Harald Welzer – författare

Autobiographical memory constitutes an essential part of our personality, giving us the ability to distinguish ourselves as an individual with a past, present and future. This book reveals how the development of a conscious self, an integrated personality and an autobiographical memory are all intertwined, highlighting the parallel development of the brain, memory and personality. Focusing strongly on developmental aspects of memory and integrating evolutionary and anthropological perspectives, areas of discussion include: why non-human animals lack autobiographical memorydevelopment of the speech areas in the brain prenatal and transnatal development of memoryautobiographical memory in young children.This book offers a unique approach through combining both neuroscientfic and social scientific viewpoints, and as such will be of great interest to all those wanting to broaden their knowledge of the development and acquisition of memory and the conscious self.

Struggles over drinking water, new outbreaks of mass violence, ethnic cleansing, civil wars in the earth's poorest countries, endless flows of refugees: these are the new conflicts and forces shaping the world of the 21st century. They no longer hinge on ideological rivalries between great powers but rather on issues of class, religion and resources. The genocides of the last century have taught us how quickly social problems can spill over into radical and deadly solutions. Rich countries are already developing strategies to garner resources and keep 'climate refugees' at bay. In this major book Harald Welzer shows how climate change and violence go hand in hand. Climate change has far-reaching consequences for the living conditions of peoples around the world: inhabitable spaces shrink, scarce resources become scarcer, injustices grow deeper, not only between North and South but also between generations, storing up material for new social tensions and giving rise to violent conflicts, civil wars and massive refugee flows. Climate change poses major new challenges in terms of security, responsibility and justice, but as Welzer makes disturbingly clear, very little is being done to confront them. The paperback edition includes a new Preface that brings the book up to date and addresses the most recent developments and trends.

Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects – houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We’re on a treadmill to disaster.To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as societies, we need to stop doing what we’re doing and say ‘enough’. We find it hard to do this because our culture has trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we’re reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be no change of course in favour of sustainable and climate-friendly practices and lifestyles. We need a cultural model in which the beauty of stopping is given the recognition needed for the project of civilization to continue. Optimizing processes that are heading in the wrong direction only makes matters worse.Stopping is imperative: it is a human cultural technique that we must re-learn. Only then can we achieve a new beginning.

Autobiographical memory constitutes an essential part of our personality, giving us the ability to distinguish ourselves as an individual with a past, present and future. This book reveals how the development of a conscious self, an integrated personality and an autobiographical memory are all intertwined, highlighting the parallel development of the brain, memory and personality. Focusing strongly on developmental aspects of memory and integrating evolutionary and anthropological perspectives, areas of discussion include: why non-human animals lack autobiographical memorydevelopment of the speech areas in the brain prenatal and transnatal development of memoryautobiographical memory in young children.This book offers a unique approach through combining both neuroscientfic and social scientific viewpoints, and as such will be of great interest to all those wanting to broaden their knowledge of the development and acquisition of memory and the conscious self.

The authors discovered 150,000 pages of transcriptions of secretly recorded conversations among German prisoners of war, of which approximately one third were made in P.O.W. camps in Britain, another cache was made by bugging prisoners in the Mediterranean theatre of the war (North Africa, Malta, Italy) and the remainder comes from the bugging of prisoners of war in the USA. These transcriptions are thus unmediated, uncensored, and unselfconsciously candid and that is what gives this book its historical significance and extraordinary impact. What emerges from these transcriptions and within these pages is a shocking and profoundly illuminating portrait of the typical German soldier of the time: their thoughts, their feelings and their ideologies. SOLDATEN is a book that explodes many of the myths that we hold on to about Germany and its people during the War.

Die gesamte Bandbreite der Gedächtnisforschung. Ausgehend von den neurologischen und psychologischen Grundlagen betrachtet das Handbuch die vielfältigen Formen des Gedächtnisses darunter das autobiografische, das kollektive, das kommunikative und das soziale Gedächtnis. Einen weiteren Schwerpunkt bildet die unterschiedliche Repräsentation von Gedächtnis, z. B. in der Literatur, in Bibliotheken, Archiven und Museen, durch Denkmäler, Bilder, Fotos, Filme usw. Für zahlreiche Fachbereiche von Soziologie bis Literaturwissenschaft relevant.