Ökumenischer Lagebericht 2025: Catholica

Das Jahr 2025 war in der katholischen Weltkirche durch den Tod von Papst Franziskus, das darauffolgende Konklave und die Wahl von Papst Leo XIV. bestimmt. Der Artikel würdigt das Pontifikat von Papst Franziskus und berichtet im Rückblick über das Konklave. Weiter stellt er den neuen Papst Leo XIV. vor und blickt auf seine bisherige Amtszeit. Schließlich wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich das Thema der Synodalität in der deutschen katholischen Kirche weiterentwickelt hat, welche Schritte unternommen wurden und welche Ergebnisse die Beratungen bisher gebracht haben.

Imprisoning War Criminals on a Trial-and-Error Basis: Spandau, Landsberg, and Sugamo as Improvised Institutions of Sentence Enforcement

Once the tide of the war began to turn in their favor and the enormity of the crimes of the Axis powers became apparent, the Allied powers of World War II agreed that after their victory, those responsible should be prosecuted. They even agreed on which crimes should be prosecuted in such proceedings. Almost no attention, however, was given to the issue of sentence enforcement. Thus, even as the wheels of the Allies’ war-crimes tribunals in Europe and the Pacific were put in motion, there was no general plan regarding how to run the institutions where the war criminals would serve their sentences. In this article we present some preliminary conclusions of a research project that took a detailed look at the three most important prisons for WWII war criminals: Spandau, Landsberg, and Sugamo. Though the victorious powers faced similar legal and practical problems in the administration of all three institutions, the solutions they found differed considerably. The most significant common feature of the respective systems they established is their improvised nature.

Ukrainian youth challenging the given role of a war refugee in arts-based collaborative research

This paper explores how Ukrainian youth challenge their given role as war refugees through arts-based collaborative research. Drawing on two projects involving Ukrainian youth in Finland – a documentary video project and dream collage creation – the paper examines how participants contest dominant refugee narratives through multimodal expressions. Using nexus analysis, the study analyses the intersection of participants’ historical bodies, interaction orders, and discourses in place. Findings reveal that youth resisted portrayals as vulnerable victims or heroes, instead emphasising their identities as ambitious young people eager to live their lives and pursue dreams. They challenged researchers’ assumptions by foregrounding joy, humour and normalcy rather than war experiences. The collaborative process prompted researchers to critically examine their own privileged positions and preconceptions. While arts-based methods enhanced knowledge democratisation, they did not automatically disrupt power hierarchies or dominant discourses. The study highlights the need for ongoing reflexivity and negotiation of roles in participatory research with forced migrant youth. It demonstrates how arts-based approaches can create spaces for marginalised voices to contest reductive categorizations, while also revealing the persistence of deeply rooted discourses that shape interactions between researchers and participants.

Chokepoints Amidst the Trade War: Immigrant Worker Power in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

This article asks what the opportunities for and constraints on labor organizing in San Diego’s logistics sector are. Using Amazon warehouse workers and XPO Logistics truck drivers as illustrative examples the paper uses the power resources approach to assess the associational, institutional, societal, structural, and disruptive power workers have at their disposal in the region’s logistics sector. Drawn from a broader project on the San Diego–Tijuana region’s logistics sector that uses 2 years of fieldwork, 25 semi-structured interviews, oral history accounts, quantitative data, and primary document analysis it is argued that while structural power is high due to occupying an important position along the supply chain amidst the ongoing global trade war, associational power and institutional power are low due to the precarious citizenship status of many workers in the region and the independent contractor status of truckers. However, there are some exceptions associated with lower rates of turnover due to the transnational nature of work and social reproduction as well as the accompanying social ties. Furthermore, it is argued that building societal power with immigrant rights and legal aid organizations is important to building the disruptive capacity of workers.

Creating “diasporic intimacy” with the Lebanese Diaspora in Brazil in times of peace and war

War and Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Yemen

This article examines the impact of the Yemeni civil war on subjective well-being (SWB). Analyzing the relationship between regional war intensity and SWB for the period 2015–2023, while accounting for personal characteristics and regional fixed effects, we find a significant negative association between changes in fatality counts within a governorate and changes in SWB. In addition, the more recent political violence in a region, the stronger its negative effect on SWB.

Der Berliner Hochzeitssommer: Eine gute Idee geht in die Fläche

Wozu braucht es ein „Segensbüro“? Mit dieser Frage werden wir oft konfrontiert. Sie verbindet sich mit der Annahme, unsere Arbeit würde nur in einem angesagten jungen urbanen Kiez funktionieren. Der „Berliner Hochzeitssommer“ tritt den Gegenbeweis an. Nach vier erfolgreichen Pop-up-Hochzeitsfestivals an der Startbahn/Genezarethkirche in Berlin-Neukölln zwischen 2022 und 2024 war es 2025 an der Zeit, unsere Erfahrungen zu teilen und Segenshochzeiten dezentral in ganz Berlin anzubieten. Zu einer empirischen Untersuchung des ersten Berliner Hochzeitsfestivals, vgl. Daniel Hörsch : Segenshochzeiten: Heiraten einfach anders! Eine Auswertung des Pop-Up-Hochzeitsfestivals in Berlin-Neukölln, einzusehen unter: https://www.mi-di.de/media/pages/publikationen/heiraten-einfach-anders-zwanglos-authentisch-und-segensreich/4b3b71516f-1661169669/midi_broschuere-2022_hochzeit_share03-45.pdf (28.08.25).

Modal fractures and rhythmic embodiments: a psycho-semiotic analysis of masculine signification in The Macomber Affair (1947)

The disjuncture between narrative representation and affective embodiment poses a central problematic for film analysis: how cinema articulates subjectivities resistant to stable definition amid historical crises. Zoltan Korda’s The Macomber Affair (1947), set against a charged backdrop of post-war anxiety and colonial ideology, provides a potent case study. Through close analysis of visual composition, modal configurations, and passional trajectories, this article argues the film stages masculine subjectivity not as a coherent, attainable identity, but as a precarious process of corporeal signification. Synthesizing post-Greimasian semiotics (Zilberberg, Greimas, Fontanille) with psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Mulvey), it analyses masculinity as a field of modal fluctuations, recalibrated through desire, knowledge, capacity, and obligation ( vouloir, savoir, pouvoir, devoir ), that gives form to unconscious drives within a triangulated field of gazes. The film’s formal architecture is central: the safari landscape operates as a colonial dispositif where masculine anxiety becomes legible, while its recursive temporality, by presenting death at the outset to inscribe meaning retroactively, destabilizes linear causality, foregrounding subjectivity as re-articulation over teleological attainment. Crucially, the article contends this individual psychodrama is predicated upon the ideological erasure of the “native gaze,” revealing the colonial frame as the narrative’s precondition. Ultimately, this study proposes a methodological shift from reading masculinity as thematic representation to apprehending it as a corporeal, affective process produced by cinema’s formal and colonial operations.

Bildkontinuitäten: Die Illustration der Hitler-Biografie Joachim Fests im Stern 1973/74

Die Hitler-Biografie Joachim Fests aus dem Jahr 1973 wird noch heute als markantes Beispiel einer „Hitler-Welle“ diskutiert, die seinerzeit zu beobachten war. Weitgehend vergessen ist, dass sie in Teilen auch im Wochenmagazin Stern abgedruckt wurde. Mehr als ein halbes Jahr veröffentlichte der Stern Auszüge aus Fests Buch, die opulent und teilweise spektakulär bebildert wurden. Diese Präsentation trug nicht nur visuell dazu bei, den „Führermythos“ zu reproduzieren. Für die Beschaffung und Auswahl der Bilder war ein Netzwerk früherer NS-Propagandisten verantwortlich, das in der Medienlandschaft der Bunderepublik Deutschland weitgehend bruchlos reüssieren konnte. Zentrale Figur dieses Netzwerks war Heinrich Hoffmann, Sohn des bekannten Hitler-Fotografen – und in den 1970er Jahren Leiter des Stern -Bildarchivs.

German Missions in German Colonialism: A Historical Contextualisation of Afterlives

In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novels set in German East Africa, German colonialism is portrayed as violent, with administrators, military personnel, plantation overseers, and missionaries all engaging in acts of violence towards East Africans. Of these groups, the figure of the missionary is the most ambivalent, given that Christianity had both protective as well as culturally damaging functions in colonial spaces. This article provides a historical contextualisation of German missionary presence in German East Africa around 1900 and thereby productively complicates the role of missionaries and places them within the broader context of colonial violence in German East Africa. It examines the use of German within mission schools to contextualise the use of the German language in the novel as well as the ways in which missionaries were engaged in epistemic violence. In a third section, the article examines some of the ways in which German missionary societies contributed to the colonial revisionist movement – a movement that is described in the last chapter of Afterlives . This article reflects on how German missionary groups tried to keep their legacies alive in post-war Germany by creating memories of the former German colonies and thus provides context for the transnational and multilingual entanglements of the novel Afterlives .