Pollination ecology in the 21st century: key questions for future research

To inspire new ideas in research on pollination ecology, we list the most important unanswered questions in the field. This list was drawn up by contacting 170 scientists from different areas of pollination ecology and asking them to contribute their opinion on the greatest knowledge gaps that need to be addressed. Almost 40% of them took part in our email poll and we received more than 650 questions and comments, which we classified into different categories representing various aspects of pollination research. The original questions were merged and synthesised, and a final vote and ranking led to the resultant list. The categories cover plant sexual reproduction, pollen and stigma biology, abiotic pollination, evolution of animal-mediated pollination, interactions of pollinators and floral antagonists, pollinator behaviour, taxonomy, plant-pollinator assemblages, geographical trends in diversity, drivers of pollinator loss, ecosystem services, management of pollination, and conservation issues such as the implementation of pollinator conservation. We focused on questions that were of a broad scope rather than case-specific; thus, addressing some questions may not be feasible within single research projects but constitute a general guide for future directions. With this compilation we hope to raise awareness of pollination-related topics not only among researchers but also among non-specialists including policy makers, funding agencies and the public at large.

Inverting the lives of 'others': retelling the Nazi past in 'Ehe im Schatten' and 'Das Leben der Anderen'

The article compares Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film Das Leben der Anderen (2006) with Kurt Maetzig's early post-war film Ehe im Schatten (1947). The comparison is based on significant narrative and thematic elements which the films share: They both have a ‘theatre couple’, representatives of the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’, at the centre of the story; in both cases the couple faces a crisis caused by the first and second German dictatorship respectively and then both try to solve the crisis by relying on the classical ‘bürgerliches Erbe’, particularly the ‘bürgerliches Trauerspiel’. The extensive use of the ‘bürgerliches Erbe’ in the films activates the function this heritage had for the definition of the German nation in the nineteenth century. However, while Maetzig's film shows how the ‘heritage’ and its representatives fail in the face of National Socialism, von Donnersmarck's film claims the effectiveness of this ‘heritage’ in the fight against the East German dictatorship. Von Donnersmarck thus inverts a critical film tradition of which Ehe im Schatten is an example; furthermore, as this tradition emerged from dealing with the Third Reich, von Donnersmarck's film, it will be argued, is more interested in the redemption of the Nazi past than the East German past.

Utopia and education in the seventeenth century: Bacon’s 'Salomon’s House' and its influence

New Worlds Reflected provides a significant contribution both to the history of utopian literature and travel, and to the wider cultural and intellectual history of the time, assembling original essays from scholars interested in representations of the globe and new and ideal worlds in the period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and in the imaginative reciprocal responsiveness of utopian and travel writing. Chapter 7 looks at the influence of Salomon’s House in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) on later seventeenth-century educational utopias.