Fatal decompression sickness following therapeutic hyperbaric environment (author's transl)

In Hannover/Germany in 1976 a so called "Society for Regenerative Hyperbaric Therapy" (Gesellschaft für Regenerative Uberdruck-Therapie) subjected 20 patients within two coupled multi-place chambers to a simulated hyperbaric environment, equivalent to a maximum of 4 ata, followed usually by gradual reductions of the pressure. The patients were of an average age of 67.2 years and were afflicted by various disorders. During one of the "dives" a patient developed air embolism of the central nervous system. During ensuing confusion of the chamber was opened suddenly, with resultant explosive reduction of the high pressure. This resulted in five letal accidents of decompression sickness. Post mortem examination revealed diffuse distribution of gas bubbles throughout the entire body. By elecronmicroscopy each bubble was covered by an osmiophilic coat. Post mortem findings are discussed and correlated with well-known and new clinical symptomes. These observations present for the first time fatal accidents of decompression sickness in humans, associated with hyperbaric air-therapy.     

Die Bekämpfung der Unsicherheit: Politikerkarrieren und Karrierepolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Political Careers differ from other professional careers in several regards, but most significantly in the peculiar degree of insecurity they impose. This insecurity is due to the democratic accountability to voters, which includes the possibility of electoral defeat and deprofessionalization. Therefore a continuous career is rendered much more difficult than in other occupations. This calls for specific strategies of access to and staying in political positions, which may be subsumed under the rubric of “career politics”. This article deals with political careers in the Federal Republic of Germany and the elements of individual career politics that may be reconstructed from these careers. The analysis is based on a dataset comprising the political biographics of all 1948 German state legislators with the date being taken from the official legislative handbooks. The features that are most interesting here are the succession and the cumulation of different political offices. Four strategies of career politics can be distinguished: a local politics, a party politics, an interest group, and a fourth strategy, that proceeds via staff positions. In analyzing these strategies the article wants to contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between political careers and career politics.     

Climate risks,climate economics,and the foundations of rights-based risk ethics

In this article, I argue that climate ethics must basically be risk ethics. But risk ethics is still an underdeveloped field of normative ethics. For example, rights-based ethical theories, the attractive features of which are outlined in this article, tend to prohibit all risk impositions. Such inability of rights-based theories to deal convincingly with risks could be a reason why the standard approach of climate economics, which as I try to show is based on questionable normative presuppositions, is still as influential as it is. I propose a solution to the problems rights-based moral theories have with risks and outline the basic criteria of permissible and impermissible risk impositions. Finally, I indicate that this will enable us to tackle climate risks in a promising way. The main aim of the article, however, is not to contribute to concrete questions of climate ethics but to the improvement of its normative foundations.     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Europa als besonderer Kommunikationsraum

This paper develops a sociological perspective on the process of social integration that has been initiated in the course of the evolution of European political institutions. This perspective wants to avoid the pitfalls of normative diagnoses (which complain about what is not there) as well as the pitfalls of national comparisons (which do not see more than national similarities and national differences). A more abstract notion of social integration is presented as providing an analytical framework for understanding and explaining the process of socially integrating a culturally heterogeneous Europe. The key concept is that of a transnational space of communication and its discursive closure (with recourse to Deutsch and Bourdieu). The central theoretical idea is to use communicative density as the criterion of the emergence of a communicative space in which two different types of experience make possible its discursive closure: the experience of being treated fairly by the others inhabiting this space (the cognitive capital of a community) and the construction of a common memory frame resulting from the confrontation of differing national (and subnational) memories in this space (the narrative capital of a community). Thus two mechanisms can be identified which explain discursive closure. This model leaves open whether this will happen, but it offers a strategy for identifying the extent and the causes of such processes without recourse to normatively motivated wishful thinking.