Death plays an important role in human life, and there have been many theories about how this inevitability affects human thought, and social life. According to anthropological studies, death and death-related phenomena, including rituals, music, the meaning of death, are based on the originating cultures. This makes depressive suicidal black…[Read more]

Vocal accent in musical performance may carry more information than what is apparent at a first look. This idea becomes more significant in a popular music realm, where globalization is pronounced, thus making the dichotomy of individuality and belonging desires obscured compared to a realm where locality dominates the form of expression. This…[Read more]

After the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Hong Kong music in general lingered in the middle of influences from the English heritage, Mainland China, and local traditions. This is observed best in popular music made, and performed in Hong Kong’s local scenes. As a result of globalisation of 1990s and 2000s, Hong Kong’s local popular mus…[Read more]

Death/doom metal music, a style of extreme metal, emerged around the beginning of 1990s with a genius loci in West Yorkshire. While this style dispersed around the globe during this decade and later decades, the pioneers of this style -namely Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and Anathema- quickly moved on from the style which they are credited to…[Read more]

After the extreme turn of late 1980s and early 1990s of metal music, three northern England-based bands –My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost from Bradford, and Anathema from Liverpool, commonly referred to as ‘the Peaceville Three’ because of their record label based is Dewsbury, West Yorkshire- went on to pioneer the musical style which came to be…[Read more]

Doom metal music is comprised of richly varied styles. These styles sound significantly different from time to time, yet they still are referred under a doom umbrella. One compelling trait emerges among these seemingly disparate styles. Especially when compared to other heavy and extreme metal music styles, these doom styles always stay on the…[Read more]

Death/doom emerged as a subgenre in extreme metal music during 1990s mostly based in Yorkshire. Interestingly, these Yorkshire-based bands changed their style significantly to what is generally accepted as gothic/doom. This change also illustrates two different approaches to death in the music. While the early repertoire engages with the idea of…[Read more]

Oral history provides important sources of information when looking at the development of a particular genre of music. This idea becomes more pronounced when the genre of music in question may be tentatively considered a popular music. While one has to be careful in labelling a genre of music ‘popular’, in this case labelling extreme metal and mor…[Read more]

This thesis uses ethology as a framework to examine Franz Marc’s paintings of animals. To perceive animals ethologically means acknowledging that animals feel, think, experience, and imagine the world. Ethology has come to include interpretive pursuits as well as traditional field studies, and as I show, Marc’s practice encompassed both asp…[Read more]

Essay on the typography, especially the typefaces, of the first German prints of Aesop’s Fables.

Bibliographical information for a seminar on the German literature of the magical arts.

Bachelor of Arts Thesis on the first printed German cookbook.

Poster presentation.

Presentation on the manuscript with most extensive German introduction to magical arts: Dresden, Landesbibliothek, M 206 (Mscr.Dresd.M.206).

Conference paper on lockable bookbindings.

Description of Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. germ. 1. This Codex is a composite manuscript in German language (Swabian). The fist codicological unit was written around 1463 and contains especially mediacal texts. The second codicological unit is dated to 1454 an contains ‘Die sieben weisen Meister’.

Overview article on history and logistics of the Westerbork transit camp, making extensive use of the original Westerbork records in the NIOD. The paper also specifies the connection between the Jewish Council in Amsterdam and Westerbork, as well as the set-up of transports and the system of “Sperren”. The article includes a complete and revised…[Read more]

This is (to my knowledge) the first piece of scholarship to systematically analyze victim masculinity in the Holocaust.
Survivor testimonies paint a picture of Terezín as a society dominated by an elite strata of dynamic young men, respected by almost everyone in the ghetto. This is a surprise, since the cultures from which all deported Jews…[Read more]

This article examines the relationship of Benjamin Murmelstein and the SS. Murmelstein, the deputy chairman of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in January 1943, and became the ghetto’s last Elder of the Jews during the large transports to Auschwitz in fall 1944. He had a long and prominent p…[Read more]

This article takes the 5,000 Jews from the Netherlands whom the Nazis deported to Theresienstadt as a point of departure to examine larger issues of citizenship, ethnicity, and habitus in the camp society. About two thirds of this group were German and Austrian emigrants, the other third people born in the Netherlands: While the former accustomed…[Read more]