Europe Center scholar Dr. Roland Benedikter (47), has been honored with the 2012 Klaus Reichert Award for Medical Philosophy. This award, given by the Center for Medical Philosophy in Karlsruhe, Germany, was bestowed on Benedikter in recognition of his outstanding merits for medical ethics, for advancing the debate on avant-garde issues at the interplay between contemporary politics, sociology, ethics and medicine, and for his efforts to re-humanize the contemporary thought and international debate about the future of the human being in times of "transhumanism" and "hyper-technologization". The award is the most highly regarded academic award of this genre in Germany.

The award ceremony will be held on October 6, 2012 in Karlsruhe. In his award speech "What future for the human being: Humanism or Transhumanism? Aspects at the interplay between technology, politics and ethics", Benedikter will give an overview of the current "global systemic shift", its trend towards a "neuromorphosis" of global culture (two notions co-coined by him) and the future of the human being in the age of "transhumanism" and invasive new technologies. Benedikter will in particular elucidate the contemporary relation between macro-philosophical trends that will dominate the years ahead in the advanced international thought on the interplay between medicine and society.

Benedikter shares the award with his long time collaborator Prof. James Giordano, director of the Center on Neurotechnology at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.

Josef Joffe, a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution and the editor-publisher of Germany's Die Zeit, reviews Jonathan Fenby's  The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved in The New York Times Book Review Sunday Aug. 19. Fenby, says Joffe, knows how to turn historical breath and depth "into enthrallment " and proceeds to prove his point.

Not just a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the book tells the story of the 20th century giant "who captivated the public's imagination while still alive" and also "traces the story of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic preeminence it had once enjoyed."

"As France hunkered down behind the Maginot line after World War I, de Gaulle preached the armored offense Hitler's panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency," Joffe says. When Hitler subdued France in 1940 in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London, where he sparred with both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.   With Germany's defeat finally in sight, de Gaulle returned to Paris. Yet after only a few days as head of government he resigned and went to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where he would spend the next 12 years.

After the chaotic years of France's Fourth Republic, where "it lost Indochina, Suez, and l'Algerie francaise," de Gaulle returned to France.  He reigned over the Fifth Republic, Joffe says, "like a latter day Sun King, forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics."

The French student riots of May 1968, "the mightiest student revolt in the West," per Joffe, were to prove his undoing.  de Gaulle went to French Army headquarters then in Germany to plead for the support of the military.  Meanwhile,"the faithful in Paris rallied and de Gaulle won a huge majority in the parliamentary elections of June 1968."  But, as Joffe says, he was the nation's savior no more.  When he called for a referendum on his reforms, he lost and resigned the same day. In November 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died in Colombey.

As Joffe concludes in his review, "There is no more fitting epitaph than Fenby's last sentence: 'The world would not see his like again.'"

Europe Center Director Amir Eshel's new book Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past, argues for the prospective rather than retrospective vision of literary works.  "Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow," says the University of Chicago Press.  Recently released in German (Suhrkamp Verlag, May 2012), the English version will be published by the University of Chicago Press in December 2012.

Amir Eshel is the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, and the Chair of Graduate Studies, German Studies.  His website is at http://aeshel.com/

TEC Director Amir Eshel weighs in on the strength and ability of Europe to overcome its fiscal problems in his blog article "Europe, beyond bashing."  In it, he reminds us that "the highly educated, democratic, and often quite-transparently-and-efficiently governed European Union houses 500 million citizens who earn three and a half times the average world GDP per capita. Crises come and go, but Europe’s foundation stands strong."  To read more, please visit Professor Eshel's website.

Stanford seniors Stephen Craig and Clay Ramel have been awarded The Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research and The William J. Perry Prize, respectively, for their theses on German's foreign policy and the global politics of oil.

Both recipients are students of the CISAC's Undergraduate Honors Program in International Security Studies and will graduate next week.

Craig, a political science major, wrote "Tamed Tiger or Restless Beast? German Foreign Policy in the Post-Unification Period."

Ramel, a science, technology, and society major, wrote “Reconsidering the Roots of Crude Coercion: a Policymaking Analysis of `the Oil Weapon.'”

The Firestone Medal recognizes the top 10 percent of all honors theses in social science, science, and engineering. The Perry Prize is awarded to a student for excellence in policy-relevant research in international security studies.