David Wetzel Bücher

Gemessen an seiner Dauer ist der deutsch-französische Krieg von 1870/71 einer der am meisten untersuchten Kriege der Geschichte. Doch neue Erkenntnisse sind möglich, wie der amerikanische Historiker David Wetzel zeigt. Er stellt die handelnden Personen in den Mittelpunkt und untersucht deren individuelle Motive und Wahrnehmungen im politischen und strategischen Kontext. Wetzel beleuchtet den Konflikt zwischen den außergewöhnlichen Persönlichkeiten Bismarcks und Napoleons III. und entwirft lebendige Porträts der Hauptakteure in Paris und Berlin. So entsteht ein spannendes, neu akzentuiertes Bild des diplomatischen Prozesses von der spanischen Revolution 1868 bis zur Kriegserklärung Frankreichs 1870. Stimmen zur Originalausgabe loben Wetzel für seine Rückkehr zu den faszinierenden Geschichten des Duells zwischen Bismarck und Napoleon III., das von Strukturhistorikern in den Hintergrund gedrängt wurde. Er stellt die richtigen Fragen und zeigt, dass bedeutende Persönlichkeiten einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Geschichte haben. Wetzel bietet eine fesselnde Erzählung, die die Bedeutung von Persönlichkeit in der Politik und in Kriegen verdeutlicht. Zudem enthält das Werk einen geistvollen bibliographischen Essay, der einen zusätzlichen Gewinn darstellt.

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.

Vaccination is a crucial medical intervention for preventing infectious diseases in humans and animals. Chimeric virus-like particles (VLP) represent a promising class of subunit vaccines, capable of displaying antigenic protein or peptide epitopes from various pathogens to enhance immunogenicity. However, challenges remain in finding efficient production systems and stable VLP scaffolds for large foreign antigens. This thesis establishes a versatile platform for developing chimeric VLPs, utilizing the small surface protein (dS) of the duck hepatitis B virus as the scaffold and the yeast Hansenula polymorpha as the expression host. Strategies for generating recombinant yeast strains and conducting analytics were developed, successfully displaying 13 different antigens ranging from 11 kDa to 80 kDa from five pathogens on the dS-based VLP surface. This versatility is significant in chimeric VLP development. The study also demonstrates that a downstream process (DSP) approved for hepatitis B VLP vaccine production can be adapted for purifying chimeric dS-based VLPs with various foreign antigens. The final part of the thesis focuses on enhancing the DSP for one type of chimeric VLP, achieving improved yields and maintaining product quality while eliminating the costly ultracentrifugation step. This research addresses key challenges in the field and provides a foundation for future vaccine candidate development.

Questions of international politics, as they relate to German history, are explored in this authoritative and controversial volume. Of the seven essays that constitute the book, four―those by Schroeder, Lauren, Rupieper, and Abenheim―center on diplomatic history and international politics, while the other three―by Barclay, Chickering, and Post―illuminate related political and cultural transformations. The Afterword by the two editors, Wetzel and Hamerow, deals with the works and philosophy of Gordon Craig, the preeminent historian of Germany to whom the book is dedicated. Craig's achievement has been to bring knowledge and interpretation into narrative history and to show that history is a self-sufficient and self-contained discipline, important for its own sake. These essays are bold and provocative; they can rightly claim originality, new insights, hitherto unrecognized aspects, new techniques of analysis for the subjects they cover; and for these reasons, as much as for any other, they deserve the attention of all those who care about German or international history.