Bertelsmann's head officer, Thomas Middelhoff, plans to radically restructure the company.

"A Madcap Idea"

Car industry: Interview with the head of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking, on the car makers' fear of hostile take-overs and the stock exchange's threat to remove the group from the M-Dax:

"The German car industry has been very successful over the past years. … It's difficult for me to say whether there really is an acute danger of a take-over. … Why should we submit to the Arbeitskreis Aktienindizes, [which decides which companies are included in the Dax and M-Dax] … Besides you have to ask yourself how significant the M-Dax really is? … Porsche has recently been included in the MSCI index, probably the most important index in the world. Quarterly reports play no role at all for this index; instead it's about corporate strategies, liquidity and market capitalisation. … To my mind, this short-term attitude isn't a sensible way of managing a company. … And who makes the money? The banks. Who else makes a living on it? The German stock exchange. Maybe, the obligation for quarterly reporting isn't a bad idea - from the point of view of a management of business."

"Threat from Bavaria"

Companies: British Telecom is struggling to survive. Particularly in buying up Viag Intercom, the telephone group has taken on too much in Germany; now it's to be broken up. Mismanagement and megalomania have driven the former state monopoly into this crisis. The British went on a shopping spree all over the world, from Malaysia to Germany. They have ended up with a mountain of debts amounting to 90 billion marks.

"The Power of the Prophet"

SPIEGEL cover story: No other world religion seems so foreign to us, none so dynamic, none seems to demand as much of its believers - or to give them so much. The West is perplexed by the steady advance of Islam. Does the Koran threaten others with a "Holy War", or does it preach tolerance? Researchers have made some remarkable discoveries about the life and ideas of the prophet Mohammed. Satanic West, demonic Islam: since the demise of Communism and its "Kingdom of Evil", Western politicians and journalists have been conjuring up the image of a new enemy - Islamic fundamentalism - themselves an indiscriminate mirror image of the rabble-rousers in the Middle East. But who was Mohammed really? What is the secret of Islam?

"Islam Means Tolerance"

SPIEGEL interview with Egypt's Minister of Religion Hamdi Saksuk on the obligation to wear a veil, sharia law and the Taliban rule of terror:

"I don't understand the Taliban, and I condemn them. More than anything, Islam means tolerance. Our religion stands up for peace, freedom and human dignity. … The Koran doesn't dictate certain forms of democracy for Muslims, which is why the West is not the decisive factor to us. No, what is crucial for us is: justice, participation, freedom of opinion. … The radical forces have just as little to do with the true faith as the misguided Christians in America. … Women are on an equal footing with men, have the unrestricted right to work and to have an education. There's no obligation to wear a veil, only the request to dress inoffensively."

"When the Gestapo Came to Get Me"

SPIEGEL in-depth interview with Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, on his youth under Nazi rule, on freedom as the very centre of his way of thinking, and on his distaste for debates among historians:

"My childhood was unusual in that my father was a member of the Social Democratic resistance … We all survived and we were more fortunate than many others. But at the time I not only had an experience of freedom, but also one of enforced self-sufficiency. … When I was 15, the Gestapo came to get me. … It was not until the 1960s that I realised that freedom can ultimately only be guaranteed by institutions. … A happy country disagrees about the future but fundamentally agrees about the past; in an unhappy country, everything is just the other way round. Germany has always been in search of a grand coalition for the future. It longs for some grand unification in its search for answers to questions about what will be tomorrow. The Germans are anything but united about what happened yesterday, and are constantly arguing about it. To my mind that doesn't lead anywhere."

"The Massacre of Lamsdorf"

Lawsuits: In Poland, the former commander of a post-war camp for Germans has been taken to court. The defendant is accused of having abused and murdered women and children. This is the first trial of its kind in a post-Communist country, from which some 14 million inhabitants of German descent were expelled after the war, two million of whom did not survive the events.

"The Whims of the Sun"

Climate: Is global warming really caused by human activities? Or is the sun simply burning a little hotter at the moment? So far computer models have ignored the fluctuations in the strength of our local star's radiation. Nobody disputes that average temperatures on our planet are increasing - at an annual average of 0.6 degrees Celsius. But climate researchers still disagree about the extent to which man is responsible for this development, and what proportion is due to the sun. While the physical effects of carbon dioxide that lead to the greenhouse effect can be simulated perfectly in experiments, there is still no final proof of the mechanisms involved inside the sun.

"Flourishing Landscapes"

SPIEGEL interview with geologist Ulrich Berner on premature warnings about a climatic disaster, the overrated effect of carbon dioxide, and the disagreement among climate researchers:

"I doubt whether the increase in temperature observed over the past 150 years is entirely attributable to CO2. More recent computer simulations show that we can only explain the changes in temperature if we include the sun's influence in our calculations, the amount of whose radiated energy is constantly fluctuating. … Even without mankind's influence, the climate swings to and fro between cooler and warmer conditions. At the moment we are moving into a warmer phase. … The impending rise in temperature will be no greater than that which mankind has already experienced in previous times."

"Peepholes in the Head"

History of medicine: Over 4000 years ago, Stone Age doctors were already opening up skulls, and they were remarkably successful at curing their patients, as the Greifswald neurosurgeon Jürgen Piek recently found out. Successes like these would hardly have been possible if the Stone Age surgeons had not had an extraordinarily good knowledge of human anatomy. Efficient wound management and post-operative care ensured that the success of the operation was not reversed by complications in the weeks after surgery. What remains a mystery is how the victims managed to endure the extreme pain during trepanation.

"The Flesh Is Sad"

Cinema: A new style of permissiveness is entering into cinema with films like Patrice Chéreau's prize-winning drama "Intimacy". Are film makers liberating the depiction of the human body from its pornographic exploitation? Where pornography excises a person's sexuality from the context of his or her life, leaving it exposed like a bare nerve, these films implant it back in life. Where pornography only knows successful consummation, they also show the ambivalence, the frustration and the failure. Where pornography's repetition confirms the invariance, these films try to invent unique, individual stories. Here, sexuality becomes a natural and normal facet of being human - and by being allowed to be itself, it regains the dignity that pornography has stolen from it.

"I Don't Like Scandals"

SPIEGEL interview with Patrice Chéreau, director of "Intimacy", on discretion and indiscretion in the camera's perspective:

"I show the things that I feel are necessary and important to the story that I'm telling - nothing less, but also nothing more. But I don't for one second think about what distinguishes my film from others or whether it surpasses them in some way. … You only have to look at a porn film to realise at a glance that "Intimacy" has nothing to do with that. … I find the first scene beautiful. I think it's beautiful the way they make love. Two bodies that are giving each other pleasure. Not in a way that stimulates me as a viewer, but in a very touching way. I see that the two of them are taking time for each other. I find the reality of the bodies beautiful, the pores, the reddening, the marks left on their skin by the sheets. … Every gesture, every turn of the body and every movement of the camera was rehearsed just like a dialogue, and I set myself a number of rules for this work: no tricks, no improvisation, no use of body doubles and no use of a hand-held camera, because those things take away the actors' control."