Catherine the Great wanted to acquire the island for her fleet. It served as the setting for William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Ariosto's Orlando Furioso fights on the shore of Lampedusa. Hundreds of Mussolini's troops voluntarily capitulated to a British-Jewish fighter pilot who had to make a forced landing on the little island. The Italian novelist Tomasi di Lampedusa mocked the piece of land that he shared a name with. And for more than twenty years, Lampedusa has been a place of hope for ten thousands of refugees. Ulrich Ladurner sets out to explore the story of these rugged cliffs in the middle of the sea – and he found remarkable testimony from the heart of historical and present day Europe.

Democracy, human rights, rule of law – it is in the name of these ideals that the West is fighting a war against the Taliban and against terror. Ulrich Ladurner reports from the sites of conflict, where central values of the Western world are being damaged. His journey leads him through a land full of opposites as he follows the traces of conquests and defeats. He looks back on the lively past of an old battlefield that has been both an American and European obsession and tells us about the lives of its people. His stories help us understand why the Great Powers are failing in Afghanistan. A hi(story) book on enemy images and the power of memory, seeking an answer to the controversial question of what we are doing in Afghanistan.

On site where on June 24, 1859, the Battle of Solferino ended with the defeat of the Austrian army under Emperor Franz Joseph I. Here, the French troops led by Napoleon III, an ally of the Sardinian Kingdom, managed to pave the way for Italian unification. The renowned Austrian author Joseph Roth’s famous novel “Radetzky March” eternalized the small town of Solferino in a literary monument, while Henry Dunant’s first-hand report on the gruesome battle and the suffering of the wounded soldiers in its aftermath led to the founding of the International Red Cross and the adoption of the Geneva Convention. When Ulrich Ladurner found the diaries of his great-grandfather, a man from South-Tyrol who was drafted to join the fight by lot, he set out into a past unknown to him. The political and historical account of the author’s journey, which in the course of the story becomes a search for his personal history, leads us to the Italian region Lombardy, south of Lake Garda. Observations, conversations and research on site helped Ladurner in his quest to reconstruct historical events.

The world changed within a few hours. As the ORF’s correspondant in Washington D.C., Peter Fritz experienced how a nation at the peak of global power was humiliated to the core on September 11, 2001. The USA reacted with politics of fear, which in turn have affected the entire world. What at first seemed like successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq soon turned out to cost the price of human rights. Martial law had replaced the constitutional rule of law. Caught up in an obsession with security, the USA lost both their economic dominance and their moral integrity. In the global race for intellectual influence and cultural dominance they are now stuck in a precarious situation. Can the USA prevent their downfall as a global super power? In his new book, Peter Fritz takes stock of the situation ten years after the terror attacks in New York and reaches the conclusion that the “War Against Terror” has been following the wrong objectives.