In 1951, the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small village in the
South of France, went crazy. That’s at least what the scenes described
by witnesses would lead one to believe: townspeople going psychotic and
not sleeping for days, children trying to strangle their parents,
upstanding citizens walking around town as if in a drug-induced haze or
being tormented by painful hallucinations. Eventually four people died
and dozens of the several hundred people struck by the unexplained
affliction remained psychotic.
Dr. Rupnow is a German historian who received his M.A. and Ph.D. in
history from Austria’s University of Vienna. The question of whether
this makes him an Austrian or a German scholar might be of little
importance, were it not to surface and further determine critical
points of his career.
“We always knew we weren’t going to remain in the U.S.
forever,” remembers Ariana Huber-Wechselberger regarding her and her
husband’s decision several years ago to temporarily leave their
respective research jobs in Salzburg, Austria and move to the USA.
Fieldwork is a basic element of
scientific research. Sabine Frühstück found out for herself while she was
pursuing her studies—with the small difference that her fieldwork took
place literally in a field—together with a troop of Japanese soldiers
on the island of Honshu.
