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From the trenches of the First World War to the university lecture halls: war invalids and POW students at ETH Zurich

Switzerland must have seemed like paradise to him. After one and a half years in POW camp in Germany, Jean Chopin, a twenty-five-year-old French infantryman, was allowed to leave for neutral Switzerland in the spring of 1916. Finally, after an interruption of almost three years, he was able to take up his academic studies again in the autumn of 1917.

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11 02 09 Etheritage Khunrath

The stuff crime novels are made of: Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hanau, 1609)

By their very nature, texts on alchemy are largely inaccessible, difficult to comprehend and often have an obscure edition history – and none more so than Heinrich Kunrath’s Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. As Umberto Eco writes, while the posthumous Hanau edition of this work was

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