Only recently freed from communism, an East German businessman enjoys the delights of capitalism as a used car dealer, until a string of seemingly unrelated accidents begins to cause his new life to unravel.

Christoph Hein is one of the best-known authors of the former GDR, and his works of fiction have been widely interpreted as responses to and critiques of socialist society. In this study, David Clarke undertakes a detailed analysis of all of Christoph Hein’s major works of fiction from Der fremde Freund (1928) to Willenbrock (2000) in order to explore Hein’s critique of the GDR regime, whilst also demonstrating how aspects of that critique provided a starting point for Hein’s rejection of capitalism both before and after German unification. For Hein, socialism had failed to make good its promise to create a community bound together by common values and goals, preferring instead to impose conformity upon its citizens. Capitalism, he believed, was equally unable to meet the need for community, and Hein sought to demonstrate the consequences of this state of affairs in the figure of Wörle in his first post-unification novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993). After this point, Clarke argues, Hein was nevertheless forced to re-examine his criticism of capitalism, a process which ultimately led to the more differentiated and convincing portrayal to be found in Willenbrock.

This handbook comprehensively covers the fundamental key concepts in coaching research and evidence-based practice and shows how coaching can be applied to multiple contexts. It provides coaching scholars, researchers and practitioners with detailed review of the key concepts, research and new insights into coaching research and practice. This key reference work includes over 70 contributions from more than 110 leading researchers and practitioners in the field across countries, and deftly combines theory with case studies and applications from psychology, sociology, business administration, organizational studies, education, and communication studies. This handbook, edited by the top scholars in the field, is meant for an academic as well as a professional readership, and is an invaluable resource for coaches, clients, coaching institutes and associations, and students of coaching.

In horses studies targeting equine melanoma therapy using DNA encoding for cytokines as interleukin 12 (IL-12) have shown some promising results. Nevertheless, complete remission after treatment has been only observed in few cases, possibly due to reduced therapy efficiency. Herein transfection efficiency and methodology-induced cytotoxicity were analysed after transfection with different nanoparticle-mediated and conventional approaches using eukaryotic DNA-expression-plasmids and mammalian cell lines. The addition of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) to the transfection protocols significantly increased transfection efficiency when compared to a conventional FHD mediated transfection protocol, and cell vitality was mainly negatively affected by the addition of chemically generated AuNPs. To measure accurately equine IL-12 and IFN-gamma concentrations after therapy, several antibodies for cross reactivity against this equine cytokines were evaluated, establishing afterwards a bead-based Luminex assay. Additionally, considering the valuable characteristics of dendritic cells (DCs), their use in further equine melanoma studies could be beneficial. To improve the still poor generation efficiency in horses, a human CD14 monoclonal antibody and an automated magnetic activated cell sorting system was used, reaching 2-fold higher DC yields than in previous published outcomes.