The wafer curvature technique was used to analyze stresses in fine-grained, 50 nm to 2 μm thick Au films on silicon substrates between room temperature and 500°C. The microstructural evolution was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), focused ion beam (FIB) microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). In situ heating experiments inside a scanning electron microscope provided a comparison between the morphological development and the stress-temperature behavior of the film. Hillock formation was observed, but it can only partially account for the stress relaxation measured by the wafer curvature technique.

Early in the year 1968 Karl Barth invited me to a discussion that touched upon, among other topics, my second [habilitation] thesis Zukunft und Verheifiung [Future and Promise], which had appeared three years earlier. In it I had attempted to trace the ground of theology eschatologically in God's word of promise, yet without putting the cart before the horse. Barth dressed his inquiry in a comment accented with self-irony. As I recall, it went as follows: ‘Even I began with eschatology and ascribed to it a decisive role for theology. I gave the future priority—but over the years I was forced to realize that I could not maintain this. The more time passed on, the more I became aware that I could not remain standing where I was. Present and past are equally important for theology if theology allows itself to be oriented by God's time. And theology must not confuse this time with one of the dimensions of the human experience of time’. Itsounded as if beginning with eschatology was something like a sin of youthfulness, possibly even like a theological childhood illness which every more or less normal theologian would grow out of in time.

(1) The term ‘eschatology’ stems from Abraham Calov who entitled the twelfth and last section of his masterpiece of dogmatics, Systema locorum Theologicorum (1677), ‘EΣXATOΛOΓIA Sacra’. This final section, which concludes the Dogmatics of a leading representative of Lutheran Orthodoxy, deals with the ‘last things’ (de novissimis), specifically death and the state after death, the resurrection of the dead, the last Judgment, the consummation of the world, hell and everlasting death, and, finally, life everlasting. Calov does not define the artificial term ‘eschatologia’ which he himself had probably coined; he hardly even explains it in the course of his presentation, so that it remains a mere heading. Clearly it applies to the eschaton, namely ‘the end’, which, according to I Cor. 15.24, comes about when Christ, after subjugating all powers and authorities, delivers over the dominion to God the Father (quaestio 2). In the preceding section Calov had cited NT texts which explicitly or implicitly speak of the eschata, the last things, or of the last day/days as the conclusion of human history.

In December 1977, Israeli politicians and journalists were allowed once again, after so long, to visit the Egyptian pyramids. It was during this visit that a saying of their Prime Minister Menachem Begin went around: ‘Just think! Your forefathers built these marvellous works!’ What memories does this reminder call forth? Does it express Israel's unyielding self-assurance, which not only runs across the traces of its own history all over the Near Middle East, but also calls them to the attention of others? Should the representatives of Modern Egypt perhaps be told that they stand in a different sort of continuity with the great dynasties on the Nile from the Jews? Or does Begin's reminder also revive the ineradicable knowledge of Israel's helplessness, which in the grey dawn of its history drove its fathers to the granaries of Egypt and made them there dependent upon their providers, until the time came when Yahweh led them ‘out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’ (Exod. 20:2)?