“Linguistic history as a history of mentalities”, “linguistic hermeneutics”, and “affective lexis” – these are just a few examples of the interdisciplinary concepts that Fritz Hermanns (1940–2007) introduced to stimulate and enrich the crossover between German linguistics and cultural studies. This new volume presents these concepts for the first time alongside Hermanns’s contributions to linguistic history, as well as to his clarification of terminological issues in political speech.