You hold in your hands a special issue of Nachrichten aus der Chemie, the monthly magazine for members of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh), the German Chemical Society. In this issue we focus on Central Europe, with contributions authored by colleagues from Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. It is being distributed to the members of the GDCh and the Austrian Chemical Society (GÖCH) as well as to the members of the chemical societies in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Slovenia and Hungary. It thus reaches almost 40,000 chemists. With this special publication we want to emphasise and celebrate the importance of the relationship between t...