Perceiving something beyond the five known senses – sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch – is a curious matter, and unlike those senses, it is difficult to pin down. “Our sense of perception is what makes us able to sense or perceive things that actually are not perceptible,” says literary scholar Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, who earned his qualification as a university instructor for his work on sarcasm in literature and is currently studying representations of perception in lyric poetry within the Languages of Emotion Cluster of Excellence at Freie Universität Berlin.

The trench around the Rotes Rathaus doesn’t look especially promising in artistic terms: It is part of the excavation work for an extension of the number 5 U-Bahn, or subway, line. But the belowground construction site recently turned out to be a real treasure trove of art, when eleven statues were found there after having been labeled “degenerate art” by the Nazi regime. Art historians at Freie Universität helped to trace the works of art, which had been thought lost, to their creators.

It can convince, convert, bring insight. And it can mislead, frighten, and confuse. Rhetoric is the “art of speaking well,” as the Roman scholar Quintilian defined it long ago. But what does “speaking well” mean in the first place?