With "The Inner World of Thought," now available for the first time in German translation, the great cultural semiotic work of Jurij M. Lotman reaches both a conclusion and a peak. In particular, his famous semiotic spatial model, as well as his reflections on text and meaning, the dynamics of cultural developments, chance and event, and cultural memory coalesce in this essayistically written book into a universal theory of culture. It sheds new light on the functioning of human society and appears almost visionary in the context of current cultural theoretical debates.