The Second European Turbulence Conference was held at the Technische Univer­ sitat Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany, from August 30th to September 2nd 1988 under the auspices of the European Mechanics Committee. It was primar­ ily devoted to fundamental aspects of turbulence, and aimed at bringing together engineers, physicists, and mathematicians. The scientific committee - serving also as Sub-committee of the European Turbulence Conference - consisted of the following members: G. Comte-Bellot (Lyon), H.-H. Fernholz and H.E. Fiedler (both from Berlin) as co-chairmen of the conference, U. Frisch (Nice), J.C.R. Hunt (Cambridge), E. Krause (Aachen), M. Landahl (Stockholm), A.M. Obukhov (Moscow), and G. Ooms (Amsterdam). The conference programme comprised 6 invited lectures and 94 contributions, presented either orally or at poster sessions. There were 165 participants from 18 countries. All papers published in these conference proceedings were, with the exception of the invited ones, again refereed by the members of the scientific committee. The main research topics discussed at this meeting were stability and gener­ ation of turbulence, effects of rotation, stratification and buoyancy forces, novel instrumentation, manipulation and control, boundary layers with separation and reattachment, computer simulation, turbulent diffusion, image analysis and flow visualization, vorticity dynamics and turbulence, and large-scale structures. We have taken the liberty of regrouping some papers following the submitted final versions for this volume. Authors may therefore find their paper under a different heading from that in the conference programme.