[en] The present report is part of a systematic study of the electromagnetic properties of strongly deformed and shape transitional nuclei carried out at GSI. The high efficiency particle-gamma detector system is described to perform multiple Coulomb excitation experiments with very heavy projectiles. Some results obtained for the shape transitional nucleus ¹⁹⁶Pt will be presented to exemplify the importance of having access to both the level energies and the E2-transition matrix elements when discussing the possible structure of these states. The second part of this paper is devoted to transfer reactions between very heavy nuclei. In contrast to light projectiles heavy ions offer the possibility to study new phenomena which originate in the much larger Coulomb contribution to the total interaction. In particular, heavy deformed nuclei will be Coulomb excited by the strong electromagnetic field to high spin states already at the time when they start interacting through the nuclear forces. The particle transfer therefore takes place mainly between excited collective states and thus should give information about the interplay between single-particle degrees of freedom, pair correlations and collective excitations. In this paper results of experiments will be reported in which nuclei from the rare earth and the actinide region have been bombarded by ^206,208Pb projectiles at incident energies near the Coulomb barrier. (orig./HSI)