The feeding of monsters - a study of nearby active galaxies

The understanding of the nature of AGNs and the galaxies hosting them belongs to one of the most interesting topics of modern astrophysical research. Especially the fueling mechanisms of the central black hole - supposed to be responsible for the enormous activity in these objects - raise a wealth of unanswered questions. The so called NUGA (NUclei of GAlaxies) survey an international collaboration and the Cologne Nearby QSO sample aim at finding answers to these questions. In this talk I will introduce these projects and present first results obtained with recent observations (e.g. MERLIN, EVN, PdBI). Thereby the presentation will mainly be concentrated on two objects, NGC3718 - a warped LINER galaxy - and HE1029 - one of the closest QSOs.