  Khovanov homology ist a new link invariant, discovered by M. Khovanov, and
used by J. Rasmussen to give a combinatorial proof of the Milnor conjecture. In
this thesis, we give examples of mutant links with different Khovanov homology.
We prove that Khovanov's chain complex retracts to a subcomplex, whose
generators are related to spanning trees of the Tait graph, and we exploit this
result to investigate the structure of Khovanov homology for alternating knots.
Further, we extend Rasmussen's invariant to links. Finally, we generalize
Khovanov's categorifications of the colored Jones polynomial, and study
conditions under which our categorifications are functorial with respect to
colored framed link cobordisms. In this context, we develop a theory of
Carter--Saito movie moves for framed link cobordisms.
