JOCHEN THIES (BERLIN)
The Moltkes: A Very British Family

The Moltkes are among the most fascinating German families of the last 200 years. At a time when the British–German relationship was starting to unravel, they were an exception among the East Elbian Prussian elite because they married English women. The famlily’s Western orientation led Helmuth James Moltke, strongly supported by his wife Freya, to resist Hitler. Even in today’s Germany, the continuation of a British–German tradition can still be traced: Gebhardt von Moltke served as German ambassador in London, and the children and grandchildren of Helmuth James Moltke live in the Anglo-American world.

Jochen Thies was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London from 1976 to 1978. Subsequently he served as a speech-writer to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and worked as a journalist. He has published many books, among them Architekt der Weltherrschaft: Die Endziele Hitlers (1976, English trans. forthcoming March 2012); Helmut Schmidt’s Rückzug von der Macht: Das Ende der Ära Schmidt aus nächster Nähe (1988); Die Dohnanyis: Eine Familienbiografie (2004); and Die Moltkes. Von Königgrätz nach Kreisau: Eine deutsche Familien - geschichte (2010). He is working on a family history of the Bismarcks.

LUTZ RAPHAEL (TRIER/OXFORD)
Mapping European Historiography 1800 to 2005: New Perspectives on the Interrelationship between Historiography and European Nation-Building

Research for the Atlas of Modern European Historiography: The Making of a Profession 1800–2005 has opened fresh perspectives on the development of modern historiography in Europe. It has cast new light on relations between the professionalization and nationalization of historiography in a European context.

Lutz Raphael is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Trier (Germany). His research interests focus on the history and theory of contemporary historiography, and the history of European societies in the twentieth century. Recent publications include Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (2nd edn. 2010); Atlas of European Historiography: The Making of a Profession 1800–2005 (co-authored, 2009); Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (coauthored, 2010); and Imperiale Gewalt und mobilisierte Nation: Europa 1914–1945 (2011).

ULINKA RUBLACK (CAMBRIDGE)
Uses of the Visual in the German Renaissance

The Fugger are well known as one of the most powerful merchant families in sixteenth-century Germany. This paper examines the uses of decorative items by members of the family in an age of financial decline. It looks particularly at the uses of leather as material and shoes as objects that had become increasingly important for men to signal civility and elegant comportment at this time. Hans Fugger’s many and often comical letters on this subject document just how difficult it could be even for the wealthy to ‘dress up’ at this time. They also pose the larger methodological questions of how we define the ‘visual’, how we can think of the place of matter in the ‘material Renaissance’, and what looking at surviving objects reveals about the past.

Ulinka Rublack is Reader in Early Modern European History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John’s College. Her most recent book is Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (2010), which was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Prize for History and was one of six finalists for the Cundill Prize in History, the world’s largest book prize for non-fiction. She is also editor of A Concise Companion to History (2011). Her other publications in English include Reformation Europe (2005) and The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (1999), which was shortlisted for the Longman / History Today Book of the Year Award.

EVE ROSENHAFT (LIVERPOOL)
Black People under Nazi Rule: Perspectives on the ‘Racial State’

Among the groups targeted by National Socialist policies of racial exclusion and elimination between 1933 and 1945 were the members of a small black population, most of them of African origin. Official policies towards them and the quality of their experiences have received relatively little attention from specialist historians; the only published monograph relies entirely on English-language sources. This talk draws on new research on a range of private and official sources to explore that history and consider how what happened to black people in Germany and occupied Europe reflects on our understanding of Nazi racial policy more generally.

Eve Rosenhaft is Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has published books and articles on aspects of German social and cultural history since the eighteenth century, including work on labour and gender history, ‘Gypsy’ and Holocaust studies, the history of financial practices, and race and colonialism. She is the co-author, with Robbie Aitken, of a forthcoming monograph on Africans in twentieth-century Ger many, on which this talk is based.

ANDREAS ECKERT (BERLIN)
Connecting Histories of Work and Non-Work: African Labour History in a Global Perspective

What constitutes work and what does not? What is legitimate and what is illegal work? Who invents, abolishes, and resurrects these divisions? And what are the practices and policies surrounding these questions? This paper discusses the transformations which the division between work and non-work underwent in twentieth-century Africa. It will look especially at labour regulations and social policy, and at the role of the state and international organizations such as the ILO in these processes.

Andreas Eckert holds the Chair of African History at the Humboldt University Berlin and is Director of the International Research Centre ‘Work and Human Life Course in Global History’, funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education. He has published widely on the history of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism, and global history. He is currently writing a general history of Africa since 1850. Andreas Eckert contributes regularly to German newspapers, especially the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

PETER DELIUS (JOHANNESBURG) and KIRSTEN RÜTHER (HANOVER)
The King, the Missionary, and the Missionary's Daughter: The Relationship between King Sekhukhune and the German Missionary J. A. Winter

GHIL in co-operation with the Christian Missions in Global History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Venue: University of London, 32 Russell Square, Stewart House, Room ST274 (2nd floor)

In 1881 the Pedi King Sekhukhune and the German missionary J. A. Winter were drawn into a close relationship which included a wide-ranging discussion of their beliefs and values. It also involved their families. Indeed, the most startling outcome of their interactions was the planned betrothal of Sekhukhune to the missionary’s infant daughter, Anna. Their developing alliance was cut short by tragedy but their brief encounter provides telling glimpses into the worlds that they inhabited. It also casts light on the wider intersection and cross fertilization of European and African forms of family, gender, religion, and, more broadly, the nature of power in a colonial context. Their relationship reverberated through the decades that followed, both within their families and in the conflicts which simmered and sometimes erupted in the region.

Peter Delius is Professor of History at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of South Africa from 1500 to the present. His most recent publications include Mpumalanga: History and Heritage (2007). He has, at various stages of his career, drawn on the archival and published records of the Berlin Missionary Society.

Kirsten Rüther is a Lecturer in History at the Leibniz University in Hanover (Germany). Her research focuses on the history of Christianization in southern Africa and the professionalization of African healers in South Africa. Her monograph Meandering Paths: African Healers' Professionalization and Popularisation in Processes of Transformation in South Africa, 1930-2004 is in preparation.

Peter Delius and Kirsten Rüther are cooperating on a project on the trans-generational and trans-continental history of a German-South African family which, in the course of four generations, changed from Pomeranian Pietists into Black Muslims. A first outcome of this cooperation is the article ‘J. A. Winter – Visionary or Mercenary? A Life in Colonial Context’, South African Historical Journal 62: 2 (2010), pp. 303-324.

RÜDIGER GRAF (BOCHUM/MUNICH)
West Germany in a World of Oil: Energy and Foreign Policy in the Oil Crisis 1973–4

GHIL in co-operation with the Seminar in Modern German History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

When OPEC quadrupled the price of oil and its Arab members curtailed production in 1973–4, Western industrialized countries accelerated the transformation of energy policies that had already started. Concentrating on the West German government’s negotiations with its transatlantic and European partners and with the Eastern bloc, the Arabs, and the ‘Third World’, the paper asks whether the first oil crisis changed West Germany’s position in the world.

Rüdiger Graf received his Ph.D. from the Humboldt University Berlin for a dissertation on visions of the future in Weimar Germany. He teaches contemporary history at the Ruhr University Bochum. In 2010/11 he was a fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University working on his current project, ‘Petroknowledge and Politics in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s’. In the current academic year he is a Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich. His recent publications include Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik: Krisen und Zukunftsaneignungen in Deutschland 1918–1933 (2008); Europäische Zeitgeschichte nach 1945 (coauthored, 2010); and a number of articles on Weimar Germany, the history of oil and energy, and historical theory and methodology.

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