Events

This event has been cancelled due to sickness.

Why did right-wing extremism fail in interwar Britain? This question is usually answered with reference to the failure of British fascism. This lecture, however, argues that the threat to British parliamentary democracy also came from a network of radical British Conservatives known as Neo-Tories. The Neo-Tories regarded liberal democracy as being in a state of degeneration and worked towards anti-democratic change through a ‘revolution from above’. The lecture will examine this thread of political history from the 1930s, but it will also look at the aftermath of the story and investigate whether and how the Neo-Tories came to terms with the overseas immigration and European integration which marked post-war democracy. 

Bernhard Dietz teaches Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He received his Ph.D. in history from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010 and finished his second book on the cultural history of West German capitalism in 2018. He has been President of the German Association of British Studies (AGF) since 2016.

Postponed from 9th December

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Convenors: Christina von Hodenberg and Jane Freeland (German Historical Institute London)

The International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment is part of the international research project “Knowledge Unbound: Internationalisation, Networking, Innovation in and by the Max Weber Stiftung”

Roundtable discussion to celebrate the launch of the online exhibition Forms-Voices-Networks: Feminism and the Media

How have women used the radio to advocate for women’s rights? What role does the radio play in the history of feminism?

Join us for an online panel conversation on women’s radio and feminist activism in Germany and Britain during the twentieth century to mark the launch of the German Historical Institute London’s online exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media.

From BBC Women’s Hour to Haben Sie fünf Minuten Zeit (Do You Have 5 Minutes), radio has been an important vehicle for discussing women’s issues and reaching female audiences. Radio has also enabled women journalists, producers and editors to redefine conventions, challenge gender norms and carve a place for women’s voices and labour in the media. This panel brings together Kate Lacey (Sussex) and Caroline Mitchell (Sunderland) in a discussion on women’s radio making and radio’s role in the advancement of gender justice in Germany and Britain in the twentieth century. From both and academic, historical and practical perspective, Lacey and Mitchell will discuss the opportunities and limitations that radio has provided for women and women’s rights. They will ask: How has radio, both mainstream and community, provided a unique space for the discussion of rights? How have women used the radio to challenge gender norms? What does studying radio reveal about the trajectory of feminism in Germany and Britain?

Kate Lacey (BA London, PhD Liverpool) is Professor of Media History and Theory in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, and Director of CHASE, the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership in Southeast England. Her research focuses on radio history, media publics, and listening as civic action. She has published widely, including two monographs, the first of which, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923 to 1945, explored the constitutive role of gender in the development of broadcasting, and the second, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, which proposed 'listening' as a rich concept with which to analyse the politics and experience of media communications in Europe and America across the long twentieth century. She was a founding member of the Radio Studies Network and sits on the editorial boards of The Radio Journal and The International Journal of Cultural Studies. 

Dr. Caroline Mitchell is Associate Professor of Radio and Participation at the University of Sunderland, UK where she teaches on its longstanding MA in Radio, Audio and Podcasting  and leads a number of research projects in the area of community media production and participatory research methods. She was co-founder of Fem FM, the first women's radio station in the UK (1992) and co-curated digital archive of the station in 2014. She has published widely about women and radio, participatory archiving and community mapping practices. As a lead member of ´Transnational Radio Encounters´ research project she was part of the team that developed the innovative global online platform radio.garden. She is a member of Women´s Radio in Europe Network and was a member of the board of Sound Women until the organisation closed in 2016.

In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

King Frederick II of Prussia enjoys the reputation of a philosopher king and a major author in his own right. But integral to that reputation is his chequered relationship with an increasingly energetic and volatile eighteenth-century public sphere. This joint lecture explores two key episodes in this history.

Shiru Lim: Frederick II meets the Public Sphere: The Composition and Circulation of the Anti-Machiavel

The Anti-Machiavel (1740) is best known as a manifesto for virtuous kingship. A closer look at how it was composed, published, and responded to, however, sheds light on ways of conceiving a public in Enlightenment Europe. This paper therefore examines Frederick and Voltaire’s collaboration on the work and their attempts to control its immediate reception.

The Anti-Machiavel was read as a straightforward statement of Frederick’s vision of kingship, but it is important to remember that this reaction was deliberately orchestrated by Voltaire. Voltaire bore a large part of the responsibility for shifting the arbitration of political legitimacy out of Frederick’s hands and into European public opinion, and the whole episode prompts us to rethink the dynamics in this most emblematic of relationships between ruler and philosopher.

Shiru Lim is an intellectual historian and a fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Her research explores the relationship between knowledge and power, and between intellectuals and the state, focusing on the eighteenth century. She is working on a monograph on Philosophy and Government in Enlightenment Europe: Frederick II, Catherine II, and the philosophes.

Avi Lifschitz: From Controlled Circulation to Public Readership: The Illicit Publication of Frederick II’s Philosophical Poems

The year 1760 began with a publishing sensation in Europe: Frederick II’s Œuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci, long circulated among a small number of the King’s confidants, appeared in two widely distributed editions in Lyon and Paris. The timing, in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, was not accidental. The French government, Frederick’s enemy in this major struggle, orchestrated the publication of these poems,which exposed the Prussian ruler as an irreverent and irreligious author.

The lecture charts the failure of Frederick’s attempt to maintain control over a circumscribed set of copies and addressees, and his efforts to reverse the reputational damage. As with the publication of his Anti-Machiavel in 1740, the timing and format of the publication of Œuvres du philosophe de Sans-Souci took the monarch largely by surprise. 

Avi Lifschitz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College and Academic Programme Director of the Voltaire Foundation. Having recently edited the first modern English edition of a wide range of Frederick II’s writings (Princeton UP, 2021), he is now working on a monograph on the monarch as a philosopher and public author.

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Contemporary popular culture often portrays Jewish mixed-sex dancing as either absolutely forbidden or as the punch line of a dirty joke. Fictional portrayals of women who leave Orthodoxy sometimes use transgressive dancing to underscore the temptation of secular society – and gentile men. Yet long before the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Jewish writers used partner dance as a powerful metaphor for social changes that transformed Jewish communities between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Scandalous dance scenes in German and other literatures are part of a larger conversation about acculturation and courtship norms, allowing writers to convey their concerns with Jewish modernity while simultaneously entertaining their readers.

Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. She taught previously at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen. She is the author of It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021). Dr Gollance is Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama, an initiative of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.

Workshop organized by University College London and the German Historical Institute London

Conveners: Marcus Böick (UCL/GHIL), David Churchill (Leeds), Pieter Leloup (Ghent)

For registered attendees only

In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford

The political culture of the ‘Berlin Republic’ has its roots as much in the era of German division as in the transformative years around 1989. Yet it is much more than a story of the convergence of triumphant (West German) democracy and failed (East German) dictatorship. Taking as its point of the departure the increasingly polarized political climate in Germany in recent years and the strong support for right-wing populism, particularly in the East, the project explores the ways in which ordinary citizens in East and West understood themselves as citizens, ‘their’ state, and the meaning and purpose of (democratic) politics. This integrated political–cultural history ‘from below’, crossing the watershed of 1989, illustrates that dramatically divergent conceptions of citizenship and democracy account for many of the enduring differences between the democratic cultures and practices in East and West.

Christina Morina is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on major themes in nineteenth and twentieth-century German and European history, especially Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, political and memory cultures in Germany since 1945, and the history of political ideas, particularly socialism, Marxism, and communism.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and/or online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

In co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, IHR

It is said that to be human is to be flawed, limited, and finite; however, the meaning of ‘flawed’ has changed over time. The lecture argues that in the nineteenth century a new conceptual framework for human deficiency emerged that compares humans with technology. This concept became ubiquitous in the twentieth century and still determines discourses on technology today. Unlike philosophical and anthropological theories of man as a deficient creature (Herder, Gehlen), I do not assume that human beings are biologically deficient by ‘nature’; instead, I examine the cultural construction of faultiness in different contexts such as work, mobility, love, and decision-making. Or, to echo Günther Anders, I ask how humans have become a ‘faulty construction’ in a technological world.

Martina Heßler is Professor of the History of Technology at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Her research interests centre on the man–machine relationship in the twentieth century and on the history of emotions. She is currently writing a monograph on the history of ‘flawed humans’.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIl and/or online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

The history of ‘Pop’ is a history of music, migration and transcultural exchange. Following the invention of recording technologies and the worldwide production and distribution of records at the end of the 19th century, the new music industry created a new global culture. Jews were prominently involved in that process on all planes, from the creation of the Shellac record and the Gramophone by Emil Berliner, to the pioneers of the music industry and Tin Pan Alley. They were composers of musicals and popular songs and popularized ‘Jewish culture’ through cantorial music, Yiddish theatre or the invention of the iconic ‘Jewish humour’. All this was often the product of disturbing and painful experiences of migration, uprooting and newly ‘invented identities’.

Hanno Loewy, PhD, is a scholar of literature and film, an exhibition curator, and, since 2004, the Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Austria. He is the author and editor of several books on film theory, Holocaust, Jewish history and popular culture.

There is a disconnection between, on the one hand, Europe regarding colonial history as ‘the past’ and of little consequence to its contemporary self-understanding and, on the other hand, formerly colonized countries and populations living with the ongoing legacies of that colonial past as a present reality. In this lecture, I argue for a decolonial project for Europe. This is a project that would acknowledge Europe’s past as one largely constituted by its colonial activities. Further, it would seek to rethink the idea of ‘Europe’, and its contemporary relations to the rest of the world, on that basis.

Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies at the University of Sussex. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the British Sociological Association. Her publications include Colonialism and Modern Social Theory (with John Holmwood) and the award-winning Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and/or online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Conveners: Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University), Laetitia Lenel (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), and Alexander Nützenadel (Humboldt-Universität Berlin/GHIL)

This event was rescheduled from 13 January.

In collaboration with the IHR's "European History 1150-1550" seminar

This talk argues that, rather than the invention of the printing-press, the processes of digitalisation in the present resemble the rise of the written word in the Middle Ages, which reshaped all aspects of society, from institutions and law to education and trade. Our knowledge of this medieval transition allows us to better understand our own, modern-day engagement with digital media. Intermediary steps such as recording and emulating the spoken word in the medium of text show how new media remained initially tied to customary ways, but would soon enable entirely new practices of use that alter culture and society irrevocably.

All welcome - this seminar is free to attend but booking in advance is required. 

Book here

In general, East German television attempted to combine so-called ‘political-operational cultural work’ with attractive programming. The same balancing act can also be observed in the presentation of Jewish topics and characters on TV. This talk covers so-called anti-fascist films about the Nazi era; campaign films against the West, e. g. courtroom dramas and crime movies; the aspect of ‘Jewish heritage’; Yiddish music; and Jewish contributions to entertainment shows.

Dr des Lisa Schoß is a scholar of film and literature. Her monograph Von verschiedenen Standpunkten. Die Darstellung jüdischer Erfahrungen im Film der DDR (From Differing Perspectives, The Representation of the Jewish Experience) is forthcoming. She is associated with the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and a member of the DFG network ‘German-Jewish Film History of the FRG’.

Organised by the German Historical Institute London in co-operation with the German Historical Institute Washington and the German History Society

It has gone largely unnoticed by musicologists and historians that the British composer, conductor, and music entrepreneur John Rutter has become a leading figure in popular music since the 1980s. Successful on the global music market, popular in the English-speaking world, and regularly topping the classical music charts with his Christmas carol compositions, Rutter embodies the opposite of commercial pop culture. He is the antitype of a pop star: he succeeds with sacred music, he addresses the middle class, and he personifies family values, community spirit, and the preservation of tradition. Using the example of Rutter, the lecture will demonstrate the importance of conservative pop cultures for the emergence and development of transnational conservatism in Europe and North America since the 1970s.

Martina Steber has been Deputy Head of the Munich Research Department of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) since 2017. She was previously a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London from 2007 to 2012, a Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg in Munich in 2012/13, a Research Fellow at the IfZ, and Deputy Professor at the Universities of Augsburg, Konstanz, and Wuppertal in 2016–18 and 2020. Her research focuses on modern German and British history, especially the history of the Nazi regime, conservatism, and regional history.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

This event has been postponed due to illness. A new date will be announced soon.

In co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, IHR

Everyone knows from experience that emotions are powerful: they motivate us to act in a certain way, they colour our experiences and shape our memories. But what impact do they have on history? What do we learn about history from looking through the lens of emotions? And what do we learn about emotions by applying a historical perspective? The talk explores those questions with regard to Germany in the twentieth century, a period of dramatic changes that deeply affected people’s lives, mindsets, and feelings.

Ute Frevert is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, where she founded the Center for the History of Emotions in 2008. She has previously been a professor of modern history at the universities of Berlin, Konstanz, Bielefeld, and Yale. She is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Her book Powerful Emotions in German History will be published by CUP later this year.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

German Association for British Studies Annual Conference

Organized by Sina Steglich (GHIL) and Emily Steinhauer (GHIL)

Venue: Humboldt University Berlin

Convenors: Indra Sengupta (GHIL), Nandini Manjrekar (TISS Mumbai), Geetha B.  Nambissan (JNU Delhi, retd.), Shivali Tukdeo (NIAS Bengaluru), Sebastian Schwecke (MWFSAS Delhi)

Keynote speaker: Professor William Pink, Professor Emeritus, Marquette University, USA

The Leo Baeck Institute London and the German Historical Institute London

Speakers: Prof Andreas Kilcher (ETH Zurich, CH) and Prof Nicholas Sawicki (Lehigh University, USA)

Chair: Dr Daniel Wildmann (Leo Baeck Institute London, UK)

Over 100 completely unknown drawings by Franz Kafka of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny and the carnivalesque have been made accessible in Prof Andreas Kilcher’s highly acclaimed book Franz Kafka: The Drawings (Yale University Press, 2022). The drawings illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Three fascinating stories can be told about Kafka’s drawings: the story of their transmission, the story of Kafka as a draftsman, and the story of his drawing in relation to his writing.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. Admission is free but places are limited and must be reserved in advance by contacting info@leobaeck.co.uk or booking via Eventbrite. Please also let us know how you wish to attend.

Zoom details: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88690122832?pwd=bUl3N2RWTlViaGRpWnJveGdYSTJWdz09

Today, the Hanseatic League is anchored in the general consciousness of Germans as the ‘secret superpower’. Around 1800, however, the Göttingen professor Sartorius chose it as the subject of a major work because he could find nothing more irrelevant than this ‘half-forgotten antique’. How could a half-forgotten antique become a superpower? The lecture will trace the mnemonic strategies which were used by historians from 1830 to anchor the Hanseatic League in the minds of the Germans, first as a history of the Third Estate and the Free Cities, then as a (proto-)Protestant unifier against the hated Habsburgs, and finally as a Germanic national maritime power against England.

Carsten Jahnke (1968) is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen. His main areas of interest are medieval economic and social history, and especially the history of the Hanseatic League. He is a member of the Board of the Hansischer Geschichtsverein and author of monographs and articles on the history of the Hanseatic League and Lübeck.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

An RMT strike affecting trains and the tube will take place on Tuesday. Please check carefully before you travel.

This workshop is organised by the ‘(De)Constructing Europe – EU-Scepticism in European Integration History’ project (led by the GHI London, the GHI Rome, the GHI Warsaw and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research). The workshop is limited to invited attendees.

Workshop programme (PDF file)

Introduction: Professor Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL)

Chair: Dr James Ellison (QMUL)

Panel: Prof Piers Ludlow (LSE), Dr Andrea Mammone (University of Rome La Sapienza), Dr Eirini Karamouzi (Sheffield)

Venue: GHIL

This evening panel is part of a conference organised by the ‘(De)Constructing Europe – EU-Scepticism in European Integration History’ project (led by the GHI London, the GHI Rome, the GHI Warsaw and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research). During this event, experts will discuss European integration and alternative visions of European integration from multiple perspectives.  

This event will take place online via Zoom. In order to attend, please register here.

When was the employment contract introduced in India? This is a perfectly reasonable question, given that 93 per cent of the 50 million strong workforce in India is officially classed as ‘informal labour’, and that the much hyped Labour Codes, which have yet to be implemented, are more a mere assemblage of the fragments and ruins of the once vaunted Formal Employment Contract than coherent pieces of ‘code’. Despite this, the story of the forging of the Formal Employment Contract in the first decades of the twentieth century, of its tortuous career and eventual dismantling over the next hundred years may give us a clue to the persistent paradoxes of India’s labouring landscape. My presentation will examine how the employment contract came into being in India, and how it was transformed and destroyed over the last century.

Prabhu Mohapatra is Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Delhi, where he teaches economic history, labour history, and global history of servitude to Masters students. He researches and supervises research on the history of long-distance migration, the history of education, the history of informality, and labour law. He has held appointments at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Göttingen, the École normale supérieure, Cachan, the University of Amsterdam, Yale University, and the University of Cambridge.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Joint Workshop of the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Award and the German Historical Institute London

Convenors: Christina von Hodenberg and Jane Freeland (German Historical Institute London), Sylvia Walby (Violence & Society Centre, City University of London), Karen Shire (Essen College for Gender Research, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

The summer school is a part of the GHIL’s India Research Programme. The Course Convener is Dr Indra Sengupta, Head of the India Research Programme at the GHIL.

How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened in preparing the child for an adult world?  In princely Mysore in southern India, the missionaries, who took the initial steps in opening up education to wider circles than those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the Government efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the proscriptions of caste and gender. On the one hand, the classroom presented opportunities for ordering space and time, and for remaking bodies and habits in the process of building new skills.
But the classroom and the boarding school were perforce also sites of unlearning, of breaking down habits and prejudices relating to touch/sight, as well as older skills and styles of learning, in order to enable the modern educated subject to emerge. A small but suggestive body of visual and other records allows for speculation  about the experience of schooling in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mysore.

Janaki Nair taught Modern History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and since retirement has also taught at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Most of her research, teaching, and writing have been on labour, urban, and legal history, feminist history, and visual culture. Her books include Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule (2011); The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (2005); and Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History (1996). Professor Nair is a Visiting Fellow of the India Research Programme at the GHIL in summer 2022.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Convenors: Marcus Meer (GHIL), Len Scales (University of Durham), and Sarah Griffin (The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London)

Keynote speaker: Leslie Brubaker (University of Birmingham)

An International Conference organized by the German Historical Institute London in Collaboration with the Prize Papers Project

Organizers: Indra Sengupta (GHIL), Felix Brahm (University of Hamburg), Dagmar Freist, Lucas Haasis (Prize Papers Project/University of Oldenburg)

This lecture is the keynote lecture of the conference "Things on the move: Materiality of Objects in Global and Imperial Trajectories, 1700–1900", organized by the German Historical Institute London in collaboration with the Prize Papers Project.

Chair: Dagmar Freist

This event will take place online via Zoom. In order to attend, please register here.

Convenor: Prof Martina Kessel (University of Bielefeld)

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Podiumsdiskussion

Der russische Krieg gegen die Ukraine stellt die EU auf die Probe. Statt der Aushandlung von Regeln im gemeinsamen Markt verlangen die jüngsten Ereignisse unmittelbare Reaktionen auf unbekanntem Terrain. Skeptikern schien bereits nach den Erfahrungen von Pandemie, Brexit, Flüchtlingswelle und der Eurokrise mehr als ungewiss, ob die EU ihr Versprechen eines friedlichen Europa, das sich nach außen erweitert und nach innen harmonisiert, würde einlösen können. Der Wortsinn von Krise ist Wendepunkt. Steht die EU an einem solchen historischen Wendepunkt, der über ihr zukünftiges Schicksal entscheidet?

Aus historischer Sicht ist es fragwürdig, die Geschichte der EG und später der EU als eine Geschichte stetiger Erweiterung und Vertiefung zu erzählen, die erst nach dem Vertrag von Maastricht von 1992 in verhängnisvolle Untiefen geriet. Die europäische Einigung hat ihre Richtung seit den Römischen Verträgen von 1957 wiederholt geändert und die damit heraufbeschworenen Konflikte haben diesen Prozess geprägt und bestimmt. Erst wenn die aktuellen Entwicklungen vor dem Hintergrund dieser weiter zurückreichenden Konfliktgeschichte der europäischen Integration diskutiert werden, erhält die Frage nach dem gegenwärtigen Zustand der EU eine klare Kontur.

Wie haben äußere und innere Krisen die Entwicklung der europäischen Integration in der Vergangenheit beeinflusst? Welche Vorstellungen von Europa prägen den Verlauf der europäischen Integration? Wie werden Hierarchien zwischen europäischen Regionen im Projekt der Integration reproduziert oder ausgeglichen? Welche politischen, gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Bedürfnisse machen EU-Beitritt oder EU-Austritt für Staaten attraktiv? Was kann man aus der Skepsis gegenüber der europäischen Einigung für die zukünftige Förderung von Zusammenhalt in Europa lernen? Sind Aufstieg und plötzlicher Fall die passenden Parameter für die Deutung der jüngeren Entwicklung der europäischen Integration?

Panel:

• Martin Baumeister, Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Rom
• Christina von Hodenberg, Direktorin des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London
• Wolfgang Knöbl, Direktor des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung
• Philipp Müller, Sprecher der Forschungsgruppe „Demokratie und Staatlichkeit“ und Koordinator des BMBFVerbundprojekts „Euroskepsis“ beim Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung
• Miloš Řezník, Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau

The panel discussion will be held in German.

MWS-Europe-Lab

Until recently, European unification seemed to be a process of constant widening and deepening, then after a series of crises a sceptical view on the EU became more prominent. Now – confronted with another war at its borders – the perception of the EU changes again. Has today's EU perhaps only become what it is because of crises and opponents of integration?

We would like to discuss these and other questions with you at our MWS-Europe-Lab. In this interactive event format, people from different regions and disciplines are brought together. Discussions take place in a relaxed world café atmosphere in which each participant can express his or her views. The goal is to develop a network of new insights and perspectives. Finally, the most important results will be summarized once again for everyone and introduced into the subsequent panel discussion.

Table Hosts and Topics

• Olga Gontarska (DHI Warschau) and Antonio Carbone (DHI Rom): Envisioning Europe(s)
• Beata Jurkowicz (DHI Warschau) and David Lawton (DHI London): Competition of European Alternatives
• Andrea Carlo Martinez (DHI Rom) and Alexander Hobe (HIS): A Union of Sceptics
• Katharina Troll (HIS) and William King (DHI London): Should I Stay or Should I Go?

The MWS-Europe-Lab will be in English.

Flyer (PDF file)

Poster (PDF file)

‘Imperialism . . . is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of his or her colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss to an outsider of the local place’. Taking its inspiration from this provocation by the late Edward Said (1990), my paper focuses on a range of modern disciplinary formations which I gloss here as earth sciences, among which I include geology, palaeontology, natural history, and most especially, geography and cartography. I consider how these sciences ‘worlded’ one specific location on the earth’s surface, ‘India’, as a knowable, calculable, intelligible, and masterable place over the course of two centuries of British colonial rule (Spivak, 1985). I then go on to discuss three ‘scenes of world-imagining’ that surfaced among inhabitants of the subcontinent in response to this worlding of their (home)land (Wenzel, 2014). I explore how these responses cope with the demands and (dis)enchantments of empire’s worlding projects through operations that I characterize as ‘geo-reverencing’, ‘geographies of loss’, and ‘topographies of plenitude’. As I do so, I draw inspiration from political philosopher Jane Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) in which she rightly asks us to ‘to come to terms as closely as possible with enchanting events and affects residing within or alongside scientific calculation, instrumental reason, secularism, or disciplinary power.’ My goal is to show that these contending world imaginings are not simply ‘enchanted’ reclamations of a (home)land violently worlded by the disciplinary practices of the dominant colonial project; rather, they demonstrate a ‘conflicted intimacy’ between science, art, and imagination—between all manner of strategic archaisms and atavisms on the one hand, and the scientific and novel on the other (Terdiman, 1985). This state of conflicted intimacy is what I gloss as ‘off-modern’, a concept I adapt from Svetlana Boym (2001) to argue that for world-making projects in colonial and postcolonial India, the empire’s gift of science is indispensable but inadequate (Chakrabarty, 2000).

Sumathi Ramaswamy is James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. She has published extensively on language politics, gender studies, spatial studies and the history of cartography, visual studies and the modern history of art, and more recently, digital humanities and the history of philanthropy in modern India. Her published writings in global history include Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe,and Empires of Vision (co-edited). She is a co-founder of Tasveerghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Her most recent works are Gandhi in the Gallery: The Art of Disobedience (New Delhi: Roli Books), a digital project on children’s art titled B is for Bapu: Gandhi in the Art of the Child in Modern India, and a co-edited volume (with Monica Juneja) titled Motherland: Pushpamala N.’s Woman and Nation (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2022). She is currently working on a new project on educational philanthropy in British India.

This lecture will be repeated at Cardiff University on 13 October at 5pm.

In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Lecture flyer (PDF file)

The bon mot ‘A German joke is no laughing matter’ is attributed to Mark Twain. Improvising on Adorno’s dictum ‘writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ one might consider writing humour in the German language after Auschwitz a contradiction in terms. Yet, this was the gap into which the Israeli author Ephraim Kishon, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, stepped. The most successful humourist of the Federal Republic, his humour was rooted in the everyday life of Israeli Jews, his writing tradition belonged to Central-Europe, his Hebrew-German translator was a well-known Austrian author and his German audience was the generation of the perpetrators and the post-war generation. The lecture will examine explanations for Kishon’s success in Germany.

Moshe Zimmermann is Professor emeritus for German History. Formerly Director of the Richard-Koebner-Center for German History, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1986-2012), he held many Visiting Professorships around the world and has won numerous academic prizes for his work. He is the author of several books and involved with curriculum planning at the Ministry of Education.

This lecture will be held online via Zoom on Thursday, 13th of October 2022 and will start punctually at 6.30pm (UK time). 

To join the event please click this link: us06web.zoom.us/j/89845454538;at the appointed date and time, wait to be admitted by the host and follow the instructions on your screen. If you have any difficulty joining us on the night, please contact volunteer@leobaeck.co.uk and a member of staff will be able to assist you.

Admission is free but we would welcome if you could inform us of your intention to participate prior to the event by emailing us on info@leobaeck.co.uk. This would help us to prepare in advance for participant numbers and management.

The event is organised by the Leo Baeck Institute London in collaboration with the German Historical Institute London and the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History (Israel).

For more information, please see the website of the Leo Baeck Institute London:

https://www.leobaeck.co.uk/workshops/conference-17-18-october-2022-a-new-look-at-german-jewish-history-through-photography.

You can register to attend this event by contacting volunteer@leobaeck.co.uk by 13th October 2022. Please note that places available for the public will be limited and allocated on a first come first served basis.

The Sjælland Letters: Unique letter formats and letterlocking techniques found in the Prize Papers collection. An online event organized by the Prize Papers Project and the Letterlocking team in cooperation with the German Historical Institute London

In this joint online event, we now present a very special collection of letters found in the Prize Papers collection. These letters were once found in a box of private papers and letters of Lieutenant George August Dossit D’Alban, who sailed on the Danish ship Sjælland, which was captured at the Cape of Good Hope in 1798. Most intriguing letter formats, letter folding and letterlocking techniques were found amongst D’Alban’s personal belongings. As the letters clearly show, D’Alban was a member of a Freemasons’ lodge.

During the first half of this one-hour event we present the Sjælland letters and their background. In the second half, Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith will give a letterlocking workshop.

As part of the event, the letterlocking team will premiere two new letterlocking videos, which will allow ‘letterlockers’ worldwide to fold and lock as in original Prize Papers letters. The videos will feature one of the many nonagon and one of the many triangle formats in the collection.We will launch the videos to celebrate the exhibition: “Captured. The Materiality of the Prize Papers” at the German Historical Institute in London

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. For more information on the event and in order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. 

In 1980 Eugenia Charles was elected prime minister of Dominica, a small island in the eastern Caribbean, becoming the first woman to serve in that position in the anglophone Caribbean. This talk focuses on Charles’s conception of the global as a political sphere, showing the paradoxes at play in her vision of Dominica as a modern state worthy of global attention rather than a peripheral, insignificant former British colony. Charles’s global vision for Dominica brought some benefits during the Cold War, but by the 1990s, as Western powers turned their gaze away from the Caribbean, this exposed Dominica’s vulnerability.

Imaobong Umoren is Associate Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently completing a book entitled Empire Without End: An Interconnected History of Britain and the Caribbean and a political biography of Dominica’s former prime minister, Eugenia Charles.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. When registering for your ticket, please select whether you would like to attend in person or online via Zoom.

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Academia Europea. Since January 2021, she has served as President of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Miri’s research explores social relations within the religious cultures of Europe with a variety of analytical approaches, and with attention to diversity in medieval communities.

This is a hybrid event: invited guests may take part in person at the GHIL but all others should join the talk online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

The Anthropocene is formally diagnosed through physical markers of human transformations of the earth. This materiality asks ‘when’ before ‘how’ and ‘why’. Yet ‘Anthropocene’ values were central to ancient and medieval states, and thus foundational for modern states. Across the globe, early expansionist polities envisaged ‘civilization’ as the successful exploitation by elites of landscapes, ecologies, and human and non-human life. Ceasing to dominate the earth was an illegitimate choice. Our present is best understood as a terrible acceleration of established practices through colonial theft, slavery, harnessing of fossil fuel energy, and the remorseless eradication of alternatives and those who lived them. A better understanding of this history enables us to chart new directions.

Amanda Power is Sullivan Clarendon Associate Professor in History at the University of Oxford. She is currently working on a monograph, Medieval Histories of the Anthropocene. She co-convenes the Climate Crisis Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences network and the IHR’s Anthropocene Histories seminar.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. When registering for your ticket, please select whether you would like to attend in person or online via Zoom.

Many scholars have argued that historical concepts of the global are under-researched. In my talk, I will argue that filling this gap will mean taking a closer look at media representing global connections and differences. I will do this by presenting my research on American designer R. Buckminster Fuller and (West) German historian Arno Peters, both of whom rose to prominence as mediators of the global after the Second World War. Yet, while Fuller epitomized a highly optimistic globalism based on notions of technological progress typical of the 1960s, Peters’s works resonated with a more self-critical globalism, which gained traction in the 1970s. Analysing the history of globalism through the prism of media (and biography) points us to important shifts in twentieth-century political cultures.

David Kuchenbuch is Assistant Professor at Justus Liebig University Giessen. His main fields of interest are the history of knowledge, media history, and transnational history. He is the author of Geordnete Gemeinschaft: Architekten als Sozialingenieure— Deutschland und Schweden im 20. Jahrhundert (2010); Pioneering Health in London, 1935–2000: The Peckham Experiment (2019); and Welt-Bildner: Arno Peters, Richard Buckminster Fuller und die Medien des Globalismus, 1940–2000 (2021).

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. When registering for your ticket, please select whether you would like to attend in person or online via Zoom.

In recent years, streaming networks have offered new encounters with the lives and traditions of ultraorthodox Judaism through means of pop cultural representations. While some praised the accuracy with which series such as Shtisel (2013-2021) or Unorthodox (2020) presented ultraorthodox customs, others identified problematic anti-Semitic stereotypes in those depictions. This lecture examines how far the representations in either series serve as a distancing mirror of our own societies and looks at them in comparison to modes of classical serial storytelling in television as exemplified by series such as Dallas or Dynasty.

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism and the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published on visual history and memory of the Holocaust and on German and Israeli film history. He is a consortium member in the Horizon 2020 research and innovation action Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age (2019-2022).

This lecture will be held online via Zoom. Please check the Leo Baeck Institute London website closer to the date of the lecture for details on how to attend.

In collaboration with the IHR's "European History 1150-1550" seminar

All welcome - this seminar is free to attend but booking in advance is required.

Book here:

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/weak-ties-flourishing-trade-merchants-and-their-agents-16th-century-antwerp

Please be aware that this Colloquium will take place online only.

Some scholars and scientists identify the Enlightenment as an inflection point in the Anthropocene, a geological age in which humans act as a planetary force. My talk suggests that this inflection point was characterized not only by new means and scales of environmental exploitation, but also by the emergence of climate politics. The naturalist Georg Forster provides a helpful itinerary through this time, from his study of Saxon hydraulics in the wake of the flood of 1784 to his death in Paris during the Terror of 1794. On either side of the Rhine, resource management and disaster mitigation constituted political power.

Patrick Anthony received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2021. He is currently a DAAD PRIME Fellow at LMU Munich and the University of Cambridge and is working on a global social history of Alexander von Humboldt’s science as it developed through extractive industries in Prussia, Mexico, and Siberia.

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. When registering for your ticket, please select whether you would like to attend in person or online via Zoom.

The Visiting Professorship is a joint project of the German Historical Institute London (GHIL) and the International History Department of The London School of Economics and Political Science and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

The current discussion on the crisis of liberal democracy repeatedly bemoans the loss of the ability to compromise as a result of increasing social polarization. Compromise as a fundamental technique —albeit not the only one—for dealing with societal and political conflicts is a voluntary agreement between at least two individual or collective parties or their representatives. It has often been claimed that readiness for compromise as an option for resolving such conflicts is tied to historically changeable preconditions, that is, specific cultures of compromise. Sociologist Norbert Elias regarded Britain and Germany as prime examples of contrasting cultures of compromise. However, political scientist Martin Greiffenhagen claims that the relationship between the cultures of compromise of the two countries has been reversed since 1945: allegedly, it is no longer Britain that now possesses a pronounced culture of compromise, but the Federal Republic of Germany. This lecture will discuss these claims on the basis of a comparison of both countries. To what extent can we speak of different cultures of compromise in Britain and Germany; how did they develop during and after the Cold War; and what does this mean for the history of liberal post-war democracy?

This public event is free and open to all but registration is required. For those who are unable to join us on this date, there will be a recording of the lecture.

In order to register to attend this event in person, please follow this link to Eventbrite. To take part online via Zoom you can register here. 

In political theory and political debates, an implicit expectation looms large: a ‘good’ polity is durable, ideally even permanent. Federal polities are accordingly conceptualized as orders which can regulate heterogeneity and resolve conflict—for the sake of long-term stability. The lecture will question this expectation of permanence by pointing to exceptions in global intellectual history from early Soviet proponents of federalism and the founding fathers and mothers of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: when and to what normative end is the idea of permanent federation subverted? 

Eva Marlene Hausteiner holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Political Thought at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, a Dr. phil. from the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a Habilitation from the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on the conceptual and intellectual histories of empire and federalism, and on story-telling in politics through conspiracy theories, metaphors, and images. 

This lecture will take place as a hybrid event at the GHIL and online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite. When registering for your ticket, please select whether you would like to attend in person or online via Zoom.

Convener: Bernhard Hollick (GHIL)

Peter Burschel is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Cultural History at the University of Göttingen and Director of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Among his many publications is Die Erfindung der Reinheit: Eine andere Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit (2014).

This lecture will show how European perceptions of skin colour – rather than primarily of skin markings, as was the case in the Middle Ages – increasingly began to influence European perceptions of non-European ‘aliens’. Peter Burschel will argue that it was not until the sixteenth century that skin was seen as a ‘supra-individual’ distinguishing characteristic that made it possible to structure, classify, and, not least, to hierarchize intercultural encounters chromatically. This shows that the process was not merely about the perception of skin colour per se, but always also addressed the question of who was white, and who was not.

Originally scheduled for March 2020 and postponed due to Covid-19 lockdown.

To register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Among the pioneers turning the Alps into the playground of Europe, the urban Jewish middle class played a crucial role. While cities like Vienna, Berlin or Prague offered Jews access to secular culture, industry or higher education, the domesticated ‘wilderness’ of the mountains provided ‘innocence’ of togetherness and belonging beyond confines of class, religion and ethnicity. Jewish climbers, environmentalists and pioneers of tourism were among the first to organize Alpine clubs, while others reinvented folklore dressing. All of them lost faith in the Alpine pastorale after 1933. Memories of innocent moments enshrined in memorabilia and tales live on. Some of this has its afterlife in the Alps, even today.

Hanno Loewy, PhD, is a scholar of literature and film, an exhibition curator, and, since 2004, the Director of the Jewish Museum Hohenems, Austria. He is the author and editor of several books on film theory, Holocaust, Jewish history and popular culture.

This lecture will be held online.

Please check the Leo Baeck Institute website (www.leobaeck.co.uk) closer to the date of the event for a Zoom link to participate in this talk or alternatively register at info@leobaeck.co.uk.

Admission is free but please inform the Leo Baeck Institute in advance of your intention to attend by contacting info@leobaeck.co.uk, in order to enable preparations to be made for participant numbers and management. 

As soon as this will be possible again, lectures will be held at: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ. Places at the GHI are strictly limited and must be reserved in advance by contacting the Leo Baeck Institute London. Admission is free. Lectures will begin promptly at 6.30pm. Latecomers may not be admitted.

India has, in recent decades, witnessed a sea change in the nature and settings of work. New workplaces and work cultures have grown in tandem with India’s consumer revolution, notably in the burgeoning interactive service sector. Here, the demands of customer service are reshaping the political subjectivity and democratic sensibility of the predominantly young workforce. Workers develop new forms of critical understanding of the self and society through the assessment of customers’ needs and conduct, as well as through emotional reflexivity, self-control, and self-awareness that are critical components of customer care. These, in turn, stimulate a personalized, individualized, transactional, and clientelistic approach to politics in preference to collective action, while also unleashing a critique of class, power, and hierarchy.

Nandini Gooptu is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies in the Oxford Department of International Development and a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. She is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India (2001), editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India (2013), and joint-editor of India and the British Empire (2012), and The Persistence of Poverty in India (2017).

To register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

After 1945, both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic included asylum law, and thus the admission of politically persecuted persons, in their constitutions. Since then, debates about the admission of refugees/displaced persons have continued in West German and East German society, persisting into the decades after reunification. Time and again, issues such as flight, asylum, and admission have mobilized the German public and provoked deep controversies. Patrice G. Poutrus argues that these discussions are not so much about specific questions of admission policy, but more about a fundamental struggle regarding German society’s political and moral self-understanding. They raise questions such as: what consequences should follow from the history of National Socialism? Do we want to live in a pluralistic society? What identity does German society have and who belongs to it? Patrice G. Poutrus is the author of a book about this ‘contested asylum’ in which he examines its history from 1945 to the present.

Patrice G. Poutrus studied history and social sciences at Humboldt University, Berlin and wrote his Ph.D. on the social and economic history of the GDR at the Europa University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). He works on the history of divided Germany after 1945, and on historical refugee and migration research. He is currently working on a research project at Erfurt University about family memories in the GDR and the post-1990 transformation of Thuringia.

To register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

GHIL in co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford

Our understanding of what violence actually is has changed considerably in the second half of the twentieth century. When violence against children and women first became a public and political issue in the 1960s, it was exclusively considered as physical violence. Today, however, violence is no longer regarded as a physical act alone; psychological, emotional, and linguistic violence is also problematized. Looking at three cases—gender-based violence, language as violence, and bullying—this lecture will examine the preconditions and effects of this development and argue that our ideas of vulnerability have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years.

Svenja Goltermann is Professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich. She has published widely on the history of violence, the history of psychiatric knowledge, and changing perceptions of victimhood. Her latest book, provisionally titled Victims: Perceptions of Suffering and Violence in Modern Europe, will be published by OUP.

To register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

The nomadic photographer and filmmaker Helmar Lerski was born in Alsace, raised in Switzerland, began his professional career in Milwaukee, moved to Germany, travelled to Erez Israel and ultimately retired in Switzerland. Aesthetically, Lerski sought to communicate timeless values through the manipulation of light and the physiognomy of the human face in extreme close-ups. His photo project ‘Jewish Heads’ started his search for a distinct Jewish identity. While advocating a Jewish homeland as a Zionist filmmaker, Lerski remained loyal to his artistic vision. This dichotomy between identifying Jewishness in the Diaspora and a national Jewish identity tied to the land of Israel, between biology and environment, eternal art and propaganda, makes Lerski’s work rich and still contemporary.

Prof Horak is the former Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Munich Filmmuseum and Curator at the George Eastman Museum. He teaches at UCLA and is the multi-award-winning author of numerous books on film historical subjects.

This lecture will be held online.

Please check the Leo Baeck Institute website (www.leobaeck.co.uk) closer to the date of the event for a Zoom link to participate in this talk or alternatively register at info@leobaeck.co.uk.

Admission is free but please inform the Leo Baeck Institute in advance of your intention to attend by contacting info@leobaeck.co.uk, in order to enable preparations to be made for participant numbers and management. 

As soon as this will be possible again, lectures will be held at: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ. Places at the GHI are strictly limited and must be reserved in advance by contacting the Leo Baeck Institute London. Admission is free. Lectures will begin promptly at 6.30pm. Latecomers may not be admitted.

Organized by the Max Weber Stiftung India Branch Office and the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment at the German Historical Institute London

Invited Speakers:

Helma Lutz, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Janaki Nair, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Samita Sen, University of Cambridge

Paula-Irene Villa, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

This will be an online event. Register here via Eventbrite

The fourteenth century is characterized by a series of profound structural changes. This lecture forms part of a larger monograph project arguing that one of the ways in which people in England, France, and Italy responded to these changes was in a nostalgic mode. It was by articulating a longing for ‘the good old days’ that contemporaries tried to come to terms with plague, extreme demographic shifts, rapid commercialization, growing social mobility, rapid political change, pervasive warfare, and so on. After exploring the wider context of nostalgia in this period, the lecture will focus on medieval critiques of social mobility and flux, expressed through a nostalgic lens.

Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in medieval history at St John’s College, Oxford. She has published on medieval violence, law, and Dante in particular, and is currently writing a monograph on nostalgia in the long fourteenth century.

To register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

This talk analyses the presence of generic Heimat imagery in German-Jewish family albums from the 1930s and highlights two major tendencies: the appropriation of Heimat iconography in photographs of the Jewish home, and the endeavour to situate Jewish family members within generic Heimat scenes. In both cases, Heimat iconography alluded to an alternative notion of German identity – and of belonging in the German landscape – which allowed and encouraged the integration of Jews within it. Consequently, in Jewish family albums, Heimat imagery provided an imagined landscape that sheltered Jews from the menace of Nazism.

Ofer Ashkenazi is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Koebner- Minerva Center for Germany History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of three monographs on German film (most recently, Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape, 2020). His current research project considers Jewish photography under Nazism.

This lecture will be held online.

Please check the Leo Baeck Institute website (www.leobaeck.co.uk) closer to the date of the event for a Zoom link to participate in this talk or alternatively register at info@leobaeck.co.uk.

Admission is free but please inform the Leo Baeck Institute in advance of your intention to attend by contacting info@leobaeck.co.uk, in order to enable preparations to be made for participant numbers and management. 

As soon as this will be possible again, lectures will be held at: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NJ. Places at the GHI are strictly limited and must be reserved in advance by contacting the Leo Baeck Institute London. Admission is free. Lectures will begin promptly at 6.30pm. Latecomers may not be admitted.

Organizers: German Historical Institute London in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut London

For many countries, the ‘German model’ of coming to terms with the past has long been considered exemplary with regard to the Holocaust. Many saw that Vergangenheitsbewältigung could serve as a model for other difficult histories. Yet in the recent years, this model’s character has come under scrutiny, with the debate around the Humboldt Forum showing that Germany has widely ignored other dark chapters, such as its colonial past. Furthermore, it raised the question of how to place different histories of violence into relation with one another and whether, as Michael Rothberg puts it, memories of atrocity must stand in a hierarchy. The rise of populism in Germany has led to a resurgence of narratives that were supposed to have been laid to rest, and which seek to avoid difficult chapters entirely and focus on other, more ‘glorious’ moments of the past instead.

So, where does this leave us? Can German efforts to atone for Nazi atrocities still serve as a model for how other countries might come to terms with their own legacies? To what extent is the old model of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ still relevant in a post-migrant Germany? What other histories need to be written? How can we steer away from competitive models of history writing? And what tools do we have to answer populist or even extremist criticism of contemporary means of dealing with the past?

This round table brings together four leading experts from Germany, the US, and the UK to discuss these pressing questions of our time: Corinne Fowler, Susan Neiman, Michael Rothberg, and Mark Terkessidis. BBC Radio 4‘s Samira Ahmed will lead the discussion.

For more information on the speakers and to register for this event via Eventbrite, please follow this link to the Goethe Institut.

Organized by the German Historical Institute London in co-operation with the German Historical Institute Washington and the German History Society, to be held online (Zoom).

Conveners: Bridget Heal (University of St. Andrews), Katherine Hill (Birkbeck, University of London), David Lederer (NUI Maynooth), Alison Rowlands (University of Essex) and Hannes Ziegler (GHI London)

Jahrestagung des Arbeitskreises Großbritannienforschung

Conveners: Frédérique Lachaud, Sorbonne Université Lettres; Wencke Meteling, Universität Marburg/German Association for British Studies; Jenny Pleinen, German Historical Institute London

Please register via Eventbrite:

For 7 May 2021 

For 8 May 2021

The attack on the US Capitol in January 2021 showed right-wing extremists sporting a chaotic and cross-temporal panoply of symbols : from Spartan helmets and Confederate flags to Templar patches, Norse runes, an Indigenous headdress, and video game logos. This talk will explain how extremists weave symbols from particular historical moments, and from renditions of those moments in popular culture, into an alternate historical narrative that can most accurately be called ‘White History’ – a mythical understanding of the past that elevates whiteness, colonialism, and masculinity. Moreover, this talk will explore the way mainstream cultural forces such as textbooks, media, and political speech reinforce these narratives even though they contradict real, recorded history.

Amy S. Kaufman is a medievalist working as a full-time writer and speaker on medieval literature, popular culture, and the relevance of the Middle Ages to contemporary politics. Most recently she co-authored the book The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (2020).  
 

To register for this event, please follow this Zoom registration link.

Although right-wing terrorism has been a highly relevant issue to German society in recent years, there is still surprisingly little knowledge about its history. This observation applies not only to the general public and the media, but also to historians, who have only recently begun to fill this gap. This lecture examines interpretations of right-wing terrorism in Germany after the Second World War. How do they relate to the master narratives of the Federal Republic and how are they entangled with interpretations of National Socialism? What current challenges do historians face in seeking new narratives of right-wing terrorism, and to what extent are these narratives contested by existing legends and speculations?

Barbara Manthe is a Research Fellow at the University of Bielefeld and an expert on the history of radical right-wing terrorism and violence in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945.

To register for this event, please follow this Zoom registration link.

Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

The last two and a half decades have seen a veritable boom in Holocaust research. This development coincided with a range of new research trends, perspectives, and approaches, which are markedly different from those that guided the pioneering work of scholars in the postwar years. The lecture discusses some of these new trends in detail, but also addresses problems and challenges like the ritualization of memory and nationalist functionalization of the Holocaust.

To register for this event, please follow this Zoom registration link.

This lecture discusses the historical pedagogy of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (‘National Volunteer Organisation’), which is the ideological inspiration behind India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP has been continuously in power for the last seven years. Together, the two movements are interrelated parts of an intricate organizational apparatus which has innumerable affiliates all over the country. A particular version of Indian history has long been a core part of their propaganda machinery, and their vast range of formal and informal educational institutions propagate identical historical lessons. After a brief overview of the cardinal tenets of this history, this talk focuses on the methods of dissemination which have captured the popular discourse to a large extent and have predisposed significant sections of the electorate towards the BJP. The conclusion will highlight how and why this version of history has proved so successful in dislodging far more credible and compelling alternatives. 

Tanika Sarkar is Emeritus Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her work investigates questions of religion, gender, and politics in both colonial and post-colonial South Asia, with a particular focus on women and the role of the Hindu Right. Her most recent book is Hindu Nationalism in India (2021).

To register for this event, please follow this Zoom registration link.

Convener: Prof. Ulrich Herbert (Freiburg), assisted by: Jakob Schönhagen (Freiburg)

To register for the conference please write to Kim König (k.koenig@ghil.ac.uk). Deadline: 28.06.21. There is no charge for attendance.

Organizers: Das Historische Seminar der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und das Deutsche Historische Institut London

Speakers: Professor Sarah Stockwell (Cambridge), Dr. Itay Lotem (Westminster) and Professor Elizabeth Buettner (Amsterdam)

Conveners: Paul Freedman (Yale University), Bernhard Jussen (Goethe University Frankfurt), Simon MacLean (University of St Andrews), Fiona Griffiths (Stanford University), Len Scales (Durham University), and Dorothea Weltecke (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Organized by The German Historical Institutes in London and Washington, D.C. 

In the past decade, post-Soviet Jewish writers, poets and artists who live and work in Germany, have been playing a crucial
role in the ongoing debate on the various forms of migrant belonging in contemporary German culture. This lecture explores how these different cultural agents reflect and de-stabilize, performatively, the meaning of Heimat, a concept that is highly charged both in German and Soviet contexts.

Dr Natasha Gordinsky is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa. She is co-author of Canon und Diskurs: Über die Literarisierung der jüdischen Erfahrungswelten (2008), written with Susanne Zepp, and author of In Three Landscapes: Lea Goldberg’s Early Writings (2016, Hebr.) She is currently working on a book-length project that deals with spatial history of World War II in post- Soviet Germanophone literature.

Dr Katja Petrowskaja holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Russian State University in Moscow and works in Berlin as an author and free-lance journalist for press and radio. Her first book Maybe Esther (2014) was translated into 20 languages and has won several prestigious literary prizes.

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Please follow the instructions on the Leo Baeck website to participate in the talk.

Organized by the DFG-Projekt ‘Sozialdaten als Quellen der Zeitgeschichte. Erstellung eines Rahmenkonzeptes für eine Forschungsdateninfrastruktur in der zeithistorischen Forschung’

Conveners: Lutz Raphael (University of Trier), Sabine Reh (Research Library for the History of Education, BBF-DIPF Berlin), Pascal Siegers (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences), Kerstin Brückweh (University of Erfurt) and Christina von Hodenberg (GHI London)

This is a hybrid event: invited guests may take part in person at the GHIL but all others should join the talk online via Zoom (join here)

Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg. She has been Professor at the University of Delhi, has held visiting professorial positions at the Universities of Vienna, Hannover, Zurich and Emory University, Atlanta. She has written extensively on transculturality and visual representation, the disciplinary practices of art history in South Asia, the history of visuality in early modern South Asia, heritage and architectural histories in transcultural perspective. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Walter-Benjamin-Kolleg at the University of Bern, the Tate-Hyundai Research Centre, London and the Deutsches Zentrum für Kulturgutverluste that supports provenance research of objects acquired in colonial contexts.

In co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford

After the end of the Cold War, the 1990s mark the beginning of the quest for a new world order. During this decade new visions of global governance emerged, based on a redefinition of fundamental principles such as peace, security, sovereignty, and the idea of responsibility associated with these multilateral approaches. Far from being linear and triumphalist, however, these developments were overshadowed by mass violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the international community’s failure to prevent them. Investigating these visions and accompanying failures offers a way of historicizing the 1990s and analysing the decade’s lasting impact on our world today.

Fabian Klose is Professor of International History and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on the history of decolonization, international humanitarian law, human rights, and humanitarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His most recent book, In the Cause of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century, will be published by Cambridge University Press in February 2022.

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Founded as an arts society in 1915 in London’s East End, Ben Uri’s collection, exhibition history and programming were significantly impacted from the 1930s onwards by the artistic influx of the so-called ‘Hitler émigrés’. This lecture examines the conception of Heimat in relation to the lives and work of German-Jewish artists from this cohort, among them Frank Auerbach and Eva Frankfurther, as they navigated their new host culture, touching on notions of national cultural heritage and belonging.

Sarah MacDougall is Director of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, where she has been a curator since 2002 and Head of Collections since 2012. Her research focuses on Jewish and/or immigrant artists in Britain in the 20th century with exhibitions including Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain (2009–10) and Finchley Strasse (German Embassy, London, 2018). She is a member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the University of London.

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Please follow the instructions on the Leo Baeck website to participate in the talk.

After many months of living through a pandemic, we know how difficult it is to describe and interpret the present without being able to assess what the future will bring. Some idea of the future is always needed, as this talk will discuss with reference to the writings of the northern Italian bishop Atto of Vercelli in the first half of the tenth century. The lecture will begin by examining the contemporary issues that Atto responded to in his texts before looking at his assumptions regarding the history of knowledge. Finally, it will show that Atto’s understanding of the office of bishop had a substantial impact on his specific manner of describing the present.

Barbara Schlieben was awarded a Ph.D. from the Goethe University Frankfurt for her thesis on the court of Alfonso X of Castile and León. In 2009 she was appointed Junior Professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After an interim professorship at the University of Hamburg and a fellowship at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, she became a Professor of Medieval History at the HU Berlin in 2017.

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

The exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks explores the intersections between the growth of mass media and women’s rights movements in a transnational context during the 20th century. Centred on the histories of feminisms and the media in Britain, Germany and India, it draws attention to little-known or unheard voices and stories and draws connections between activists and the media across time and space.

Developed by the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment, curated by Maya Caspari (GHIL) and coordinated by Jane Freeland (GHIL)

Image from See Red Women’s Workshop: ‘Protest’. 1974 (screenprint)

THE EXHIBITION IS NOW LIVE, VISIT IT HERE: WWW.FEMINISMANDTHEMEDIA.CO.UK

Launch event for the online exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media

What is the political role of the photograph and how does it intersect with the global history of feminist activism? 

Join us for an online panel conversation on photography and feminism to mark the launch of the German Historical Institute London’s online exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media.

The panel brings together the leading photographers, artists and activists, Sheba Chhachhi and Mary Ann Kennedy. With discussant Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi, Chhachhi and Kennedy will draw on their creative practice to consider the diverse and changing ways feminists have mobilised photography as a form of political activism from the late 20th century to the present. The discussion addresses how feminists have interrogated and re-imagined the role of photography, subverting dominant historical narratives, renegotiating the relationship between the photographer and the photographed, and envisioning feminist futures: what kind of history does the photograph tell? Who or what is included—and who is not? What—or whose—claims does the photograph inscribe?

Sheba Chhachhi is an installation artist/ photographer who investigates questions of gender, eco-philosophy, violence and visual cultures, with emphasis on the recuperation of cultural memory. An activist/photographer in the women’s movement in the 1980s, Chhachhi moved on to create intimate, sensorial encounters through large multimedia installations. Her work seks to bring the contemplative into the political. She has exhibited widely including the Gwangju, Taipei, Moscow, Singapore and Havana biennales; her works are held in significant public and private collections, including Tate Modern, UK, Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi, BosePacia, New York, Singapore Art Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi and National Gallery of Modern Art, India.  She was awarded the Juror’s Prize for contemporary art in Asia by the Singapore Art Museum in 2011 and in 2018 the Thun Prize for Art & Ethics. Chhachhi speaks, writes and teaches in both institutional and non -formal contexts. She lives and works in New Delhi.

Mary Ann Kennedy grew up in an inner-city neighbourhood of Chicago in the 60’s and 70’s – a place and time that laid bare structured, institutional socio-political inequalities of class, race and gender. Education is key in enabling women to enter the political and economic sphere and so she soon switched from a get-a-decent-education-but you’ll-only-get-married all-girls high school to the formerly all-male Technical High School College Prep. Having initially trained as an architect, she soon became aware that how we live is as heavily circumscribed through how we perceive the world – and our place within it. The growing awareness of the role photography plays in forming our vision of the world, and our place within it, led to a desire to challenge current narratives, to celebrate creativity as a vehicle for change – and to work within education as a political act. She studied with Simon Watney and Victor Burgin and collaborated with Jo Spence, which led to the establishment of a commercial studio in London engaging with educational publishers, campaigns and community arts groups. Mary Ann is a founding member of Photography Workshop (Edinburgh)/Portfolio Gallery, a founding member of WildFires network for women in Scotland who work in and with photography and is currently the Programme Leader for the BA(Hons) Photography degree at Edinburgh Napier University.

Na’ama Klorman-Eraqi is a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Haifa.  Among her publications: The Visual Is Political: Feminist Photography and Countercultural Activity in 1970s Britain, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2019; she also published articles, in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Photographies and Third Text. Her research interests include political intersections between feminism, protest movements and photography, as well as social-political aspects of contemporary art. 

In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

The Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture 2021, hosted by the German Historical Institute and London School of Economics and Political Science, will be held online and at the GHIL on Wednesday, 24 November 2021 at 6.00pm (UK time).

This is a hybrid event: invited guests may take part in person at the GHIL but all others should join the talk online via Zoom (join here)

After 1918, populist movements regularly appealed to economic conflicts between nations and to a loss of financial sovereignty. By comparing Italy, Germany, France and Britain, this lecture will explore the emergence of economic populism and its transnational dynamics in interwar Europe. Authoritarian models of financial regulation, often based on a combination of charismatic leadership and technocratic government, gained tremendously ground. They transcended fascist rule and had a lasting impact on economic policy after 1945.

The Visiting Professorship is a joint project of the GHIL and the International History Department of The London School of Economics and Political Science and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Download flyer (PDF)

Organizers: Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL), Prof. Gabriele Lingelbach (Kiel)

For invited attendees only.

Elizabeth Hunter: Wonderful Sleepers: Medical and Supernatural Explanations for Extraordinary Sleep in Seventeenth-Century England

Seventeenth-century readers were fascinated with stories of wonderful sleepers. Wonder books contained marvellous and terrible tales of people who slept without interruption for days, months, or even years, and of those who got out of bed while still asleep to compose poetry, walk on rooftops, or commit terrible acts of violence. These were linked to descriptions of the amazing sleeping habits of the dormouse and the snake in books of natural history, and to accounts of witchcraft, possession, and ghost sightings. While wonderful sleep might appear to provide evidence of a world beyond the material, it was generally agreed that the explanation could be found in the secret workings of the body.

Elizabeth Hunter is an Honorary Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is currently writing a monograph entitled The Secrets of Sleep, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Some of this research has been published in the journals Social History of Medicine (forthcoming) and The Seventeenth Century (2020).

Hannah Ahlheim: The Sleep of our Dreams?

We sleep away almost a third of our lifetimes. This unconscious, unproductive third often seems to be an obstacle to a lively 24/7 society. At the same time, sleep is not only vital for life and health, but offers space for dreaming. How does a modern society governed by science, rationality, and efficiency deal with the unruly phenomenon of sleep? The lecture tells a history of sleep in the twentieth century that is linked to a history of work and tired soldiers, but also to a history of culture, consumption, and the sciences.

Hannah Ahlheim is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Giessen. After studying in Berlin, she received her doctorate from the Ruhr University Bochum and taught at the University of Göttingen. Her research interests include the history of National Socialism and antisemitism, the social and cultural history of sleep, and science and the history of time.

UPDATE: Due to sickness, Elizabeth Hunter is unable to attend, so the lecture is moving to a purely online format (via Zoom). Her talk will be read by a member of GHIL staff. Hannah Ahlheim will be present virtually via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Convenors: Felix Brahm (GHI London) and Melina Teubner (University of Bern)

This lecture has been postponed to 11th January. If you have already signed up to attend then you should receive an email about the change.

Recently, there has been an uptick of interest in the late Reinhart Koselleck’s theoretical writings. Whenever scholars across the humanities deal with issues of temporality, with present pasts or past futures, Koselleck’s work is invoked. Yet new histories of fascist and Nazi times oddly omit one of Koselleck’s most incisive essays, ‘Terror and Dream’. This talk will explore Koselleck’s thinking in conversation with Charlotte Beradt’s TheThird Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939, especially their insistence that dreams are the most telling historical source for understanding how experiences of time fundamentally changed in the 1930s.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Associate Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on several books at the moment, including an intellectual biography of Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006).

This lecture will take place online via Zoom. In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Roundtable discussion to celebrate the launch of the online exhibition Forms-Voices-Networks: Feminism and the Media

What has recognition meant for feminists? Who have they wanted recognition from and why has it been so important?

Join us for an online panel conversation on the politics of recognition in feminism and its relationship to the media in Germany, Britain, and India to mark the launch of the German Historical Institute London’s online exhibition Forms, Voices, Networks: Feminism and the Media.

The panel brings together scholars Tiffany Florvil (New Mexico), Ingrid Sharp (Leeds), and D-M Withers (Reading) in a discussion of feminist recognition in the twentieth century. Drawing on their research and professional work, Florvil, Sharpe, and Withers will discuss the ways in which feminists have struggled for recognition and how the media has both provided a space for and shaped this fight. While campaigns for recognition have often been equated with political participation and women’s suffrage, the discussion will move beyond this to explore other forms of recognition feminists have sought across Britain, Germany, and India. In doing so, the roundtable reflects on the very meaning of recognition and asks who is recognized and who is not? Who to seek recognition from, and what to be recognized as? Should ‘recognition’ be an aim for the feminist movement at all?

Speaker biographies

Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of 20^th-century European Women’s and Gender History at the University of New Mexico. She specializes in the histories of post-1945 Europe, the African diaspora, Black internationalism, as well as gender and sexuality. She has published pieces in the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and The German Quarterly. Florvil has also coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories, as well as published chapters in Gendering Post-1945 German History andTo Turn this Whole World Over. Her manuscript, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, with the University of Illinois Press, offers the first full-length study of the history of the Black German movement of the 1980s to the 2000s. The book recently won an Honorable mention from the DAAD/GSA Book Prize in Literature and Cultural Studies at the German Studies Association and was a Finalist for the ASWAD Outstanding First Book Prize. She is on the Board of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH), on the Advisory Board for the Black German Heritage and Research Association, and on the Editorial Board for Central European History. She is also an editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press.

Ingrid Sharp is Professor of German Cultural and Gender History in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include feminist opposition to the First World War, women’s role in the Revolutions of 1918 and the international history of women as political agents. Her co-edited volume with Matthew Stibbe Women Activists between War and Peace. Europe 1918-1923 was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. She edited Age of Empire 1815-1920, volume 5 of A Cultural History of Peace, also published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

D-M Withers is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading and author of Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing and Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage. They are also developing a slate of screenplays and researching the life and enterprises of populist publisher Paul Hamlyn.

The exhibition, Forms, Voices, Networks explores the intersections between the 20^th century growth of mass media and women’s rights movements in a transnationalcontext. Through a series of snapshot examples, it illustrates how feminists have mobilized and negotiated media to advance women’s rights and contest gender stereotypes at different moments, while also attending to the ambivalence of women’s relation to the media across different time periods and contexts. The exhibition is now available online at www.feminismandthemedia.co.uk.

In order to register for this event, please follow this link to Eventbrite.

Conveners: Falko Schnicke (German Historical Institute London), Robert Aldrich (University of Sydney), and Cindy McCreery (University of Sydney)

Ralf Lützelschwab is a former Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the Freie Universität Berlin and specializes in church history of the late Middle Ages, with a strong focus on the Avignon papacy and monastic history.

This lecture examines the Carmelites, the great unknown in Western monastic history. They experienced their very own migration history, moving from the hills of Mount Carmel to Europe. If they had not opted for exile, they would not have survived. In new surroundings, sermons became part of their regular pastoral routine. The paper will focus on sermons and sermon collections, both manuscript and print, held in a number of Carmelite libraries in Germany and England. How did the Carmelites fulfil their task as preachers? How did they shape the conscience of their flocks?

In the 1920s and early 1930s – as today – Jews in Germany were concerned about growing antisemitism, and many took precautions to conceal their Jewishness by dressing and behaving in certain ‘assimilated’ ways. Yet there were still occasions when it was beneficial to be openly Jewish. This lecture explores the tensions that came with being visible as a Jew – an identity play that often involved appearing simultaneously non-Jewish and Jewish. Drawing on a wide range of images and films, this presentation explores controversial aspects of German- Jewish visibility and invisibility, as well as the complex reasons why Jews chose to appear distinctly ‘Jewish’.

Kerry Wallach is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and an Affiliate of the Judaic Studies Program at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (2017) and a number of articles on German-Jewish literature, history, film, and visual and consumer culture. She serves as co-editor for the German Jewish Cultures book series published by Indiana University Press and sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute London.

A winter school on global history for Ph.D. and early-career scholars in Germany and India

Organized jointly by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, the India Branch Office of the Max Weber Foundation, and the German Historical Institute London

Conveners: Debarati Bagchi, Felix Brahm, Pablo Holwitt, Monica Juneja, and Indra Sengupta

Organized by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies and the India Branch Office of the Max Weber Foundation

Venue: Lecture Room II, India International Centre Annexe, New Delhi

Speakers: Felix Brahm (GHIL); Monica Juneja (Heidelberg); Joachim Kurtz (Heidelberg); Dhruv Raina (Delhi) und Rekah Vaidya Rajan (Hyderabad)
Chair and Moderator: Neeladri Bhattacharya (Delhi)

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

Stefanie Schüler-Springorum studied modern history, ethnology, and political science at the Universities of Göttingen and Barcelona, and received her Ph.D. from the Ruhr-University Bochum in 1993. She was Director of the Institute for German Jewish History and Professor at Hamburg University from 2001 to 2011; Head of the German branch of the Leo Baeck Institute from 2009; and since 2011 she has been Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin.

This talk will look at the entanglement of antisemitism, gender, sexuality, and emotion in Nazi Germany. It will focus on Nazi Germany’s violent practices and dynamics, which encompassed other forms of resentment and hostility, but treated men and women conspicuously differently in each case, as can be shown in the race defilement propaganda and persecution of the 1930s and 1940s. The paper will argue that the peculiar ambivalence of these cases was inherent in the attraction of Nazi propaganda and deterrence at the same time.

Download flyer (PDF)

What started out as a religious niche has matured into a 250 billion-dollar industry largely pioneered by a group of diverse women embracing unique identities on social media. Fashion stylist-turned-blogger Adi Heyman’s inspiration for launching a Jewish fashion and lifestyle blog in 2010 stemmed from her personal and professional experience as an Orthodox Jew working in the fashion industry.In her talk, Heyman explores the possibility of being an ‘Orthodox fashion influencer’, and reflects on the lack of authentic content highlighting modest fashion, as well as the under-representation of women from minority cultures. As one of the leading religion-focused Jewish influencers, she promotes conservative silhouettes with a contemporary twist that resonate with the religiously observant consumer. Her work interprets Western identities alongside religious belief in a way that enables women to feel empowered by personal fashion and lifestyle choices. In 2019, Heyman founded the Jewish Fashion Council (JFC) to build a global community of Jewish fashion professionals and to provide funding and support for Jewish student life at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design.

GHIL in co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of OxfordThe worldwide economic crisis since 2007 is not the first time that financial speculation has been accused of resembling a casino game. The dividing line between speculation and gambling has always been fragile and contested. The debate about the legitimation of certain types of speculation and their resemblance to games of chance enjoyed a heyday around 1900, in both Germany and Britain. Around this time, the anti-gambling movement reached its apogee in both countries and resulted in the legal prohibition of various forms of gambling. At the same time, new financial instruments opened up space for speculative transactions on a hitherto unseen scale. From a comparative perspective, the lecture tries to bring these two strands together and traces how politicians, journalists, economists, and speculators strove to draw a line between honourable economic activity and illicit wagering.

Cornelius Torp is Professor of Modern History at the University of Bremen. He recently served as the DAAD Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair of German and European Studies at the University of Toronto and was a Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has published widely on modern German and European history, the history of globalization, the history of the welfare state, and the history of gambling.

GHIL in co-operation with the Seminar 'Britain at Home and Abroad', Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Jenny Pleinen is a Research Fellow in Modern History at the GHIL. She received a Ph.D. in history for her study of western European migration regimes after the Second World War. Her current research concerns the political economy of government redistribution in Britain since the middle of the 19th century.

Her lecture will focus on the period after the Second World War, when the landed gentry’s image in British politics underwent a fundamental reconfiguration, with demands for higher taxation losing momentum and a bipartisan consensus for public subsidies emerging. The lecture explores how this change came about and what role the invention of the ‘stately home’ as a key feature of British cultural heritage played in it.

***   Please note that this event has been cancelled!   ***

This lecture was instead recorded and made available as a GHIL podcast, 8 July 2020.

***   Please note that this event has been cancelled!   ***

***   Please note that this event has been cancelled!   ***

This lecture was instead recorded and made available as a GHIL podcast, 15 July 2020.

***   Please note that this event has been cancelled!   ***

This lecture was instead recorded and made available as a GHIL podcast, 1 July 2020.

Please note that this event has been cancelled!

***   Please note that this event has been cancelled!   ***

Conveners/Organisers: Historisches Seminar der Ludwig-Maxiliams-Universität München; German Historical Institute London

Samita Sen is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. Her lecture will focus
on the recruitment of labour for the Assam tea industry. She will argue that recruitment for plantations in colonial India gave
rise to institutions and agencies which became separate businesses in themselves. They maintained close links with the
industry to which they supplied labour, but these two interests were not convergent since the recruiting agencies’ profitability
depended on their ability to leverage the buyers. Moreover, the commercial brokerage of labour, which expanded its
net across the country, drew into its profitable sway a vast network of recruiters at different levels, as well as whole sets of
social relationships and institutions. Exploring the specificities of this recruitment system helps us to understand of modes
of mobilizing labour, social forces, and institutions at play in the creation of labour markets and the processes that entangled
migration and trafficking.

Samita Sen’s recent publications include, with Nilanjana Sengupta, Domestic Days: Women, Work,
and Politics in Contemporary Kolkata (2016); and ed. with Suhit Kumar Sen, Passage to Bondage: Labor in the Assam Tea
Plantations (2016).

What does ‘acting Jewish’ really mean? Is it a style of performance drawing on the alleged traits of global Jewry? Or is it perhaps about ancient perceptions? Paul Herzberg offers a view, drawing on his four decades in the entertainment industry.

Paul Herzberg is an actor and writer. His most recent appearances as an actor were as John Vorster in Antony Sher’s I.D. at the Almeida; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at The Arcola; at the RSC as Vincentio in The Taming of The Shrew; and in 2017 as Shimon Peres in the award-winning play, Oslo. Recent television appearances include Daniel Borgoraz in the award-winning serial The Honourable Woman. His screenplay Almost Heaven won the Nashville International Best Feature Award, and his stage play, The Dead Wait, was shortlisted for The Verity Bargate Award and, nominated in three categories for the MEN theatre awards, winning best actor. His commissioned screenplay Anna’s Story was selected for the 2018 Brit List.

Originally scheduled for Thursday, 23rd April 2020 and postponed due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

British German Association in collaboration with the GHIL

Margaret MacMillan is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The War that Ended Peace (2014); The Uses and Abuses of History (2008); and the international bestsellers Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao (2006) and Peacemakers: The Paris Conference 1919 and its Attempt to End the War (2001), which won the 2002 Samuel Johnson Prize.

Watch the event video at the BGA website.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Executive Chair of the History of the Ruhr Foundation. De-industrialization is usually associated with the industrial nations of the Global North. Whilst there have been earlier phases of de-industrialization, studies of the phenomenon usually focus on the decades from the 1960s on. De-industrialization in the Global North is associated with processes of industrialization in the Global South. However, there have also been processes of de-industrialization in pockets of the Global South. The lecture will reflect on how de-industrialization might be studied in a global perspective. It will argue that de-industrialization studies should be brought together with social movement studies, memory studies, and heritage studies in order to find a framework within which processes of structural change might usefully be compared in their transregional entanglements. Among Prof Berger's most recent publications is the edited volume Constructing Industrial Pasts: Heritage, Historical Culture and Identity in Regions Undergoing Structural Economic Transformation (2019).

Conveners: Hannes Kleineke (History of Parliament Trust) and Stephan Bruhn (GHI London)

Giorgio Riello is Professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute in Florence. His lecture charts the confluence and overlap between two different fields of historical enquiry: early modern global history and material culture. At a basic level, global historians’ interest in ‘things’ is the result of the fact that material artefacts – whether commodities, luxuries, scientific instruments, ethnographic specimens, or unique art objects – have been seen as being as mobile as people, if not more so. Yet the ‘material turn’ in global history also raises a series of methodological and theoretical questions concerning agency, mobility, and what is now called global microhistory. Among his works are Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (2013); with Peter McNeil, Luxury: A Rich History (2016); and Back in Fashion: Western Fashion from the Middle Ages to the Present (2020).

GHIL in co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford

How did West Germany try to contain state violence against prisoners from the late 1960s onwards, and even to present prisons as institutions that reflected the paradigm of liberalization? To what extent did ideas and perceptions of legitimate and illegitimate violence change? A number of prison scandals led to increased sensitivity in media coverage and in politics regarding acts of violence in prisons. These were countered by new ‘social rehabilitation’ approaches, with limited success. Looking at prison reform in West Germany, the lecture will focus on violence as a problem in processes of creating social order.

Annelie Ramsbrock is a Research Associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She received her doctorate from the FU Berlin and was Visiting Professor of Modern European History at the University of Göttingen. She is the author of The Science of Beauty: Culture and Cosmetics in Modern Germany, 1750–1930 (2015) and Geschlossene Gesellschaft: Das Gefängnis als Sozialversuch – eine bundesdeutsche Geschichte (2020).

The identities of many eastern European and German Jews who immigrated to Eretz Israel between the 1880s and the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 oscillated between their roots and their identification with the new Zionist project. This lecture explores how immigrants expressed social, cultural, and political belonging through clothing and, focusing on gender and visual materials, offers fresh perspectives on how clothing became fashion, or ‘anti-fashion’, and to what extent a consensual mode of dress emerged. It also explores how the clothing habits of Arab people and the changing Ottoman and British occupying authorities influenced ‘Jewish’ fashion.

Svenja Bethke is a Lecturer in Modern European History and the former Deputy Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research interests include the Holocaust, legal history, the history of modern Palestine/Israel, visual culture and fashion history. She is currently a visiting Marie Curie Fellow at the Abraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for her project on ‘Clothing, Fashion and Nation-Building in Eretz Israel’.

Originally scheduled for Thursday, 21st May 2020 and postponed due to Covid-19 lockdown.

Survivors of the Shoah have often described how the SS liked to define torturing practices during the genocide as ‘jokes’. The paper discusses the systematic presence of derisive laughter in Nazi Germany and analyzes its meanings as a way both to act out understandings of Germanness and to ‘justify’ violence.

The Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture 2020, hosted by the German Historical Institute and London School of Economics and Political Science, will be held as an online event via Zoom on Thursday, 26 November 2020 at 6.30pm (UK time).

Please click here to register for this event.

The Visiting Professorship is a joint project of the GHIL and the International History Department of The London School of Economics and Political Science and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Alice Rio is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. An enduring problem in early medieval history is what to make of the legal material, which is abundant relative to the total surviving evidence (legislation, acts of practice, models, old texts, new texts), and paints extremely contradictory pictures of contemporary legal practices both within and across legal genres. The lecture will try to show that this level of contradiction results from people calling on many different legal and cultural frameworks for representing their own actions, all of which were potentially valid provided that they could be sold successfully to one’s audience: what mattered was success in getting others to play along through scene-setting and role-play. Alice Rio has written two books on early medieval legal and legal-ish practices: Legal Practice and the Written Word in the Early Middle Ages: Frankish Formulae, c.500–1000 (2009); and Slavery After Rome, 500–1100 (2017).

Convenors: Christina von Hodenberg and Jane Freeland (German Historical Institute London)

Partners: Max Weber Foundation India Branch Office, German Historical Institute Washington, German Historical Institute Rome, Orient Institute Beirut

GHIL in co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

The Nazis drew upon a wide range of media first to mobilize voters, then to consolidate power, and, ultimately, to motivate German citizens in waging war. The flourishing German film industry lured more than a million spectators into cinemas each year during the war. Blockbusters such as Wunschkonzert, Stukas, and Die grosse Liebe explicitly targeted a young audience who, in their entertainment, craved romance, adventure, and escapism from the realities of everyday life. By juxtaposing these action films and romantic comedies with contemporary events, the movies showcased a ‘fun’ and dynamic Nazi society while promoting highly politicized images of ‘modern’ gender relations.

Elissa Mailänder is an Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Sciences Po in Paris. Her research interests include the history of violence, gender, and sexuality. Mailänder’s previous work has focused on perpetrator history and the everyday in Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Her new project examines heterosexual relationships in Nazi Germany and highlights the importance of mass participation and practices of everyday conformity with mass dictatorship.

In the 19th century Jews gradually began to free themselves from their ambivalence towards the fine arts. Rabbis repeatedly placed the depiction of people in pictures and sculptures close to idolatry and viewed it with reservations. The discovery of a visual culture in Judaism by the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, fulfilled a double function: it was intended to strengthen a new Jewish selfconfidence internally and at the same time to ward off the antisemitic prejudice that Jews were incapable of artistic expression. This process will be illustrated by the example of the emergence and development of Jewish museums in Europe.

Cilly Kugelmann was the Program Director and Vice Director of the Jewish Museum Berlin from September 2002 until March 2017 and she is currently chief curator on the museum’s new permanent exhibition. She has worked for the museum since May 2000, first as head of the Education department, and later also of the Science and Scholarship and Exhibitions departments. Previously, Kugelmann directed the education program, ran public relations, and curated historical exhibitions at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main.

Focusing on water at times of war, fire, and plague, this talk will look at a premodern society struggling with life-threating dangers and trying to find remedies. Three case studies from the ‘Regnum Teutonicum’ explore war (the Siege of Neuss), precautions taken against fire (Strasbourg), and accusations of well-poisoning made against Jews in the Late Middle Ages. They demonstrate that the life-sustaining power of water was crucial for the community. Every threat to water supply – real or imagined – had serious consequences.

Sabine von Heusinger is Professor of Late Medieval History at the University of Cologne. Her current research on water as a precondition for human life allows her to investigate many aspects of social, cultural, and intellectual history in the Late Middle Ages.

Moses Mendelssohn has engaged artists of Jewish and non-Jewish origin from his lifetime until today. The lecture will show how, over this long period, Mendelssohn has been turned into the icon of German-Jewish modernity by being represented in a myriad of ways and techniques.

Richard I. Cohen is the academic director of the Israel Center of Research Excellence (ICore) for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World. Formerly the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he has published widely on the history of Jews in western and central Europe and on the inter-relationship between art and society in the modern period. Among his publications: The Burden of Conscience: French-Jewish Leadership during the Holocaust;  Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe;  co-curator and co-editor of From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power, 1600–1800,  and Le Juif Errant: Un témoin de temps. He recently edited and introduced Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society [vol. 30 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Oxford University Press, New York].

The history of cotton has been the subject of much recent research, but blind spots remain. International debates have barely acknowledged the role of early modern Switzerland as one of the most important European areas producing, marketing, and selling cotton cloth in the 18th century. This talk shows how Swiss producers and merchants were integrated into global cotton networks and reflects on how cultural history approaches may be reconciled with the debate, dominated by macro-economics, about the Great Divergence.

Kim Siebenhüner is Professor of Early Modern History at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. She has worked on early modern religious history, material culture, and cross-cultural exchange. She is the author of Die Spur der Juwelen: Materielle Kultur und transkontinentale Verbindungen zwischen Indien und Europa (2018) and co-editor of Cotton in Context: Manufacturing, Marketing and Consuming Textiles in the German-Speaking WorldWorld (1500–1900) (2019).

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

Taking the example of Tube Meetom and Rudolf Duala Manga Bell, two boys from elite families of Duala, Cameroon, living with a petty bourgeois German family, this lecture discusses child circulation practices of the Atlantic contact zone in relation to notions of ‘family’ and home-making. On the level of colonial control, the lecture highlights the ambivalent practices of state control through the male custodian and the agency of the African father by means of financial and social interaction. On the affective level, an array of relations between extended families points to bonds not governed by the logic of ‘race’ and coloniality. Although in the end the German colonial authorities forcefully limited the ambitions of the two boys by exiling one and executing the other, their life stories advanced African independence movements in the 1930s.

Stefanie Michels focuses on German colonial and African history. She teaches at the University of Hamburg and has recently co-edited Global Photographies (2018) and Koloniale Verbindungen – Transkulturelle Erinnerungstopographien: Rheinland und Grasland, Kamerun (forthcoming).

Hugo Drochon will speak first on ‘Nietzsche’s Great Politics: From Bismarck to Hitler’, discussing how Nietzsche’s productive life maps perfectly onto Bismarck’s reign, which was characterized by the ‘great politics’ of German unification and the power politics of the European balance of power. Yet ‘great politics’ was also the way in which Heidegger, Jaspers, and Baeumler of the ‘Hitler prophecy’ tried to make sense of Nietzsche’s politics in the inter-war period, and Drochon’s paper will reflect on how these two moments can help us make sense of our own politics. This will be followed by Philipp Felsch speaking on the ‘The Italian Job: Nietzsche’s Return in the Cold War’ about the return of Nietzsche after the Second World War that was due equally to the new French reception (Deleuze, Klossowski, Foucault, and others) and the critical edition of Nietzsche’s works by the Italian antifascists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Felsch will dedicate his talk to the latter’s political philology.

Hugo Drochon is a historian of late 19th and 20th-century political thought, currently Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics (2016).

Philipp Felsch is Professor of Cultural History at the Humboldt University Berlin. His recent publications include Der lange Sommer der Theorie (2015) and BRD Noir (2016).

Conveners: Fiammetta Balestracci (Queen Mary University of London), Christina von Hodenberg (German Historical Institute London), and Martin Baumeister (German Historical Institute Rome).

Venue: German Historical Institute London

This paper examines the extraordinary career of Buttan Singh, a Sikh wrestler who became the national wrestling champion of Australia in the early 1900s. Later in that decade, he travelled to Britain and Australia. The paper considers Buttan’s transnational peregrinations within three discrete historical contexts. First, it places his story into the broader streams of Sikh migration within the British Empire. Second, it shows how Buttan’s story became entangled in the making of a frontier society in Western Australia. Finally, the paper relates Buttan’s career to that of other peripatetic sportsmen who breached the ‘colour line’ before the First World War.

Prashant Kidambi is Associate Professor of Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. He is the author of The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (2007; 2016), and is currently completing Cricket Country, a book on the making of the first Indian cricket team.

In this illustrated lecture, Professor Nathan Abrams will explore recent British representations of Jews on television focussing on the role of the Jewish gangster in McMafia and Peaky Blinders in particular.

Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University in Wales where he directs the Film Studies programme and the Centre for Film, Television, and Screen Studies. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (2018) and Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), and co-founding editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal.

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Organizers: Frankfurt Book Fair, Geisteswissenschaften International Frankfurt, German Historical Institute London, Goethe-Institut London, New Books in German

Moderator: Dr Ruth Martin

Venue: German Historical Institute London

How can museums and historians reappraise traumatic and partly hidden histories such as slavery, and offer opportunities to enable dialogue about events that society finds uncomfortable? Historian Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, University of Bremen, will first address the little explored topic of trafficked people and related legal concepts in the Holy Roman Empire, a state not usually associated with slaves. Although on the margins of the transatlantic slave trade, eighteenth-century Germany was deeply involved in it. Richard Benjamin, Head of the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool, will then argue that museums of slavery should not only become platforms for dialogue on decolonizing the past and collection practices, but also develop new ways of power-sharing with publics and communities. The talks will be followed by a commentary by historian Catherine Hall, UCL. Chaired by Felix Brahm, GHIL.

This event is available as a MP3 download (59 min, 41 MB) Report: Slavery’s Past and Present: Challenges to Academic Research and Museum Work in Germany and Britain. By Dana Hollmann

English Goethe Society lecture

In the years after 1784, the centre of the Order of Illuminati, which had been founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria, moved to central Germany, where it became active in Gotha, Weimar, and somewhat later in Jena – no longer working against reigning princes, but, at least in Gotha, together with them. The lecture will focus on the small Illuminati group in Jena, which met from 1785 to 1788. It consisted mainly of law students, whose meetings we can reconstruct on the basis of unpublished protocols and lecture scripts. The remarkable thing about this group is that it was closely bound up with the early reception of the work of Immanuel Kant and paved the way for its broad impact on the thought of Friedrich Schiller and German Idealism.

Venue: German Historical Institute London

With talks by historian Robbie Aitken (Sheffield), on “Making the Visible the Invisible – Black Germany in the Age of Empire”, and poet, dramaturge and editor Philipp Khabo Koepsell (Berlin), on “Afro-Deutschland – The Making of an Activist Movement“.

Organized by the German Historical Institute London in co-operation with the German Historical Institute Washington and the German History Society.

Conveners: Len Scales (Durham University) and Cornelia Linde (GHIL)

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Second Conference in the Series 'In Global Transit' organized by the German Historical Institutes in Washington and London in cooperation with the Max Weber Stiftung Branch Offices in Delhi and Beijing, and The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, Berkeley

Conveners: Wolf Gruner (USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Los Angeles), Simone Lässig (German Historical Institute Washington), Francesco Spagnolo (The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Berkeley), Swen Steinberg (Queen's University, Kingston)

Venue: The Magnes Collection, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley, USA

The idea of the modern revolution rests on the idea that all individual revolutions are part of one great and all-embracing movement and this is why, in the 19th century, ‘the’ revolution became singular. Marx’s philosophy of history is pivotal in this respect. The lecture conceptualizes the idea of a ‘script’ of the revolution, and discusses how the history of the modern revolution can be grasped as the history of a tradition and, in practical terms, as the history of a constant mimesis. It also pursues the problem of how, in the course of the 20th century, this script began to fade, as revolutions resembled the Marxian concept less and less, so that today we again speak of a plurality of revolutions.

Thomas Mergel is Professor of 20th-Century European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He works on the cultural history of politics since the 18th century, focusing in particular on the history of political communication. His publications include Parlamentarische Kommunikation in der Weimarer Republik: Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag (3rd ed. 2012)

Workshop jointly organized by the German Historical Institute London, the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London, and the University of Tübingen

Conveners: Christina Brauner (Tübingen) in cooperation with Michael Schaich (GHIL)

Venue: German Historical Institute London

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

Annual Lecture of the German History Society

In 1928, a consortium headed by the internationally renowned wine merchant Kempinksi opened a huge entertainment complex at the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. It consisted not only of a cinema and ballroom, but also of several themed restaurants – among them a Spanish bodega, a Japanese tea room, a Wild West bar, and a Viennese wine tavern. ‘Haus Vaterland’, despite its patriotic name, promised to assemble ‘the world under one roof’ and in this sense borrowed from the World’s Fair imaginaries. Investigating how ‘the world’ was arranged and performed in one of the most prominent places of public entertainment in Weimar Germany can help us better to understand how knowledge and imaginations about ‘the world’ were produced, circulated, and experienced, and how they shaped modern mass entertainment.

Maren Möhring is Professor of Comparative Cultural and Social History at Leipzig University. She is the author of Fremdes Essen: Die Geschichte der ausländischen Gastronomie in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (2012) and is currently working on a publication about ‘Haus Vaterland’ and the transnational history of mass entertainment.

Venue and Collaborator: Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, Common Ground (G11), Wilkins Building (South Wing), Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

How do colonial history, the Second World War, and the Holocaust intersect? As Britain embarks on the creation of a National Holocaust Memorial, calls have been made for a memorial to and a museum of Britain’s historical involvement in slavery, its colonial past, and their legacies. Meanwhile, scholarship such as Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory has argued that Holocaust remembrance also has the potential to open up routes for commemorating other contested national pasts. This panel will enable a dialogue between scholars of the Holocaust, colonialism, and the British Empire to reflect on national and transnational legacies.

With Avril Alba, Sydney, Yasmin Khan, Oxford, and Tom Lawson, Northumbria.

Chaired by Tamar Garb, IAS London.

An audio recording of this event is available here (this link will take you to the UCL website).

Who owns public history and on what grounds? How does the historian relate to public debates? Across spatial and temporal conflict contexts, debates about the content and role of history textbooks are sensitive, highly political, and often notable for their interminability. Developing a theoretical approach, political scientist Eleni Christodoulou, Georg Eckert Institute, Brunswick, will embrace ‘educational anxieties’ by offering a framework for analysing securitization dynamics that successfully resist and prevent textbook revisions as part of peace-building processes in Cyprus and Lebanon. Neeladri Bhattacharya, former Chief Adviser of the National Council for Education Research and Training in India, will then explore how contested claims of caste and class, region and nation, are played out on the site of history textbooks in India.

Chaired by Nandini Manjrekar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

This event is available as a MP3 download (104 min, 69 MB)

Report (in German only): „History Battles“ und „Weapons of mass instruction“: Geschichtslehrbücher in Konfliktgesellschaften. Tagungsbericht zum Seminar “Who owns Public History” des DHI London. Von Simone Hacke

European museums have recently come under increasing pressure to repatriate objects from colonial times. But where do we go from here? Does repatriation naturally entail ‘decolonizing the museum’, or might it even prevent museums from doing just that? This panel will discuss what decolonization in the museum might actually mean. How do recent debates fit into the bigger picture of engaging with uncomfortable collecting histories? How could embracing these histories enable marginal and multiple voices to have a say?

With Subhadra Das, Curator, UCL, Clémentine Deliss, Curator and Author, Tristram Hunt, Director, V&A, and Alice Procter, Tour Guide and Art Historian.

Chaired by Mirjam Brusius, GHIL.

This event is available as a MP3 download (106 min, 98 MB)

Participants: Isabel Ramos Lobato (ILS Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development Dortmund); Nandini Manjrekar (Tata Institute of Social Science Mumbai); Geetha B. Nambissan (JNU Delhi); Shivali Tukdeo (National Institute of Advanced Studies Bengaluru); Georgie Wemyss (University of East London)

Venue and Collaborator: Goethe Institute London, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PH

To address the urgent need for living space in the 1950s the GDR government introduced new housing projects based on prefabricated concrete slabs, the so-called Plattenbau. Erected on the outskirts of East Berlin, Zingster Straße 25 in Neu-Hohenschönhausen was one of them and it was completed in 1987. Three decades later the artist Sonya Schönberger visits some of the tenants. Who is still around, and who has moved in since? Her interviews, read by performers Johanna Malchow and Ingo Tomi, tell not just personal stories of daily life in the GDR, but also bear witness to the regime change of 1989, and the often challenging and still under-debated aftermath of social change in a unified Germany.

The performance is introduced by Christina von Hodenberg, Director, GHIL.

**PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED**

The German Historical Institute, London, in association with the German History Society, is holding a free one-day event for A-level history teachers on Friday, 5 July 2019, from 11:00 am to 3:30 pm. This will take place at the German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, in Central London. The programme (see below) will include talks by academics on various themes in German history, and a tour around the institute’s library and other facilities.

Co-organized by Rodney Harrison (AHRC Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow/Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology) and Mirjam Brusius (Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History, German Historical Institute of London).

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Conveners/Organisers: Historisches Seminar der Ludwig-Maxiliams-Universität München; German Historical Institute London

Venue: German Historical Institute London

International academic workshop, co-organized by the German Historical Institute London (GHIL) and the Jena Center 20th Century History

Conveners: Felix Brahm (GHIL), Daniel Stahl (University of Jena)

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Organized by the German Historical Institute London and the German Historical Institute Washington

Conveners: Paul Freedman (Yale), Bernhard Jussen (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main), Simon MacLean (St Andrews), Ruth Mazo Karras (Trinity College Dublin), Len Scales (Durham University), and Dorothea Weltecke (Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main).

Venue: German Historical Institute London

The castle is perhaps the most recognisable feature of the western European landscape in the Middle Ages, dominating medieval social and political order from the 11th century onwards. The origins of the castle are generally assigned to the 9h and 10th centuries, beginning with defensive fortifications established against the Vikings. In this paper, I argue that there are problems with this origin story by re-evaluating some of the key sources and assumptions on which it rests. This argument has broader implications for how we think about the significance of fortifications in the last years of the Carolingian Empire and the evolution of the castle between the 9th and 12th centuries.

Scholars have long treated the history of the transatlantic migration to the Americas and the trans-Ural movement of peasant colonists within the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th century separately. In fact, the two processes were interconnected and had a number of striking similarities. One common feature was modern reception and transit camps for immigrants and migrants, which emerged almost simultaneously at various locations along global migration routes. These ‘hubs of global migration’ became important laboratories of migration management in the modern age.

F. Benjamin Schenk is Professor of Russian and East European History at the University of Basel and currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of International History, LSE. His most recent monograph is Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart, 2014; Russian translation, 2016).

Commentator Andy Willimott is Lecturer in Modern Russian History at the QMUL School of History.

In the 1950s and 1960s British institutions delivered a variety of forms of technical and military assistance to emergent Commonwealth states. As a result, the ‘end’ of empire saw large numbers of Britons still working in the public services of newly independent countries and a great influx of students from former colonies to train and study in Britain, including at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where British authorities struggled to cope with the high demand for places. This lecture explores what the history of Commonwealth and foreign cadets at post-war Sandhurst tells us about Britain’s management and experience of decolonization.

Sarah Stockwell is Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History at King’s College London. Her research focuses on British decolonization. Her most recent book, The British End of the British Empire (2018), explores the domestic impact of decolonization principally through analysis of the history of British institutions that had acquired roles within Britain’s imperial system.

In his History of the Two Cities (written about 1157), Otto of Freising reports on a ‘Prester John’, allegedly a descendant of the three wise men, who ruled in India, and defeated the armies of Muslim rulers. A few years later, the priest king John supposedly addressed a letter to the Byzantine emperor describing his own kingdom as an ideal: a realm of abundance, health, wondrous people, truth, and faith. But why did contemporaries invent this letter, which some crusaders, in particular, believed to be genuine?

Jochen Johrendt is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Wuppertal. He works on the history of the papacy and on Italy, in particular, Rome. His most recent publication is Der Investiturstreit (2018) and he is currently working on a monograph on the medieval papacy.

GHIL in co-operation with the Faculty of History, University of Oxford

On 25 March 1934 the Jewish population of the small town of Gunzenhausen in central Franconia experienced one of the first pogroms, in which two Jews lost their lives. The lecture reconstructs the spatial appropriation of this urban space and analyses the interdependence of space, violence, and collective belonging. In Gunzenhausen the spatial appropriation was extremely violent. The pogrom proved to be a revolutionary moment of commitment to a way of life that, although it had been following a racial concept of social order for some time, still had to reach agreement on binding forms of social exclusion and racial community-building.

Since 2000 the historian Ulrike Jureit has been a Research Fellow at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture, associated with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

The talk will explore several case studies that allow us to chart shifts in attitudes to office-holding, from the idea that an office was a piece of personal property or duty owed to a monarch towards office as a public, disinterested, and accountable responsibility. The examples of Samuel Pepys, Lord Chancellor Macclesfield, Charles Bembridge, and Sir Edward Colebrooke will be used to explore debates over the blurred boundary between gifts and bribes, the sale of office, breach of trust, what constituted a public official, and over how far a universal set of standards should apply across Britain’s empire.

Mark Knights is Professor of History at the University of Warwick and his principal research interest is early modern British political culture. His most recent work is The Devil in Disguise (2011, paperback 2015), which one kind Amazon reviewer describes as an ‘interesting and unusual history book that is so gripping that at times it reads like a murder mystery novel’.

First Meeting of the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment

Convenors: Christina von Hodenberg (GHI London) and Jane Freeland (GHI London)

Venue: German Historical Institute London

Max Weber Lecture of the MWS India Branch Office

Venue: Auditorium of Jadunath Museum and Resource Centre, 10 Lake Terrace, Kolkata

Max Weber Lecture of the MWS India Branch Office

Venue: Goethe Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan Auditorium, New Delhi

Classic Jewish film and television, from The Jazz Singer to Seinfeld, was shaped by the economic need to reach the broadest possible audience, leading to creative strategies that minimized or downplayed the difference between Jews and the rest of society. As Netflix and other streaming services have made more specialized entertainment commercially viable, new ways of acting Jewish on screen have emerged that highlight the quirkier and more contested aspects of Jewish identity.

Henry Bial is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas, where he has also served as Director of Jewish Studies, Director of the School of the Arts, and Chair of the Department of American Studies. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage (2015).

Concept and Convenor: Mirjam Brusius, GHIL

Organizer: Forum Transregional Studies with the Max Weber Foundation in co-operation with the GHI London, UCL (Alice Stevenson, Subhadra Das), and the University of the West Indies, Mona (James Robertson)

Funding by: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany

Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship Lecture

Venue: German Historical Institute London

The Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship is a joint project of the GHIL and the International History Department of the LSE and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Conference organised by the German Historical Institute London in conjunction with the London School of Economics and the Gerda Henkel Foundation

Conveners: Johanna Gehmacher and Elizabeth Harvey

Venue: German Historical Institute London