Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor
The Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship is a co-operation between the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Historical Institute London (GHIL), and the Gerda Henkel Professor’s home university. Its purpose is to promote awareness in Britain of German research on the history of the German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic, and to stimulate comparative work on German history in a European context. The first professorship was awarded in 2009.
Paul Nolte has been Professor and Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Freie Universität Berlin since 2005. Previously, he taught at Bielefeld University, where he finished his PhD in 1993 under the supervision of Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his habilitation in 1999, and at the International University Bremen. He has been a German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University (1993–94), a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1998–99) and the Historisches Kolleg München (2012–13), a Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2010–11), and has held the Richard von Weizsäcker Professorship at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2016-17).
Paul Nolte’s work ranges from the late eighteenth century to the present, mostly in German social, political, and intellectual history, often focusing on the intersections between those approaches (e.g. political society, ideas of social order, or history of democracy as both institutions and movements). Other fields of interest include historiography and academic biography in the twentieth century, US and transatlantic history, and, more recently, the history of landscape, territory, and the environment.
He has been Chief and Managing Editor of Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft (2004–24). At Freie Universität Berlin, he has been directing the MA programme in Public History, one of the first of its kind in Germany, since 2008, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies since 2019.
Major book publications: Lebens Werk: Thomas Nipperdey’s Deutsche Geschichte . Biographie eines Buches (2018); Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Historiker und Zeitgenosse (2015); Was ist Demokratie? Geschichte und Gegenwart (2012); Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft (2000); Gemeindebürgertum und Liberalismus in Baden (1994); as co-editor: Stadtgeschichte als Zeitgeschichte: Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert (with Hanno Hochmuth).
27 November 2024
Inaugural lecture
Contested Spaces, Geo-Interventions, and the Search for Order: Re-Assessing Germany’s Modern History
The Annual Gerda Henkel Foundation Visiting Professorship Lecture
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 predicaments of the early twenty-first century seem to call established narratives of modern trajectories into question. Environmental crisis and the shock of the Anthropocene coincide with disillusionment about classical tales of Western liberty, emancipation, and conquest of planetary space. How did we get there, and what kinds of stories should we be telling? Paul Nolte’s lecture surveys the field for the case of modern Germany and suggests a framework that brings together recent approaches in the history of ecology, space and territory, and political regimes since the eighteenth century.
GHIL
Time: 5.30pm
Research Project
Orders and Freedoms in the Anthropocene: A New German History, c.1500 to the Present
Despite decades of cultural turn and postmodernism, larger narratives of German history still centre on modified teleological understandings of political regime change. The Sonderweg, or ‘special path’, has given way to a narrative of rise, fall, and redemption, in which Germany was basically in line with Western progressive developments, then fell into the catastrophe of Nazi rule and the Shoah, before being redeemed in a path of liberalization into the full democracy of 1990.
How does that square with by now firmly established critiques of Western modernity and linear, progressive histories? Also, the predicaments of the early twenty-first century, with its much-discussed ‘poly-crisis’, give rise to new questions about the tracks of modern history and how we should evaluate them in a long-term perspective, not just for the case of Germany. The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed regimes of discipline and order that challenge previous understandings of freedom in liberal societies, while climate change and the environmental impact of human societies warrant a fundamental reconsideration of core processes of modernization such as the Industrial Revolution and technological progress, and, indeed, the emancipation of humans from nature. What would German history (as a paradigmatic case for European, or Western, modernity) look like if we took this seriously?
We might want to frame it as a constant struggle between demands for freedom and emancipation on the one hand, for order and regulation on the other. The quest for order, with the emerging instruments of technology, fossil fuels, and science, was imposed not only on society, but on nature and the environment, and in a larger sense, on the order of territories, from the settlement of the sixteenth-century religious struggles to Nazi rule across Europe in the twentieth century. Territorial uncertainties in the German lands time and again reinforced calls for order and unambiguity. The attempt to reconcile order and freedom may be identified as a constant in German history, and still shapes the core coordinates of German political culture, as in the ‘ordoliberalism’ of its social market economy and in the iconic claim that the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) instituted a freiheitlich-demokratische Grundordnung, or a liberal democratic basic order.
Contact
Gerda Henkel Foundation:
Dr Sybille Springer
Tel.: +49 0211 936524 0
E-Mail: springer@gerda-henkel-stiftung.de
http://www.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de
German Historical Institute London:
Dr Michael Schaich
Tel.: +44 020 7309 2014
E-Mail: m.schaich@ghil.ac.uk
Previous Gerda Henkel Visiting Professors
| 2023/2024 | Prof Dr Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (Berlin): Zeitgeschichte from the Margins: The Post-War Experience of Nazi Victims |
| 2022/2023 | Prof Dr Constantin Goschler (Bochum): Cultures of Compromise in Germany and Britain 1945–2000 |
| 2021/2022 | Prof Dr Alexander Nützenadel (Berlin): Economic Populism and the Rise of Fascism in Interwar Europe |
| 2020/2021 | Prof Dr Martina Kessel (Bielefeld): The imagined individual: Narratives of self, history, and politics in modern Germany |
2019/2020 | Prof Dr Ulrich Herbert (Freiburg): Migration Policy in Germany and Europe, 1980–2019 |
| 2018/2019 | Prof Dr Johanna Gehmacher (Vienna): Records and Notes from Trans/National Networks: Politics and Women’s Movements around 1900 in the Personal Papers of Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930) |
| 2017/2018 | Prof Dr Arnd Bauerkämper (Berlin): Security and Humanity in the First World War: The Treatment of Civilian 'Enemy Aliens' in the Belligerent States |
| 2016/2017 | Prof Dr Dominik Geppert (Bonn): A History of Divided Germany, 1945–1990 |
| 2015/2016 | Prof Dr Lutz Raphael (Trier): Transformations of Industrial Labour in Western Europe between 1970 and 2000 |
| 2014/2015 | Prof Dr Kiran Klaus Patel (Maastricht): Welfare in the Warfare State: Nazi Social Policy on the International Stage |
| 2013/2014 | Prof Dr Dorothee Wierling (Hamburg): Coffee Worlds. Trade in Green Coffee and its Agents: The Hamburg Coffee Merchants in the 20th century |
| 2012/2013 | Prof Dr Andreas Rödder (Mainz): The History of the Present |
| 2011/2012 | Prof Dr Ute Daniel (Braunschweig): Media and Politics: An entangled History (c. 1900–1980) |
| 2010/2011 | Prof Dr Christoph Cornelißen (Frankfurt am Main): The British and German Welfare States After 'the Great Boom': Public Debates on Social Inequality and Social Justice since the 1970s |
| 2009/2010 | Prof Dr Johannes Paulmann (Mainz): International Aid and Solidarity: Humanitarian Commitment and the Media in Germany, c. 1950–1985 |