Spring 2023

Friday, 27 January 2023 (Cancelled, moved to September 2023)

UNC Chapel Hill  |  2:00 – 4:00 pm  |  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN  I  O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History,  Elon University, Department of History & Geography

Introduction of the Prize Winner: THOMAS PEGELOW KAPLAN  I  Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History,  University of Colorado, Department of History

Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2022

YANARA SCHMACKS  |  Doctoral Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Department of History

“We always did this for our children”: Motherhood in the GDR between Socialism and Opposition 

The presentation explores how GDR women dealt with motherhood and thereby, in conversation with and sometimes opposition to the state, renegotiated socialist modernity. East German women writers drew up alternative socialist versions of maternity, framing the mother-child relationship as a platonic partnership between mother and child and, in contrast to their Western counterparts, deemphasizing the bodily elements of motherhood. These positions toward motherhood and children were often politically in line with culturally hegemonic ideas about the socialist family that were promoted by the state. Yet, in the 1980s, motivated by intense maternal concern for their children in the face of growing Cold War tensions and environmental destruction, GDR women’s activists tried to actively intervene at the state level to improve the future of their children, thereby becoming involved in oppositional activities and ultimately contributing to bringing about the Wende. 

YANARA SCHMACKS is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She is working on a dissertation titled “Reproductive Nation: German Motherhood, Erotics, and Ecology between East and West,” exploring how the maternal served as a space for the renegotiation of both the German past as well as the East-West divide and reunification. Her research was published in Central European History and in Psychoanalysis and History. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Comments:

JAMES CHAPPEL I  Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History,  Duke University, Department of History

DONNA HARSCH  I  Professor of History,  Carnegie Mellon University, Department of History

Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies; Duke Department of History

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Friday, 17 February 2023

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation:

KAREN HAGEMANN  |  James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History,  University North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS” Roundtable:

#IchbinHanna: Gender, Diversity and the German Academic System

Under the hashtag #IchBinHanna academics in Germany started a campaign against the German Law on Fixed-Term Contracts (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz) in Higher Education and Research in the summer 2021. This campaign responded to a video titled “Ich bin Hanna” by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which attempts to explain why fixed term contracts are necessary. With the argument that competition is needed in academia the video justifies a university system that does not know a tenure track, works untenured scholars to the point of burn-out, exploits them for unpaid teaching and only grants full professors tenure. What the ministry, politicians and many university leaders fail to see is that the lack of a tenure track causes not only the miserable working conditions of many young academics, but also contributes to the continuing discrimination of women and a lack of diversity in academia. This roundtable will discuss with a focus on history and cultural studies the questions how the current structures and culture of the German academic system evolved and contribute to a discrimination of women, young scholars and academics with a diverse background and which reforms are necessary.

Roundtable Participants:

• • SEBASTIAN KUBON  |  Research Associate in the Field of Science Policy of the Green Party of the Bavarian Parliament

SEBASTIAN KUBON was research associate at the University of Hamburg. In the summer 2022 he started to work for the Green Party in the Bavarian parliament in the field of science policy. His main fields of research are Medieval and Early Modern History, Digital and Public History and the Didactics of Historical-Political Education. His recent publications include Die Außenpolitik des Deutschen Ordens unter Hochmeister Konrad von Jungingen (1393-1407) (2016); and #IchBinHanna: Prekäre Wissenschaft in Deutschland (with Amrei Bahr and Kristin Eichhorn, 2022). He hopes to complete his habilitation on Public History and Medieval History in 2023. He is also a Post-Doc representative in the Board of the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands, the Association of German Historians.

• • MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS  I  Postdoc (Universitätsassistentin) at the Department of History and European Ethnology and the Center for Interdisziplinary Gender Studies at the University of Innsbruck

MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS is a Postdoc (Universitätsassistentin) at the Department of History and European  Ethnology and the Center for Interdisziplinary Gender Studies at the University of Innsbruck, after several years at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the Universidad de Barcelona and Universitat Pompeo Fabra. She has a PhD in History on the topic of Labor and Gender (2010), and since 2018 she is working on her habilitation titled “Maps of Europe in the Early Modern Period: Techniques of Production.” Her most recent publication include Popularisierungen von Geschlechterwissen seit der Vormoderne. Konzepte und Analysen (ed. with Falko Schnicke, 2020); Zwischen Raum und Zeit Zwischenräumliche Praktiken in den Kulturwissenschaften (ed. with Monika Frohnapfel-Leis, 2022).

• • SYLVIA PALETSCHEK I  Professor  at the Department of History and Vice Rector for University Culture at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg
    

SYLVIA PALETSCHEK is Professor at the Department of History and Vice Rector for University Culture at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg. Her fields of research include women’s and gender history, history of universities, memory culture and public history, and the gender history of historiography. Her most recent English book publications include  Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Century (ed., 2011); The Gender of Memory. Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (ed. with Sylvia Schraut, 2008).

• • MARY LINDEMANN I  Professor Emerita at the Department of History at the University of Miami and former AHA President

MARY LINDEMANN is Professor Emerita at the Department of History at the University of Miami. Her fields of research include early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish history as well as medical history in the early modern world. She was president of the American Historical Association in 2020 and president of the German Studies Association in 2017–2018. Her most recent book publications include:  Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (2006) and The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790 (2015). Currently she is writing “The Fractured Lands: Northern Germany in an Age of War and its Aftermath, 1648-1721.”

Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Department of German and Slavic Languages & Literatures, Center for European Studies; Duke Department of History

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Friday, 31 March 2023

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation: TERESA WALCH  I  Assistant Professor of Modern European History, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of History

PAUL JASKOT  I  Professor,  Duke University, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

From an Integrated to an Intersecting History: Digital and Analog Analysis of Architecture in Nazi Occupied Krakow

Understanding the role of buildings in German-occupied Krakow cannot easily be connected to the systemic digital mapping and question of genocide necessary for understanding the war in Europe. The two questions not only operate at different scales, but also involve archival information of different substance, and (digital) methods with different approaches. At the core of this disconnect is the problem of working through the real intersection between culture and genocide, individual experience and systemic oppression, or the materiality of the built environment and the abstraction of the political-economic scale of the Nazi occupation of Europe. This presentation will show how we are currently using modeling of built spaces based on archival sources for analyzing building in occupied Krakow. At the same time, we will talk about the relationship between individual Jewish and non-Jewish victims in the spaces of genocide. Our goal, though, is to lay out how we might think about the approaches of digital visualization and the history of Nazi Germany together.

PAUL JASKOT is Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. He also the Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. His most recent book publications include The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012), and New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (with Alexandra Garbarini, 2018).

Comment: BARRY TRACHTENBERG  I   Associate Professor, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History,  Wake Forest University, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History and UNC-Chapel Hill, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies

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Friday, 14 April 2023

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN  I  O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History, Elon University, Department of History & Geography

ADAM R. SEIPP  I  Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences, Texas A&M University

Amis: German Society and the US Army, 1945-1995

During the Cold War, more than 16 million Americans lived and worked in the Federal Republic of Germany as military personnel, dependents, or civilian employees.  This massive and long-lasting engagement between a foreign army and the population of a sovereign state had important implications for both.  Historians have explored the impact of foreign forces on consumption patterns, social movements, and youth culture in Germany, but there has been little attention paid to their role in shaping politics and political culture. My talk, part of a book project, will explore the lived experience of German communities that existed alongside, and among, the U.S. Army. Scholars need to better integrate the history of foreign military forces, and particularly the Americans, into the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.

ADAM R. SEIPP is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University. He earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2005. His main fields of research are German history, the European history of war and society, and transnational history. He is the author or editor of several books, including Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945–1952 (2013), Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (ed. with Michael Meng, 2017), and The Berlin Airlift and the Making of the Cold War (ed. with John Schuessler and Thomas D. Sullivan, 2022). 

Comment: ELISABETH PILLER I Juniorprofessor of Transatlantic and North American History,  Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History

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Fall 2022

Friday, 23 September 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN  I  James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

JAMES M. BROPHY  I  Francis H. Squire Professor of History;  European Studies Director  I  University of Delaware, Department of History

Print Circuits and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870

Publishers were brokers of political communication. They presided over transnational markets of knowledge, translated new texts, launched journals and newspapers, and devised hybrid formats for consuming news. Generating broad readerships for political print, producers promoted political literacy and refashioned citizenship ideals. They furthermore drew on a long tradition of circumventing censorship to vend forbidden literature. Based on the careers of dozens of major and minor publishers over two generations, this talk casts publishers not only as merchants of print but also as political actors and intellectual midwives. Their successes and failures tell us much about nineteenth-century pathways to political modernity. The architects of a vibrant, if flawed, political public sphere, publishers illuminate both the possibilities and limitations of circulating dissent in German-speaking Central Europe. 

JAMES BROPHY is Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He specializes in modern European history, particularly the social and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He has written Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870 (1998) and Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (2007) as well as co-edited Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998; 7th ed., 2020) and the forthcoming Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (2023). He is the former president of the Central European History Society and a current member of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe‘s advisory board. 

Comment: JAKOB NORBERG I   Professor and Chair  I  Duke University, Department of German Studies

Co-Conveners: Duke, Department of History and Department of German Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History and Department of German & Slavic Languages

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Friday, 21 October 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Moderation:

TERESA WALCH  |  Assistant Professor of Modern European History I University North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of History

THOMAS PEGELOW KAPLAN  |  Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History  I University of Colorado Boulder, Department of History

NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS” Roundtable:

“Historikerstreit 2.0.”? The German Debate about the Holocaust, Colonialism & Genocide

Over the past two decades, scholars, among them many historians, have been debating the relationships among the Holocaust, colonialism, and other genocides. In May 2021, Dirk Moses, then UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, injected renewed energy into these debates with the publication of his article “The German Catechism” in Geschichte der Gegenwart. The media response to this article first inside and later also outside Germany ranged from polemical rejection to nuanced support. Some observers even called this debate the “Historikerstreit 2.0.” More than a year later, this roundtable with American and German experts will take stock of the debate and reflect on intentions, positions, and possible conclusions.

Roundtable Participants:

• • • A. DIRK MOSES  I  Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Political Sciences

A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Political Sciences. He researches different aspects of genocide. Before coming to City, he was the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, was published in 2007. His latest book, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, appeared in 2021.

• • • ALON CONFINO  |  Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the  University of Massachusetts Amherst

Alon Confino is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, professor of History and Judaic Studies, and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on the theory and practice of writing history displayed in particular in the topics of memory, culture, and nationhood. His most recent books include Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (2012); and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014). 

• • • ZOÉ SAMUDZI I  Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion and Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design
      

Zoé Samudzi is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion and  Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a member of the advisory committee for the Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Cedars-Sinai. Her research engages the Ovaherero and Nama genocide, and colonial visualities.  She is  the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (2018).

• • • STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM  I  Director and Professor, Center for Research on Antisemitism at the  Technical University of Berlin and  Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg

Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is the Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin and Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg; since 2020 she is also the Director of the Berlin branch of the Center for Research on Social Cohesion. Her main fields of research are Jewish, German, and Spanish History. Recent publications include Football and Discrimination. Antisemitism and beyond (edited with Pavel Brunssen, 2021); Emotionen und Antisemitismus: Geschichte—Literatur—Theorie (edited with Jan Süselbeck, 2021); and Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte: Geschlecht und Differenz (2014). 

Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies and Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, and Duke Department of History

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Friday, 18 November 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm  I  Zoom Seminar

Welcome and Moderation: MADELINE JAMES   I  PhD Candidate  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

TILL KNOBLOCH   I  PhD Candidate  |  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

The ‘Manufactured Crisis’: The Outbreak of World War II in Europe

Claus von Stauffenberg once described the inner circle of Nazi leaders as consisting solely of “opportunists and psychopaths” and indeed rarely had a war been instigated by a more peculiar lot of people. Fanatics, amateurs, yes-men and the inevitable “alte Kämpfer” – they all gathered around their leader at the Berghof where Hitler’s endless monologues and absurd mannerisms created a conspiracy-prone bubble that reason could not penetrate. Drawing from my dissertation research, the presentation will demonstrate how those personal factors shaped the Third Reich’s foreign policy and ultimately the outbreak of World War II. It will thus become clear that Hitler’s perceptions and ideas, his decisions and actions, were not the result of calculated diplomacy but the product of a system designed to appeal to the personal habits of one man. 

TILL KNOBLOCH  is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spending the academic year 2022/23 in Berlin as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. His research interests focus on International History, Modern German and European History, Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Second World War, as well as Causes and Outbreaks of Wars. His dissertation, “The ‘Manufactured Crisis’: The Outbreak of World War II in Europe,” examines the diplomatic crisis at the eve of the Second World War from an international perspective with a particular emphasis on Polish sources. 

Comment: CHAD BRYANT  I  Associate Professor of History I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History

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Spring 2022

Friday, 21 January 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  |  1:00 – 2:30 pm  |  Online Seminar

With the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2022

Young Scholar Writing Seminar: How to Write a Good Article for a History Journal?

I: Introduction:

MONICA BLACK  |  Professor of History  |  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and editor of the journal Central European History

How to Write a Good History Journal Article? 

MONICA BLACK is Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her research focuses on Modern Germany and Europe with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. She is the Editor of the journal Central European History. Her books include: Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (2010); A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (2020).

II: Presentation by the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021:

JOHNATHON SPEED  |  Graduate Student  I  Vanderbilt University

A “Child Export”: the Swabian Children at the Austro-German Border, 1897-1914

Inspired by a long-brewing moral panic, a regional coalition of state actors ordered the removal of dozens of so-called “Swabian Children” back across the Austro-German border in 1911. These extraditions embedded Austrian sovereignty in the very bodies of these migrants, while simultaneously abrogating parents’ rights as legal guardians. In drafting these reforms absent corresponding legislation from the imperial centers, these bureaucrats demonstrated their capacity as agents of meaningful legal change. This paper explores how, spurred to outrage about this purported “child export,” state actors at the local level wielded the vast powers of the provincial state to exert control over these children and their families. And by introducing the possibility of physical removal, they transformed the Swabian Children into a truly transnational migration regime. This was thus the moment at which the national categories of Austria and Germany finally mattered more than regional ones like Swabia, Tyrol, or Vorarlberg.

JOHNATHON SPEED is a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the peculiar Alpine child migrants known as the “Swabian Children.” His research was supported by the Institute for European History (IEG) at Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of childhood and youth, migration studies, and legal history in Central Europe since the nineteenth century.

Comments by:

• • MONICA BLACK
  • CHAD BRYANT  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Moderation:  KEVIN J. HOEPER  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History and KENNETH ALARCÓN NEGY  I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill History, Department of History and Center for European Studies

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Friday, 21 January 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  3:30 – 5:30 pm I Online Seminar

Konrad H.  Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2020

JOHNATHON SPEED  |  Vanderbilt University, Department of History

The Swabian Children and Child Welfare in the Eastern Alps, 1820-1921

Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of children from the Austrian Alps undertook yearly journeys to Southwest Germany, where they negotiated labor contracts at “child markets” (Kindermärkte) for work as domestics and shepherds. From its first discovery in the 1820s up to its dissolution a century later, a loose coalition of regional bureaucrats and administrators took steps transforming these so-called “Swabian Children” into public wards of the provincial state. These interventions drastically changed what it meant to be a Schwabenkind. Under sustained state pressures, these children began to travel by different means, to conclude labor terms by written contracts, and to associate more with state servants than family members in their pursuit of work abroad. This talk reveals how, contrary to past scholarship, the “Swabian Children” were hardly impervious to state oversight. By 1900, it might rather be argued that they had been fashioned as a state-based category of public welfare.

JOHNATHON SPEED is a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the peculiar Alpine child migrants known as the “Swabian Children.” His research was supported by the Institute for European History (IEG) at Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of childhood and youth, migration studies, and legal history in Central Europe since the nineteenth century.

Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN  I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Introduction of the Prize Winner:  JAMES CHAPPEL  I Duke University, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill History, Department of History, Center for European Studies,

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Thursday and Friday, 3 to 4 March 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  |  Online Seminar

North Carolina German Studies Workshop

“German Historians in North America after 1945: Transatlantic Careers and Scholarly Contributions”

For the program click here

Friday, 8 April 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  |  3:30 – 5:30 pm | Online Seminar

VANCE BYRD  |  Presidential Associate Professor of German  |  University of Pennsylvania, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

The Allied Bombing Raids in Dresden and Panoramic Representation

Invented in 1787, the panorama was an attraction that gave audiences around the world the opportunity to immerse themselves in natural and city landscapes as well as bloody battle scenes depicted on larger-than-life circular paintings. After nearly one-hundred years of relative obscurity, panoramas have become popular again in the twenty-first century. Over ten million visitors have seen Yadegar Asisi’s panoramas in Germany and France since 2003. This talk focusses on Asisi’s panoramic representation of Dresden after the allied bombing raids of February 1945, which establishes a debatable comparison to military violence and destruction in Rotterdam, Coventry, Stalingrad, and Warsaw during World War II. The presentation will challenge a universalizing narrative about European trauma and military conflict and ask how exhibition design and site specificity contribute to debates on German victimhood, guilt, and responsibility.

VANCE BYRD is Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of nineteenth-century German literature. In addition to his first book, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, Byrd has co-edited two books and two journal special issues. He is working on a second monograph, Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration, and a co-edited collection titled Queer Print Cultures.

Welcome and Moderation: JAKOB NORBERG (Duke University, Department of German Studies)

Comment: PAUL JASKOT (Duke University, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies)

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures

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Fall 2021

Friday, 24 September 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  |  2:00 – 4:00 pm   |  Online Seminar

Book Discussion Roundtable together with “H-German”

HELMUT WALSER SMITH  |  Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History; Professor of German Studies, Vanderbilt University, Department of History

Germany—A Nation in its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000

This book shows how the concept of the German nation developed and changed over half a millennium, demonstrating that nationalism was only one possible way of imagining the nation. Using evidence from maps and literature, material culture and high politics, this book precisely delineates constantly altering constellations of national imaginings and charts epistemological ruptures between chronologically distinct and essentially different ways of defining the nation. Modern nationalism is part of this larger story, but only a part, and one, moreover, with both productive and extremely destructive dimensions to it.  The book also suggests that while Germany has not left the age of nationalism, it has made considerable progress in this direction, the partial successes of right-wing populism notwithstanding. For this reason, it makes sense to speak of the German nation before, during, and after nationalism.

HELMUT WALSER SMITH is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. From 2005-2008, he was Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt. His recent book publications include: Germany. A Nation in its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism (2020); The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, editor (2011); and The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (2008).

Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Introduction: JASPER HEINZEN (H-German Review Editor; University of York, Department of History) and MATTHEW UNANGST (H-German Review Editor; SUNY, Department of History)

Roundtable:

• • TERENCE MCINTOSH (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Is Associate Professor at the UNC Chapel Hill History Department. He is specialist of early modern Germany, especially its social, political, religious, and economic history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His current book project is titled “Disciplining the Parish: Godly Order, Enlightenment, and the Lutheran Clergy in Germany, 1517–1806.”

• • JOHN BREUILLY (London School of Economics, Department of Government)

Is Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the Department of Government of the London School of Economics. His expertise lies in modern German history and the comparative history of modern Europe. He most recently edited The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013), and he published a second edition of Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture, and Society 1780-1918 (2020).

• • KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  (UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Is  the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at UNC Chapel Hill. He is an expert of modern German history and the comparative history of modern Europe. More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German history in general. His most recent books are: Broken Lives. How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (2018), and Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (2015). 

• • EVA ROSENHAFT (University of Liverpool, Department of Languages, Cultures and Film)

Is Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her fields of research are German and European social and cultural history between 1720 and 1960, with particular emphasis on Romani studies, Holocaust studies, memory studies, women’s and gender history, Black and critical race studies, and the history of colonialism. Her most recent books include: Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions, ed. with Jie-Hyun Lim (2021), and Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, ed. with Theodor Michael (2017).

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, UNC Center for European Studies.

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For the H-German Roundtable on Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 (2020), which was the result of the above event, click here.

Friday, 8 October 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  |  3:30 – 5:30 pm | Online Seminar

TERESA WALCH  |  Assistant Professor  |  UNC-Greensboro, Department of History

“Cleansing” Germany: Ideology, Space, and the Nazi Consolidation of Power

Holocaust history has experienced its own “spatial turn” in the past decade, and important studies have examined the role space played in ethnic cleansing and genocide in central Europe during the 1940s. This project shifts the analytic focus from wartime spatial planning to everyday spaces in 1930s Germany to illuminate how the Nazi regime first formulated and began implementing policies of spatial cleansing. National Socialists believed that all of Germany had been contaminated by “Judeo-Bolshevism” in the post-World War I era. In 1933, the Nazi regime and its allied architects, city planners, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens set out to “cleanse” and remake everyday spaces according to this worldview. The talk explores how antisemitic notions of a Germany infected by Jews immediately and forcefully instigated efforts to render Germany physically, symbolically, and rhetorically “judenrein” during the Nazi consolidation of power.

TERESA WALCH is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research examines the politics of space and place in modern Germany. Her book manuscript, Degenerate Spaces: The Coordination of Space in Nazi Germany, investigates the relationship between Nazi ideology and spatial practices between 1933-1945. She is also co-editing a volume entitled Räume der deutschen Geschichte, set to appear with Wallstein Verlag in 2021.

Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN (Elon University, Department of History & Geography)

Comment: CHRISTOPHER BROWNING (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Carolina; Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies

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Friday, 22 October 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  |  2:00 – 4:00 pm   |  Online Seminar

Book Discussion Roundtable

HEDWIG RICHTER  |  Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, University of the Bundeswehr (Munich), Department of History

Democracy—A German Affair? Rethinking the German Past

Can and should the history of democracy in Germany be written as a success story? With her newest book, Demokratie: Eine deutsche Affaire, Hedwig Richter, professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, has generated fierce debate by claiming that democracy has a longer history in Germany than the older, male-dominated scholarship has claimed with its contested notion of a German Sonderweg (special path) that deviated from the West. Written for a broader audience, the book provides a provocative new interpretation of democracy in German history and the role of the people by defending gradual reform from above, integrating gender and the body, and calling for a transnational approach. Critics contend that Richter makes Imperial Germany appear improbably democratic and the Third Reich less totalitarian. The aim of the discussion is to explore the limits and possibilities of a more balanced interpretation of the long 19th century for the scholarly and public rethinking of modern German history.

HEDWIG RICHTER is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. Her wide-ranging research interests include the history of democracy and dictatorship, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, and gender in history. Her most recent publications include: Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre (2020); Moderne Wahlen: Eine Geschichte der Demokratie in Preußen und den USA im 19. Jahrhundert (2017); and the edited volume Frauenwahlrecht: Die Demokratisierung der Demokratie in Deutschland und Europa (ed. with Kerstin Wolff, 2017).

Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

COMMENTS:

• • OLIVER F.R. HAARDT (University of Cambridge, Magdalene College)

Is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the history of the state in modern Europe, particularly Germany. His ongoing book project examines the constitutional transformation of the German Empire between 1871 and 1918. His 2016 dissertation on the federal evolution of Imperial Germany was awarded the Helmut-Coing-Prize by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.

• • SYLVIA SCHRAUT (University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, Department of History)

Is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. Her research interests include social and urban history, the history of nobility, and women’s and gender history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her publications include: Bürgerinnen im Kaiserreich. Biografie eines Lebensstils (2013); Erinnern, Vergessen, Umdeuten? Europäische Frauenbewegung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (ed. with Angelika Schaser and Petra Steymans-Kurz, 2019).

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, UNC Center for European Studies.

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Friday, 12 November 2021

UNC Chapel Hill   |  2:00 – 4:00  pm  | Online Seminar

NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS”:

Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Global Perspective

The electoral success of rightwing populist parties in major democracies has sparked an international discussion about the efficacy of “fascism” as an analytical framework. Do analogies with early and mid-twentieth century fascist movements and governments make sense today? What attributes, if any, do they share today and with historical fascism? To date, the German and Italian “models” have dominated the discussion about “strongmen” and authoritarianism. This roundtable takes a global perspective by posing these questions in relation to India, Brazil, Poland, and Germany.

Roundtable:

• • KORNELIA KONCZAL (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Institute of Eastern and South Eastern Studies): East Central Europe

Is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of History and the Arts at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests include the social history of post-1945 Europe, the transnational history of the social sciences and humanities, as well as memory and heritage studies. She is currently preparing a book tited Politics of Plunder: Post-German Property and the Reconstruction of East Central Europe after the Second World War. 

• • MELISSA TEIXEIRA (University of Pennsylvania, Department of History): Brazil

Is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches on Latin American and global history. Her first book, Remaking Capitalism in Twentieth-Century Brazil: A Global History, examines Brazil’s interwar experiment with corporatism to explain the rise of the developmentalist state, and why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime. 

• • SHRUTI KAPILA (University of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College): India

Researches and teaches modern Indian history and global political thought and is University Lecturer the Faculty of History and Fellow and Director of Studies at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include the edited volumes An Intellectual History for India (2010); and Political Thought in Action: Bhagavad Gita and Modern India (2013). Her new book Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age will be published by Princeton University Press in 2021. 

• • A. DIRK MOSES (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History): German Central Europe

Is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History. Before coming to Chapel Hill, Moses taught at the University of Sydney for twenty years and was Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past was published in 2007 and his second monograph, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, will arrive in  2021.

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History) 

Co-Convener: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History; Center for European Studies; Carolina Center for Jewish Studies; Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies

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Friday, 3 December 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  |  3:30 – 5:30 pm  |  Online Seminar

KEVIN HOEPER  I  Graduate Student, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Rediscovering the Regiment: Tradition and Transformation in the Habsburg Army, 1867-1914

In the armies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, much of military life centered on the regiment. As cultural institutions and combat formations, army regiments not only provided soldiers with a sense of belonging, but also served as focal points for local, regional, and even national patriotisms. Despite the regiment’s centrality to military culture, though, scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have rarely analyzed the meaning of regimental tradition or the dynamics of regimental identity formation. This presentation offers just such an analysis, focusing on the Austro-Hungarian example. While sharing certain basic characteristics with other contemporary European states, Austria-Hungary’s regimental system also reflected the empire’s stunning level of ethnolinguistic diversity. As I argue, the regiment in Austria-Hungary served as an important intermediate military space where soldiers negotiated the complex web of local, regional, dynastic, and ethnic loyalties that characterized public life in late imperial Austria.

KEVIN HOEPER is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on war, violence, and military culture in the Habsburg empire and its successor states. His ongoing dissertation project, with the working title “Our Regiment: Military Tradition in the Bohemian Lands, 1867-1942,” explores the creation and cultivation of regimental identities in Austria-Hungary and in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic.

Welcome and Moderation: TERESA WALCH (UNC-Greensboro, Department of History)

Comment: CHAD BRYANT (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of HIstory, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies

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Spring 2021

Friday, 29 January 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  I  4:00 – 5:30 pm I Online Seminar

Konrad H.  Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2020

PETER B. THOMPSON  I  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of History

Masters or Victims of the Chemical World?: The Question of Complicity in a Chemically-Minded Third Reich

The presentation will examine the ways in which the gas mask served as a technological site of discipline, conformity, and complicity in the envisioned air and gas protection community of the Third Reich. Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis used the gas mask as a material tool in the creation of a compliant and chemically-minded German subject. With masks donned, German civilians now appeared as technologically augmented soldiers in the Nazis’ envisioned struggle for national survival. Indeed, in the eyes of the Nazis, the mask created a physically homogenized society that could survive, if not thrive, in a modernity defined by its toxic environment. Exploring the role of gas mask technology in the creation of a national community predicated on violent exclusions and bodily discipline, this presentation will argue that the average German civilian under the gas mask maintained a complex subjectivity that regularly shifted between perpetrator, bystander, and victim of the Nazi regime.

PETER B. THOMPSON is a PhD graduate in the History Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His broad research interests lie at the intersection of German cultural history and the history of science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century.

Welcome: LISA LINDSAY (Chair, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Introduction of the Prize Winner:  JAMES CHAPPEL  I  Duke University, Department of History

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN   I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill History, Department of History, and Center for European Studies, UNC-Chapel Hill

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CANCELLED

Friday, 29 January 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  I  12:00 – 2:00 pm I Online Seminar

Graduate Writing Seminar

with PETER B. THOMPSON  I University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, Department of History

Discussion of “The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915-1945”

In the second year of Wolf War I, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the World Wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of German-ness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. While this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust

Comments:  JAMES CHAPPEL (Duke University, Department of History) and KONRAD H. JARAUSCH (UNC—Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Moderation:  MAX H. LAZAR (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History) and MICHAEL SKALSKI (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

The paper will be distributed to the participants before the workshop. Please contact the organizers of the event.

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill History, Department of History and the  Center for European Studies

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Friday, 26 February 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  I  4:00 – 5:30 pm I Online Seminar

MICHAEL SKALSKI  I  Graduate Student, UNC—Chapel Hill, Department of History

FDJ-ler Make New Friends: International Youth Exchanges in the Eastern Bloc, 1972-1989

In the spirit of communist internationalism, Eastern Bloc regimes provided ample opportunities for children, teenagers, and students to travel and become acquainted with their peers from other peoples’ democracies. Not only were the exchanges a popular vacation alternative for young people, they also served the purpose of strengthening Bloc cohesion and adherence to socialist values. Thousands of East German youth came into contact with their Polish, Czech, and Soviet peers annually, making lasting friendships, exchanging experiences, and falling into conflict over cultural differences. This presentation explores the quality and outcomes of these interactions, the role of political ideology and nationality in shaping the outlooks of the next generation of socialist citizens to argue that the state-sponsored programs returned the children as “better” Germans (or Poles or Czechs) rather than better communists.

MICHAEL SKALSKI is a PhD graduate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation, “A Socialist Neighborhood: Cross-Border Exchanges between Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, 1969-1989,” explores successes and failures of internationalism and integration in the Eastern Bloc.

Moderation: ANDREA SINN (Elon University, Department of History and Geography)

Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies

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Friday, March 26, 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  I  2:00 – 4:00 pm I Online Seminar

Event of the new NCGS Sub-Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS”:

STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM  I  Director of and Professor at the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung of the TU Berlin

On Numbers and Feelings: Antisemitism in Germany Today

Antisemitism seems to be on the rise, in Germany and elsewhere. However, the scope of this rise, its reason, its agents and last but not least its meaning, as well as the political consequences to be drawn from it, are fiercefully debated. In my paper, I will discuss the various ways of assessing antisemitism in Germany today: Survey and Polls, historical and sociological qualitative research, statistics by police and civil society organizations as well as the media covering of important events. I will put special attention to the pitfalls of each approach and to the problems of the media discourse. Finally, I will discuss the results of this overview against the backdrop of rising populism, racism and other forms of resentment in Germany, Europe and worldwide.

STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM, is the Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism and Co- Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies, both in in Berlin, and, since 2020, is the Director of the Berlin branch of the Center for Research on Social Cohesion. Her main fields of research are Jewish, German, and Spanish History. Recent publications include Four Years After: Antisemitism and Racism in Trump’s America (edited with N. and M. Zadoff, H. Paul, 2020); The Challenge of Ambivalence: Antisemitism in Germany Today (2018); Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte: Geschlecht und Differenz (2014).

Reading on the subject suggested by Stefanie Schüler-Springorum:

• • • Hans-Joachim Hahn and Olaf Kistenmacher (eds.), Beschreibungsversuchen der Judenfeindschaft. Zur Geschichte der Antisemitismusforschung vor 1944, Berlin 2015.
    • Brian Klug,  “What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Antisemitism’?” In: Proceedings of the International Conference “Antisemitism in Europe Today: The Phenomena, the Conflicts,  Berlin, November 8-8, 2013, Berlin 2014.
    • Franziska Krah, „Ein Ungeheuer, das wenigstens theoretisch besiegt sein muß”. Pioniere der Antisemitismusforschung in Deutschland, New York 2016.
    • Uffa Jensen and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,  “Gefühle gegen Juden. Die Emotionsgeschichte des modernen Antisemitismus.” In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 39 (2013): 413–442.
    • Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, “Gender and the Politics of Anti-Semitism.” In American Historical Review 123 (2018): 1210–1222.
    • Stefanie Schüler-Springorum,  “Antisemitismus-Studien:  Ein Überblick.” In Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland: Antisemitismus-Studien und ihre pädagogischen Konsequenzen, Berlin 2020, 91-104.
    • Julijana Ranc,  „Eventuell nichtgewollter Antisemitismus”. Zur Kommunikation antijüdischer Ressentiments unter deutschen Durchschnittsbürgern, Münster 2016.
    • Jean-Paul Sartre, Überlegungen zur Judenfrage, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2010 (Original: 1947)

Opening Remarks: RUTH BERNUTH (Director, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, UNC Chapel Hill)

Comment: THOMAS PEGELOW-KAPLAN  I  Appalachian State University, Department of History

Moderation: ANDREA SINN  I   Elon University, Department of History and Geography

Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and Center for European Studies, and Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies.

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Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism

See for a definition of the term “antisemitism” the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism from April 8, 2021, a tool to identify, confront and raise awareness about antisemitism as it manifests in countries around the world today. It includes a preamble, definition, and a set of 15 guidelines that provide detailed guidance for those seeking to recognize antisemitism in order to craft responses. It was developed by a group of scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies to meet what has become a growing challenge: providing clear guidance to identify and fight antisemitism while protecting free expression. It has over 200 signatories, all established and internationally known scholars of Jewish history, the study of antisemitism and the history of the Holocaust and genocide.

Friday, April 9, 2021

UNC Chapel Hill  I  4:00 – 5:30 pm I Online Seminar

HEATHER R. PERRY  I  Associate Professor, UNC—Charlotte, Department of History

Nourishing the Volk: Nutrition, Health, and National Belonging in Germany’s Long Great War

The talk examines Germany’s “long” Great War (1914-1924) through the lenses of food, health, and gender.  Whereas most scholars have focused on how hunger and deprivation in war-time Germany contributed to social unrest and female politicization, this research focuses instead on how male nutritional scientists forged relationships with female philanthropists, women’s groups, and housewives’ organizations to re-shape national ideas about food and identity in the struggling German nation.  Moreover, it shows how despite the demobilization of the nation’s (male) military soldiers in 1918, the ongoing resource scarcities in Germany between 1918-1923 necessitated the continuous mobilization of the nation’s “kitchen soldiers” during the often overlooked periods of occupation, humanitarian intervention, and national re-building.

HEATHER PERRY  is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her  specialty is the history and culture of the First World War; however, she focuses more broadly on the study of German and European History, the History of Medicine and the Body, and the History of War and Society. Her recent publications include: the monograph Recycling the Disabled: Army, Medicine, and Modernity in WWI Germany  (2014); and the  volume Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War, which she edited with Heather Merle Benbow (2019). Currently she works on a book project titled Feeding War: Nutrition, Health, and National Belonging in Germany, 1914-1924.

Moderation: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH   I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Convener: UNC-Chapel Hill, Peace, War and Defense Curriculum

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Fall 2020

Friday, 25 September 2020

UNC Chapel Hill   I  4:00 – 5:00 pm   I  Online Seminar

A. DIRK MOSES  I  Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, UNC—Chapel Hill, Department of History

The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression

This presentation summarizes some main results of Moses’s forthcoming book The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, which argues that genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, it argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the “crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The book contends that this violence is the consequence of “permanent security” imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.

A. DIRK MOSES is the recently appointed Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History. Before coming to Chapel Hill, Moses taught at the University of Sydney for twenty years and was Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past was published in 2007 and his second monograph, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, will arrive in  2021.

Comment: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Moderation:  KAREN HAGEMANN  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History,  Center for European Studies, and  Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.

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Friday, 9 October 2020

UNC Chapel Hill   I  4:00 – 5:00 pm   I  Online Seminar

BILL SHARMANN   I  Graduate Student, Duke University, Department of History

Third-World Refugees, Rights, and West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s

During the 1970s and 80s, thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia began seeking asylum in West Germany each year. Banned from working and often forced to live in camps, these so-called “Third-World” refugees became objects of police surveillance, social-scientific knowledge, and humanitarian intervention. While scholars have examined how the West German media, state, and society responded to refugee “crises,” this talk uses archival sources, documentary films, poetry, and oral histories to illuminate the intellectual and social worlds of refugees themselves. Far from being passive victims in need of “help,” many non-European refugees developed critiques of racism and bureaucracy, forged friendships and political alliances, and demanded justice through activism. Their assertions helped recast immigration as a matter of rights—not merely of contract labor or compassion—and altered perceptions about West Germany’s place in the post-1945 world.

BILL SHARMAN is doctoral candidate at Duke University, where he studies modern European, African, and global history. He is working on a dissertation called “Moral Politics: Global Humanitarianism, the Third World, and West Germany.”

Moderation: JAKOB NORBERG I  Duke University, Department of German Studies

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and the UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

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Friday, 23 October 2020

UNC Chapel Hill  I  4:00 – 5:00 pm   I  Online Seminar

HELMUT PUFF  I  Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Towards a History of Times: Surveying the Recent Historiography on Time, Timing, and Temporality

While exploring the epistemological difficulties in studying time, the philosopher Henri Bergson cautioned his readers in 1888 that, “We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space.” This observation notwithstanding, recent years have seen an unprecedented spate of studies on temporalities in history, anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines. Evidently, time as a category has never been absent from historical studies. Still, what distinguishes recent studies from previous scholarship? How does time in its different registers and rhythms structure societies? How do temporal modes structure politics, cultures, societies, and social interactions? This talk will seek to survey the historiography on times, temporalities, and temporizations with a particular eye to the history of waiting as a socially mandated and politically meaningful temporal mode in social interactions. 

Bibliographical Handout

HELMUT PUFF is the Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Collegiate Professor of History and Germanic Languages, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His teaching and research focus on German literature, history, and culture in the medieval and early modern periods. His most recent books are the monograph Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (2014), and the edited volume After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies with and Beyond Foucault (2012). Recently, he has started a new project on waiting as a mode of experienced temporality between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.

Moderation: TERENCE V. MCINTOSH  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History and Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

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Friday, 13 November 2020

UNC Chapel Hill   I  2:00 – 3:30  pm  I Online Seminar

LORRAINE DASTON  I  Director Emerita, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Nineteenth Century Science Goes Global

During the latter half of the 19^th century, international scientific collaborations of unprecedented scale, expense, and degree of organization were initiated in both the human and natural sciences. This is also the moment when the first international scientific congresses were organized and European colonial powers extended their transportation and communication networks as well as their political and economic domination to large parts of the globe, both essential preconditions for the international scientific co-operations. Despite two devastating World Wars and innumerable regional conflicts, the model of international governance of science has largely survived and indeed expanded. The contrast with the failure of other projects of international governance is striking, especially since science and scholarship remain fiercely competitive and are largely financed at the national level. How did scientific international governance emerge and remain relatively durable, despite the shocks of war, national rivalries, and scientific polemics?

LORRAINE DASTON is Director Emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She has published widely on topics in the history of early modern and modern science, including probability and statistics, wonders, objectivity, observation, and scientific archives. Her most recent books include: Histories of scientific observation (with Elizabeth Lunbeck, 2011); and  Against Nature (2019).

Moderation: STEFANI ENGELSTEIN (Duke University, Department of German Studies)

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History and Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

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Friday, 20 November 2020

UNC Chapel Hill   I  2:00 – 4:00  pm  I Online Seminar

New NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS”:

Post-Colonialism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: The Achille Mbembe Case in Germany

This spring has witnessed heated debate in Germany about the campaign to disinvite Achille Mbembe, the South African-based Cameroonian theorist, as the keynote speaker at a music festival. In late March, some politicians and critics accused Mbembe of relativizing the Holocaust, trading in anti-Israel antisemitism for linking Israel to colonialism and Apartheid, and for supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). In response, German and foreign academics signed public letters supporting Mbembe, who addressed his critics as well. Many of the contentious issues are familiar, but this time the debate extends beyond the self-referential European Cold War coordinates of the old Historikerstreit. For not only does Mbembe introduce a voice from Africa, Germany is also wrestling with its colonial past. Whereas Holocaust memory has been intended to promote political liberalization, now it seems that Holocaust memory, at least as currently mobilized, is wielded against other historical victims of the German state. We ask: what does “relativizing the Holocaust” mean today? How does this debate relate to the global moment of anti-racism and coming to terms with colonial pasts? Why does a postcolonial understanding of Zionism lead to accusations of antisemitism in Germany? In this session, we pose these and other questions raised by the Mbembe debate.

Roundtable:

• • A. DIRK MOSES (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Is the recently appointed Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History. Before coming to Chapel Hill, Moses taught at the University of Sydney for twenty years and was Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past was published in 2007 and his second monograph, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, will arrive in  2021.

• • JOSEPH BEN PRESTEL (FU Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Global History)

Is Assistant Professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) of History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (2017) and is currently working on a book about the connections between Palestinians and the radical left in West Germany from the 1950s to the 1980s.

• • PRISCILLA LAYNE  (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures)

Is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching draws on postcolonial studies, gender studies and critical race theory to address topics like representations of blackness in literature and film, rebellion, and the concept of the Other in science fiction/fantasy. She is author of White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of African American Culture and her current book project is on Afro-German Afrofuturism.

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History) 

For more information: on the debate, see:

• • • “Long Read | The Metamorphosis of Achille Mbembe.” New Frame, 10 June 2020.
    • “Why Achille Mbembe was accused of anti-Semitism.” Deutsche Welle, 30 April 2020.
    • “German politician urges festival to disinvite BDS academic.” The Jerusalem Post, 13 April 2020.

    • Ulrike Capdepón & A. Dirk Moses, “Forum: The Achille Mbembe Controversy and the German Debate about Antisemitism, Israel, and the Holocaust.” Journal of Genocide Research, 4 December 2020.

Co-Convener: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

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Friday, 4 December 2020

UNC Chapel Hill   I  4:00 – 5:30  pm  I Online Seminar

THOMAS PRENDERGAST  I  Graduate Student, Duke University , Department of History

The Sociology of Empire: German and Habsburg Theories of Multinational Statehood, 1848-1914

Over the past twenty years, historians have dramatically reevaluated the Habsburg Monarchy. Whereas scholars once characterized the Monarchy as a “prison of nations,” they now emphasize the effectiveness of its institutions and its subjects’ loyalty to the dynasty and indifference to nationalist propaganda. And yet, despite its stability and “modernity,” Habsburg Austria came to be categorized in the decades before World War I as an “empire,” an archaic polity fundamentally different from Western European “nation-states.” This lecture will examine how and why Central European jurists attempted to define the Habsburg Monarchy as an “empire” and the Habsburg effort to undermine this definition through a new and globally influential sociological critique of the state. I will show that German nationalist legal scholars used “empire” to distinguish the Monarchy from other similarly composite European states and that Austrian sociologists recognized the analytical inadequacy of this category more than a century before the “imperial turn.”

THOMAS R. PRENDERGAST is a PhD Candidate in History at Duke University. His research explores the intellectual history of modern East Central Europe from a global and Jewish perspective, specifically the formative role this region played in shaping concepts of imperialism, federalism, internationalism, and decolonization.

Moderation: CHAD BRYANT  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and and Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies

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Spring 2020

UNC Weeknight Parking Program Details

Thursday, 23 January 2020

Global Education Center 4003  I   5:00 – 7:00 pm

DAVID BLACKBOURN I Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair of History, Vanderbilt University, Department of History

The German Atlantic: Recovering an Invisible World

Atlantic history, the history of the great interactions that took place between Europe, Africa and the Americas, has emerged since the 1980s as a dynamic field of study that has generated its own programs, textbooks, essay collections, book prizes and online list-serve. The German presence in the Atlantic world remains largely hidden because of the absence of a German nation state before 1871. Settlers, merchants, mining engineers, missionaries and scientific travelers from the German lands did not fly under a German flag. We have to look for them in the empires established by others, whether Spanish, Dutch, British or French. This lecture, drawn from a larger project on “Germany in the World, 1500-2000”, tries to recover this invisible German presence and shows that Germans played a greater role than we think, often as major brokers or intermediaries.

DAVID BLACKBOURN is Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy, he is the author of Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (1980), The Peculiarities of German History [with Geoff Eley] (1984), Populists and Patricians (1987), Marpingen (1993), The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (1997) The Conquest of Nature (2006), and Landschaften der deutschen Geschichte (2016).

Moderator: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for European Studies

Friday, January 24, 2020

Fedex 4003 I 12:00 – 2:00 pm

Graduate Luncheon and Reading Seminar

with DAVID BLACKBOURN I Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair of History, Vanderbilt University, Department of History

Organization and Moderation: MAX LAZAR and MICHAEL SKALSKI (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History)

The workshop is open to all graduate students from the region, but space is limited. RSVP by January 20, 2020 to Max Lazar: maxlazar@live.unc.edu

In cooperation with the Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill Departments of History

Friday, January 24, 2020

Fedex 4003 I  4:00 – 6:00 pm

Roundtable Discussion: A Vanishing Century: The State 19th Century European Studies

This Roundtable explores from multiple perspectives the often-stated impression that the nineteenth century is “vanishing” from German and European history. It asks how one can explain this trend, what consequences it has for the development of historiography and public historical knowledge, if and why the nineteenth century matters for the present, and what the future of nineteenth-century history might be.  Five experts on different regions and historiographical approaches to European history discuss these questions.

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN (UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History)

Participants of the Roundtable:

• • DAVID BLACKBOURN (Vanderbilt University, Department of History), German Central European History
  • JAKOB NORBERG (Duke University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature), German Studies
  • KAREN AUERBACH (UNC Chapel-Hill, Department of History), History of Eastern  Europe
  • LLOYD KRAMER (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History), French History
  • CEMIL AYDIN (UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History), Global History

See also: “Discussion Forum: The Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History?” ed. by  Karen Hagemann and Simone Lässig, in Central European History: Volume 51, Issue 4, December 2018 , pp. 611-695

In cooperation with the UNC Chapel Hill Center for European Studies and Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, the Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill Departments of History, and the French Studies and Slavic Studies Seminar

Friday, 7 February 2020

UNC Hamilton Hall  569  I  4:00 – 5:30  pm

MAX LAZAR  I  PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

Swastikas on Jakob-Schiff-Straße: The Aryanization of Jewish Street Names in Frankfurt am Main, 1933-1938 

Frankfurt’s municipal government “Aryanized” the names of nearly fifty streets named after prominent Jewish individuals in a campaign that lasted until September of 1938. Given the fact that the Nazis had effectively managed to roll back high levels of Jewish integration in various areas of political, economic, cultural, and everyday life in Germany by the end of 1933, how is it possible that the names of Jewish individuals continued to remain physically integrated into the fabric of this city for so long? To answer this question, the talk will employ elements of spatial theory in order to challenge historians to reconsider the nature and continuities of Jewish integration in Germany both before and after 1933.

MAX LAZAR is a PhD Candidate at UNC Chapel Hill specializing in modern German, Jewish, and urban history. His dissertation is a local study of Jewish integration in Frankfurt between 1914 and 1938.

Moderator: KAREN AUERBACH I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC-Chapel Hill Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and the Duke Center for Jewish Studies

Friday, 21 February 2020

UNC Hamilton Hall  569  I  4:00 – 5:30  pm

DANIELA WEINER  I  PhD Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hill, Department of History

A Democratic Imperative: Textbook Revision and Knowledge Production in Occupied Italy and Germany, 1943-1949

At the end of the Second World War, the Allies saw education as a vital tool in the remaking of postwar Europe. Therefore, revision of textbooks was a matter of vital importance. While the denazification process of the school system and the textbooks in Germany is fairly well studied, it is less well known that a similar process took place in Italy. Consequently, there is little comparative scholarship on the topic. This presentation seeks to inject a comparative and transnational perspective into the study of reeducation and textbook revision in these two countries (soon to become three states). The presentation answers the following questions: How did the textbook revision process in occupied Italy, which began in 1943, compare to and influence later efforts in occupied Germany? Did the strategies of knowledge construction vary by occupation zone and occupier?  Were some strategies more effective than others, and if so, why?

DANIELA R.P. WEINER is a PhD candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Goodman Dissertation Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies (2019-2020).

Moderator: PRISCILLA LAYNE I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures

In cooperation with the Duke University Department of History and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of History

Friday, 3 April 2020 (Cancelled)

UNC Hamilton Hall  569  I  4:00 – 5:30  pm

BILL SHARMAN   I  PhD Candidate, Duke University, Department of History

Third-World Refugees, Rights, and West Germany in the 1970s and 80s

During the 1970s and 80s, tens of thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia began seeking asylum in West Germany each year. While scholars have examined how the West German media, state, and society responded to refugee “crises,” this talk draws on archival sources, documentary films, poetry, and oral histories to examine the intellectual and social worlds of refugees themselves. As individuals and in groups, a number of non-European refugees developed critiques of nationalism and racism, denounced refugee encampments as contrary to international law and democracy, and made legal claims to asylum. These assertions recast immigration as a matter of rights—and not merely of contract labor or humanitarian compassion—and altered perceptions about West Germany’s place in the post-1945 world.

BILL SHARMAN is doctoral candidate at Duke University, where he studies modern European, African, and global history. He is working on a dissertation called “Moral Politics: Global Humanitarianism, the Third World, and West Germany.”

Moderator: JAMES CHAPPEL I  Duke University, Department of History

In cooperation with the Duke University Department of History and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of History

Fall 2019

Thursday, 12 September 2019

5:00 – 7:00 pm, UNC Global Education Center 4003

STEFANIE M. WOODARD I Limited Term Assistant Professor  I  Kennesaw State University, Department of History & Philosophy 

— Inaugural Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner–

“Feeling German”: Migration and Ethnic Identity in a Cold War Borderland

Between 1970 and 1990, approximately 835,000 ethnic German Aussiedler migrated from Poland to West Germany. Most of these “resettlers” hailed from Upper Silesia, a borderland in western Poland. Although scholars have frequently described Silesians as nationally indifferent or ethnically ambiguous, the Cold War thrust them into the center of a clash over ethnicity and memory. Whereas the Polish government downplayed or denied the Silesians’ German heritage, West German authorities cast these borderlanders as “sufferers for Germanness” and the last victims of World War II. Not simply the passive subjects of Cold War discourse, Silesians also catapulted themselves into the ethnicity debate. The resettlers’ borderland context enabled them to invoke their German ethnicity to receive privileged-immigrant status in West Germany or, later, to lobby for cultural rights in Poland. This talk, thus, highlights how an ethnically-coded conflict over victimhood and memory shaped not only the lives of individual émigrés from Silesia, but also West German-Polish relations as a whole.

STEFANIE M. WOODARD is a Limited Term Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University. She received her PhD in May 2019 from Emory University.

Moderator: JAMES CHAPPEL I  Duke University l, Department of History

In cooperation with the Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill Departments of History  and the UNC Center for European Studies

Friday, 13 September 2019 

UNC Hamilton Hall  569 I  9:00-11:00 AM (Breakfast will be served)

Writing Workshop for History Graduate Students: How to Prepare a Manuscript for the Publication in a Journal like Central European History?

Publishing an article can be a daunting task. This workshop, led by accomplished scholars, will offer insights into the process, make suggestions for revisions, and prepare graduate students for submitting a first-rate paper to academic journals. The discussion will focus on a pre-circulated draft titles “Feeling German”: Migration and Ethnic Identity in a Cold War Borderland” by this year’s winner of the Konrad Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History, STEFANIE M. WOODARD (Visiting Assistant Professor, Kennesaw State University, Department of History & Philosophy).

Comments:

• • KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  I  Lurcy Professor of European Civilization, UNC–Chapel Hill, Department of History
    
  • CHAD BRYANT  I  Associate Professor, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Moderation:

• • KAREN HAGEMANN  I  James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History, UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

The workshop is open to all graduate students from the region, but space is limited.

RSVP by September 7, 2019 to Max Lazar: maxlazar@live.unc.edu

In cooperation with the Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill Departments of History

Thursday, 26 September 2019

5:00-7:00 pm I UNC Chapel Hill I Hamilton Hall 569

SABINE GRENZ  I Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Vienna

Gendered Memories of the NS-Volksgemeinschaft and the Holocaust: The Theme of ‘Shame’ in Women’s Diaries

Shame is a well-known feature of German cultural memory of National Socialism. Whereas research on cultural memory often concentrated on public and political representations, the personal feelings of shame frequently in family memories were ignored. The talk will explore expressions of shame and feelings of guilt in diaries written by German women immediately after the Second World War. In that period, the diarists could not turn a blind eye to the Holocaust or rumors about it and some of them reflected more openly on the brutal nature of the racialized Nazi community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Hence, these diaries offer a nuanced perspective on who and what people were ashamed of at the time and also display wartime gender and other social relations, in which shame and guilt were embedded.

SABINE GRENZ is Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Vienna. She published widely on commercial sexuality and prostitution, gender methodology, qualitative empirical research and gendered meaning of life constructions. Currently, she is working on an article about shame and German cultural memory and published on this subject “Reading German Women’s Diaries from the Second World War: Methodological, Epistemological and Ethical Dilemmas,” in: Feminist Critique of Knowledge Production, Silvana Carotenuto et al., eds. (Naples, 2014).

Moderator: KAREN AUERBACH  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC-Chapel Hill Carolina Center for Jewish Studies

Thursday, 24 October 2019

5:00-7:00 pm I UNC Chapel Hill I Hamilton Hall 569

JENNIFER ALLEN I Assistant Professor, Yale University, Department of History

Twentieth-Century Anti-Utopianism and its West German Antidote

Friday, 22 November  2019 (Canceled)

5:00-7:00 pm I UNC Chapel Hill I Hamilton Hall 569

JEFFREY HERTEL I  Graduate Student, Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies

“Ein lustiger Guerillakrieg”: Comedy and Censorship in the Vormärz

As the turbulent decades before the Revolution of 1848 progressed, radical and liberal dramatists such as Georg Büchner, Karl Gutzkow, and Heinrich Laube wrote dramas that functioned as stand-ins for their liberational aspirations. Given the sneakiness with which these authors had to pursue their aims due to censorship, their dramatic works evoke what Heinrich Hubert Houben, the first major historian of German censorship, has elsewhere called “ein lustiger Guerillakrieg.” The authors pursued surreptitious strategies to smuggle a message into the popular medium of the stage under the nose of the censoring apparatus. These works, therefore, offer a perspective on a literary form that accomplished goals similar to more traditional political critiques by recourse not to reasoned argumentation, but to witty, often allegorical ridicule. The talk is an assessment of German Vormärz comedy, the authors who wrote it, and the agents of the Metternichean Bund who kept those authors in check.

JEFFREY HERTEL is in a graduate student of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies, where his research focuses on early nineteenth-century drama. He has a forthcoming article in Monatshefte on Johannes R. Becher’s Levisite oder der einzig gerechte Krieg.

Moderator: JAKOB NORBERG I  Duke University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature

In cooperation with Duke University Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures

Friday, 6 December  2019

5:00-7:00 pm I UNC Chapel Hill I Hamilton Hall 569

ERIC ROUBINEK  I  Assistant Professor UNC Ashville, Department of History

Whose Peculiarities? Race in National Socialist Overseas Colonial Planning

With the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Nazi racial ideology became the hegemonic discourse of international propaganda and diplomacy. In turn, it linked Nazi racial antisemitism to the Third Reich’s overseas colonial ambitions and portrayed Germany’s colonial policies as peculiar: different and more radical than those of its European neighbors. This talk seeks to challenge this national distinction by focusing on what the colonial organizations under the Third Reich were actually planning and with whom. By decentralizing international diplomacy and the Nazi leadership to focus on the middle management of the German colonial movement and their professional networks, it demonstrates the strong tensions that existed between colonial and racial discourses on the national, international, and transnational scales.

ERIC ROUBINEK is Assistant Professor of history at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His research focuses on the intersection of race and nation in the colonial planning of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. He authored several articles and book chapters, most recently “From a Nazi Colonialism to a Fascist Colonialism: Transnational Nationalisms and the Creation of a ‘New Europe’.” In Nazi-Occupied Europe, edited by Raffael Scheck et al. (Routledge, 2019). Lately, he has delved into the history of fashion and consumption of German women in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Moderator: MAX LAZAR I  UNC Chapel Hill  University, Department of History

In cooperation with the Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill Departments of History

Spring 2019

Sunday, 20 January 2019

GEORGE S, WILLIAMSON   I  Florida State University, Department of History

“Russian Spy,” “German Voltaire,” “Fickle Genius”: August von Kotzbue as a Problem for German History and Literature

The author of over 200 plays, August von Kotzebue (1761-1819)  was one of the most prolific and successful writers of his day. Yet Kotzbue’s career was shadowed by controversy and bitter disputes, which culminated in his assassination by the student radical Carl Sand. After his death, Kotzbue was largely forgotten by literary history and, despite  some recent interest, he remains understudied. This talk argues that a reconsideration of Kotzbue ‘s turbulent life and legacy has the potential to reshape our understanding of the so-called Goethezeit, pointing ing to new interpretations of the intellectual and political history of this era.

George Williamson is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of The Longing for Myth:  in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2004), as well as articles and book chapters on German Religious History, Schelling’s theory of race, debates on the historicity of Jesus, and the death of Kotzebue and its aftermath. His current book project is entitled August von Kotzbue(1761-1819): A Political History

Moderator: KAREN HAGEMANN  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Sunday, 3 February 2019

LORN HILLAKER  I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

The “Better State”: Competing Images of West and East Germany in the 1960s

During the Cold War, a competition emerged between East and West Germany over their political legitimacy based upon their mutual goals of leaving the Nazi past behind and offering a more promising, yet distinct, model for the future. As time passed, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) pointed to its economic miracle, successful Western integration, and developed democratic society. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), in contrast, emphasized the successes of the “revolutionary tradition” and the “liberation from fascism.” Each state worked to represent and distinguish itself in international cultural diplomacy as the “better” German state and society, in large part through the creation of a distinct Deutschlandbild with the aim to find more international recognition. One important tool for this mission were the illustrated magazines GDR Review produced by the East German foreign ministry and SCALA International published by the FRG government.

Lorn Hillaker is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill. He specializes in modern German and European History, media history and diplomatic history, in particular cultural diplomacy. Currently he is finishing his dissertation, entitled “Promising a Better Germany: Competing Cultural Diplomacies between West and East Germany, 1949-1990.”

Moderator: JAMES CHAPPEL  I  Duke University, Department of History

Thursday, 21 February 2019

5:30-7:00 PM, FedEx Global Center, Room 3009

KIRAN K. PATEL I Professor and Chair of European and Global History, Univ. of Maastricht

The Making of a European Alternative: Cooperation and Integration in Western Europe after 1945

Sunday, 3 March 2019

KIRA THURMAN  I   University of Michigan, Departments of History and German Languages and Literatures

Singing Schubert, Hearing Race: Black Concert Singers and the German Lied in Interwar Central Europe

This presentation explores the rise in popularity of African American classical musicians in interwar Germany and Austria. singing Lieder by Schubert, Brahms, and others, they challenged audiences’ expectations of what a black performer looked and sounded like in the transatlantic “jazz age.” Audiences labeled the singers “negroes with white souls,” and marveled at their musical mastery. If the listener closed his or her eyes and listened, these African American musicians, many remarked, “sounded like Germans.” How had they managed to accomplish this feat? By exploring Austrian and German reception of black singers, the presentation finds a new way to answer the question, “Can someone be black and German?” by instead asking another: “What has it meant to be black and perform German music?”

Kira Thurman is Assistant Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A classically trained pianist, she earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester in 2013. Her research focuses on two separate topics that occasionally converge: the relationship between music and national identity in European history, and Europe’s historical and contemporary relationship with the black diaspora.

Moderator: ANNEGRET FAUSER I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Music

Sunday, 31 March 2019

MARGARET REIF  I  Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies

Created Wild: Criminal Children and the Bourgeois Family in German Realism, 1850-1900

The literary figure of the criminal child in German realism is framed not as a problem of rising industrialization and urbanization but rather as a problem of the emerging bourgeois family. Theodor Fontane’s Grete Milde (1879) and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Das Gemeindekind (1887) demonstrate how the aestheticization of structures such as the bourgeois family extends to incorporate marginal figures, including the criminal child. Through the relationship between the criminal child and bourgeois family, Fontane and Ebner reveal both the allure and danger of the emerging bourgeois family as an organizing principle in late-nineteenth century German and Austrian Reality.

Margaret Reif is a PhD candidate in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. Her research interests include the cultural history of childhood, postcolonial theory, and fairytales. Her dissertation “Disruptive Organizers: Wild Children in German Realism, 1850-1900” examines the literary movement of German realism through the representation of children.

Moderator: PRISCILLA LAYNE I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of German Languages and Literatures

Sunday, 14 April 2019 — Canceled

MARK W. HORNBURG  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

The “Ideal German Soldier” in the Military Propaganda of Nazi Germany

During the Nazi era a flood of media – books, newspapers, magazines, posters, films, plays, radio broadcasts and training manuals – confronted German men with the image of the “ideal German soldier.” This presentation highlights the set of characteristics that men serving in the German military – the Wehrmacht – were expected to embody according to this propaganda, and discusses the impact that it might have played in shaping the expectations and behavior of soldiers. The paper argues that the methodology employed by many historians in examining this material produces interpretive distortions, and that a more holistic approach reveals surprising trends that challenge our assumptions about Nazi propaganda and the expectations of soldiers under the Nazi regime.

Mark Hornburg is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UNC-Chapel Hill who specializes in Modern German History. He is currently finishing his dissertation entitled “Cleansing the Wehrmacht: The Treatment of Social Outsiders in the German Military under the Nazi Regime.” He is currently co-editing the volume Beyond ‘Ordinary Men’: Christopher Browning and Holocaust Historiography (with Jürgen Matthäus and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan), forthcoming in 2019. 

Moderator: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

Fall 2018

Sunday, 23 September 2018

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN  I  The George Washington University, Department of History

Conjuring Freedom: German Central Europe in a Global History of the American Civil War

The presentation will discuss the contribution of German communists to the revolution against slavery and the defeat of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. While the Lincoln administration and top Union generals developed a military strategy to restore the status quo antebellum in the Chesapeake Bay region, German émigrés in the Mississippi River Valley worked with enslaved African Americans and some native-born white people to create what Carl von Clausewitz termed “war by means of popular uprisings.” German communism shaped the course of the American Civil War, and the American Civil War, in turn, shaped German communism.

Andrew Zimmerman is Professor of History at The George Washington University. He is the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010). He has also edited Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Civil War in the United States (2016). He is currently writing a history of the American Civil War as a transnational working-class rebellion titled “A Very Dangerous Element.”

Moderator: NOAH STROTE  I North Carolina State University, Department of History

Sunday, 14 October 2018

CLAIRE GREENSTEIN  I  Georgia Institute of Technology, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs

Political Cover or Moral Imperative: Reparations in West Germany

After World War II, the West German federal government set an international and historical precedent by paying reparations to its own citizens for abuses committed by the former German regime. This paper examines what motivated the West German government to promise and pay reparations to German Jews after the war. It argues that Jewish Germans were able to obtain reparations because organized Jewish victims’ groups placed a high level of pro-reparations pressure on the West German government, found sympathetic political allies within the upper echelons of West German government, and sustained that pro-reparations pressure over time.

Claire Greenstein is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in July 2018. Her research focuses on transitional justice and social movements, with a particular emphasis on domestic reparations programs that are established in response to governmental human rights abuses.

Moderator: TOBIAS HOF  I UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

Sunday, 4 November 2018

OFER ASHKENAZI   I   Hebrew University, Department of History and Minerva Center for German History

Toward a Critical Zionist Vision: German-Jewish Photographers and Filmmakers in 1930s Palestine

Following the emergence of National Socialism, several German-Jewish photographers and filmmakers went into exile. A small number of them arrived in Mandate Palestine and greatly influenced the Zionist visual culture of the following decades. This talk focuses on two veterans of Germany’s film industry, who participated in Zionist propaganda campaigns in the mid-1930s and created imagery that was repeatedly copied and referenced by other Zionist artists. In their work they integrated Labor Zionism with a critical, anti-nationalist discourse of the Weimar era. While they identified with, and propagated, some aspects of the Zionist vision, they visualized the local landscape in a way that criticized and protested particular aspects of Jewish nationalism.

Ofer Ashkenazi teaches modern European history and is the director of the Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include the monographs A Walk into the Night: Reason and Subjectivity in Weimar Film (2010); Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity (2012); and Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (forthcoming).

Moderator: KAREN AUERBACH  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

Sunday, 2 December 2018

JAKOB NORBERG   I  Duke University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literature

The People’s Property: The Brothers Grimm and the Tales of the Nation

In August 1846, Jacob Grimm wrote a letter to the Prussian king to encourage him to invade Schleswig-Holstein in order to protect the resident German-speaking population against attempts by Denmark to consolidate Danish rule over the areas. The philologist Grimm claimed to know the real borders of Germany and urged the king to protect them. In fact, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm believed in the crucial political role of Germanic philology for the constitution of a German nation state. In the age of nationalism, the king must be advised by a philologist; there must be a philologist king.

Jakob Norberg is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages at Duke University. He is the author of Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Thought After 1945 (2014) and over twenty journal articles on German political thought and literature in Cultural Critique, German Quarterly, New German Critique, PMLA, Telos, Textual Practice and other journals. His next book, The Philologist King: The Brothers Grimm and the Nation, is in preparation.

Moderator: GABRIEL TROP  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

Spring 2018

Sunday, 28 January 2018

KAREN HAGEMANN  I  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

Memory and Emotions: The Anti-Napoleonic Wars in 19th-Century Historical Novels

In the decades following the Anti-Napoleonic Wars of 1806 to 1815, historical novels evolved into one of the most important popular media of the memories of these wars. They reached increasingly broader audiences. These readers expected both edification and entertainment from historical novels, which should address not just the mind, but also the heart. Historical novels became a ‘school of national emotions.’ They played an important role in the construction of 19th century Germans’ national identity, because people’s connection to a nation is mainly emotional, not rational. Nations are not only “imagined” but also “emotional communities.”

Karen Hagemann is the James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published widely in Modern German and European history, gender history and the history of military and war. Her most recent books include the edited volumes Gender, War, and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775-1830 (2010) and War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (2012); and the monograph Revisiting Prussia’s Wars Against Napoleon: History, Culture, Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which won the Hans Rosenberg Prize for the best book in Central European History in 2016 by the Central European History Society.

Moderation: JONATHAN HESS  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

Sunday, 11 February 2018

THOMAS KÜHNE  I  Clark University, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The Nazi Volksgemeinschaft: From Myth to Reality

Examining ordinary Germans’ consent to the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust, historians have debated the social meaning and the implementation of the Nazi concept of a Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community,’ the vision of establishing a truly united nation that would be free of the chasms and cleavages of modern societies. While prominent historians dismiss the Volksgemeinschaft as a hollow propaganda phrase, this talk probes into its integrative power and shows how it became real. The Nazis may not have succeeded in standardizing Germans’ mindsets but they succeeded in aligning the choices Germans took. The Volksgemeinschaft became real not in a utopian fashion as a grand community of social harmony and security but in a dystopian mode as the acme of nation building through violent action—through war, terror and genocide.

Thomas Kühne is the Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, where he holds the Strassler Chair in Holocaust History. He studies the cultural and social history of war and genocide in the 20th century, with a focus on Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders. His most recent books include The Rise and Fall of Comradeship: Hitler’s Soldiers, Male Bonding and Mass Violence in the 20th Century (2017); and Belonging and Genocide. Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945 (2010).

Moderation: NOAH STROTE  I  NC State University, Department of History

Sunday, 25 March  2018

LORN HILLAKER   I   University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

Competing Images of West and East Germany in the 1960s

After unsure beginnings, West and East German foreign cultural policy took on a harder edge in the 1960s. The construction of the Berlin Wall and Cold War tensions provided essential background for the divided German states to define themselves against each other and within their respective systems. This resulted in a series of conflicting images of themselves and their rival that offered foreign audiences a view in to life in divided Germany. The presentation explores both Germanys’ confrontational foreign cultural policy during the critical 1960s when they responded to profound challenges to their states’ international image and each sought to outdo the other up to the emergence of Ostpolitik and détente.

Lorn Hillaker is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is writing his dissertation entitled, “Promising a Better Germany: Competing Cultural Diplomacies between West and East Germany, 1949-1990.” He specializes in modern German history and the comparison of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. His research interests include media history, intermediality, cultural diplomacy, and diplomatic history.

Moderation: TOBIAS HOF   I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

Sunday, 15 April  2018

SIMONE LÄSSIG   I  German Historical Institute (GHI) Washington D.C

Religion as “Agent of Change”: Jewish and other Responses to Modernity in Germany, 1780-1860

The presentation explores the ambivalent role of Judaism and religiosity during the Sattelzeit, when German Jewry was confronted with deep reaching, sometimes threatening social change. The presentation sheds new light on Jewish coping strategies and the transformation of a socio-cultural system shaped by religious practices and knowledge orders in response to modernity. It will show how a new group of Jewish “movers and shakers” used religion and tradition to translate innovation and to make change socially relevant. Focusing on lived experience in communities beyond the centers of the reform movement, the presentation offers a fresh perspective of this astonishing transformation.

Simone Lässig is the director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. and professor of modern History at the University of Braunschweig. Her research has cut across the fields of German history, Jewish history, and the history of knowledge. She is currently working on two projects: a reconsideration of family and kinship in the modern era (1800-2000) through the lens of a multi-generation family biography and a book, provisionally entitled “Coping with Disruptive Change: Jews, Middle Class Culture, and Social Transformation in early 19th Century Germany.”

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN   I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC Center for European Studies and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies

Fall 2017

Sunday, 24 September 2017

TILL VAN RAHDEN  I  Université de Montréal, Department of History

When, How, and Why Did Jews Become a “Minority”? Remapping Difference in Central Europe, 1815-1919

The conceptual couple of majority/minority is viewed as a harmless way of identifying an arithmetic relationship. The idea of a dichotomy between majority and (Jewish) minority as a short hand to describe relations between ethnic or religious groups, however, is recent. In fact, as the lecture will demonstrate, it did not exist before 1919 when in the wake of World War I the idea of democracy and the idea of the homogeneous nation-state triumphed simultaneously. Prior to 1919, languages of diversity invoked embedded concepts that referred to specific constellations of difference, such as colony or community, churches, nations, races, or tribes. The opposition of majority and minority introduced a level of abstraction into struggles over recognition. “Minority rights” for Jews and others became a miracle cure in such conflicts and seemed to offer a universal formula promising an efficacious remedy.

Till van Rahden is the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies, Université de Montréal, Department of History. His book, Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (2008), received the “Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History”. He has co-edited Juden, Bürger, Deutsche: Zur Geschichte von Vielfalt und Differenz 1800-1933 (2001); Demokratie im Schatten der Gewalt: Geschichten des Privaten im deutschen Nachkrieg (2010); and Autorität: Krise, Konstruktion und Konjunktur (2016).

Moderation: JAMES CHAPPEL  I  DUKE University, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC Center for European Studies, the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies at Appalachian State University Seminar

Sunday, 15 October 2017

LARISSA STIGLICH  I  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

From Shortage to Surplus: Demographic Change and Demolition in Eisenhüttenstadt, 1980-Present

After the Wende the former socialist model-city, Eisenhüttenstadt, experienced a fundamental transformation of its “housing problem” from an acute shortage to a surplus. Although many of the processes of transition have long since been completed, the social, economic, and cultural challenges that Eisenhüttenstadt—and many other former East German cities—continue continues to face are inextricably tied to the conditions of late stage socialism. As such, historical understandings of the Wende and the 1990s remain incomplete if presented in truncated narratives that overlook certain continuities that accompanied the fast-paced political, economic, social, and cultural changes of German unification.

Larissa Stiglich is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is writing her dissertation titled After Socialism: The Transformation of Everyday Life in Eisenhüttenstadt, 1980-Present. She specializes in history of the GDR and of unified Germany, and her research interests also include the social history of post-socialist transition and Alltagsgeschichte in East Germany and the former ‘Eastern bloc.’

Moderation: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

Sunday, 29 October 2017

5-7 pm I UNC Chapel Hill I FedEx Global Education Center I Room 4003

Roundtable: Transatlantic Research and Academic Collaboration: Challenges and Changes

The recent political tensions have made academic exchanges across the Atlantic more difficult. The ethnic and religious diversification of students and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic can no longer take a shared cultural heritage for granted. Justifying a study of Europe in the US and of the United States in the EU has to confront undercurrents of Eurotrashing and Anti-Americanism. At the same time the Internet has made long distance communication and cooperation much easier. The creation of informed and positive academic relations between Europe and the US therefore requires more dedication. The roundtable will explore the current situation and possibilities for future exchange and collaboration by discussing the following three questions:

1. 1. How well are the current instruments of academic exchange between the United States and Europe functioning for teaching and research?
   2. What should be done in order to incorporate the opportunities of the digital tools?
   3. How can the vitality of transatlantic cooperation be safeguarded in the future?

Introductory Remarks:

NINA LEMMENS  I Director of German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) North America, New York

Nina Lemmens  is the Director of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) North America office in New York, which is responsible for the organization‘s activities in the USA and Canada. She is also is the Executive Director of the German Center for Research and Innovation in New York City. She studied art history and worked as a freelance journalist for ten years during her time at university. After finishing her PhD, she  joined the DAAD in 1997 and since then has held numerous positions, including Director of the DAAD London office from 2000 to 2006 and Director of the Asia-Pacific Department in the Bonn head office from 2006 to 2009. From July 2009 to December 2013, she was Director of the Department for Internationalization and Communication in DAAD in Bonn.

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN  I  Professor, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

Podium:

• FITZ BRUNDAGE  I  Chair, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History
• JOHN STEPHENS  I Director, UNC Chapel Hill, Center for European Studies & UNC Department of Political Sciences
• KONRAD H. JARAUSCH  I  Professor, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History
• JONATHAN HESS  I  Chair, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of German & Slavic Languages and Literature)
• LISBETH HOOGE  I  Professor, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Political Sciences

In cooperation with the UNC Center for European Studies, Department of German & Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of History

Sunday, 12 November 2017

ROBIN ELLIS  I Davidson College, German Studies Department

Staging Translation: Refugee Voices in German Theater

When Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s play Die Schutzbefohlenen premiered in 2014 in Mannheim, Germany, it prompted debate about the representation of refugees in European theater. Jelinek’s text, loosely based on Aeschylus’ The Suppliants, features an undefined “we” telling of flight across the sea, and in the Mannheim production, German actors were joined by a chorus of actual refugees. While critics discussed the production’s political and ethical implications, the Vienna-based translation collective Versatorium responded by translating Jelinek’s monolingual play into nine languages, including Pashto, English, and Urdu. Versatorium, which consists of students, refugees, and professional translators, has also performed dramatic readings of this translation, titled Die, Should Sea Be Fallen In. By staging translation as a multidirectional process of encounter, Versatorium speaks back to models of advocacy that position refugees as mute victims while also extending the polyvocal potential of Jelinek’s text

Robin Ellis is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Davidson College. She received her Ph.D. in German Studies from the University of California, Berkeley with a dissertation titled “Making Translation Visible: Interpreters in European Film and Literature.” Her research focuses on questions of transnational mobility and intercultural communication, and her publications include articles on Joe May’s 1921 film The Indian Tomb and Feridun Zaimoglu’s 1998 mock-ethnography Headstuff.

Moderation: RICHARD LANGSTON  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures

Sunday, 3 December  2017

PETER N. GENGLER  I  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History

Constructing and Leveraging ‘Flight and Expulsion’: Expellee Memory Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1944-1990

The presentation examines the widespread antagonism and hostility that victims of flight and expulsion faced upon their arrival in Germany between 1945 and 1949 and expellee responses. A condensed version of chapter three of his dissertation, Peter argues that in the early postwar years, expellees articulated their experiences of sufferings in “sympathy narratives” in order to cope with their traumas and argue for social recognition and material aid to overcome the humanitarian crisis. In doing so, they cultivated an identity of a unique “community of fate” that provided a platform for the politicization of “flight and expulsion” during the 1950s.

Peter Gengler is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research broadly focuses on East and West German cultural memories of war and dictatorship. He is currently completing his dissertation, “’Flight and Expulsion’: Expellee Victimhood Narratives and Memory Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1944-1990.”

Moderation: PRISCILLA LANE   I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures.

Spring 2017

Sunday, 19 January 2017

CAROLINE NILSEN I University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

German-Norwegian Romance, Marriage, and Childbirth: Sexual Relations under the Strain of Occupation

The German Wehrmacht occupied Norway in April 1940 and stayed in the country until the end of the Second World War. The presentation explores the tensions that characterized this occupation and the experiences of the occupying German soldiers. The disparities between Nazi ideology, expectations and reality will be examined with a focus on the masculine sexual behavior and its consequences. The racist Nazi propaganda written by and for German soldiers, which encouraged relations between German soldiers and Norwegian women will be contrasted with the practice of sexual relations and marriages between them, which led to 10,000 to 12,000 German-Norwegian children born during the occupation. These children seem to indicate that the Nazi expectations were fulfilled to quite a high degree. At the same time, however, personal interactions of German men and Norwegian women were to a surprising extent hindered by the military concerns of the German occupation regime.

Caroline Nilsen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has just returned from 18 months of research in Germany and Norway, and is in the early stages of writing her dissertation, entitled “Children of Shame: The Contested Legacy of the SS Lebensborn Program, 1940-Present.”

Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN I UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the Carolina Gender, War and Culture Series

Sunday, 11 February 2017

KONRAD H. JARAUSCH I University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century

Based on six dozen autobiographies of the age cohort born during the Weimar Republic, this project looks at the ruptures of German history from below which overturned or ended all too many lives. The analysis seeks to ascertain common patterns of experience in order to get at what happened to most Germans and to explore tropes of shared memory with which they tried to come to terms with such upheavals in retrospect. This perspective sheds new light on why so many ordinary people supported the racist imperialism of the Nazis, then embraced anti-Fascist alternatives and finally sought to make sense of their choices. In contrast to conventional accounts of history from above, this reverse view seeks to understand the widespread patterns of individual actions and personal memorie.

Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Senior Fellow of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam. He has written or edited about 40 books on German and European history such as “United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects.” Most recently he has published a sweeping synthesis of 20th century European history, entitled “Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century.”

Moderation: TOBIAS HOF I UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC Chapel Hill, Center for European Studies

Sunday, 26 March 2017

ASTRIED ECKERT I Emory University

The Unintended Consequences of Socialism: What Ultimately Protected Nature in the GDR

“Giftküche DDR” – the lead story of Der Spiegel in January 1990 about the GDR’s toxic legacy confirmed the worst fears about the environmental record of state socialism. Yet days before unification became official in October 1990, the only freely elected government of East Germany created five national parks, six biosphere reserves, and three nature parks, putting 10% of its state territory under nature protection, compared to 1% in the West. The existence of ecologically valuable landscapes on the territory of the GDR obviously preceded the state. But the fact that such landscapes still proved worth protecting in 1990 appears at first irreconcilable with the news coverage. The presentation uses the national park program as a window onto the environmental history of East Germany and seeks to explain how ecologically precious landscapes emerged amidst the bankruptcy assets of the GDR.

Astrid M. Eckert is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. She is a historian of Modern Europe and Germany. Her publications include: The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (2012). Her current project explores the meaning and consequences of the Iron Curtain for West Germany in economic, cultural and environmental terms.

Moderation: KONRAD H. JARAUSCH I UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History

In cooperation with the UNC Chapel Hill, Center for European Studies