‘Post-Democracy’? Globalization, Democracy, and the Nation State in Germany after 1990 - Julia Angster (University of Mannheim)
20 February 2024 - 5:30pm (GMT) - GHIL/Zoom

In co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research (IHR)

Is ‘globalization’ a threat to democracy? From the 1990s to the late 2010s, social scientists, economists, and historians in Western countries thought so. They worried about a loss of national sovereignty and agency, about national identity, and most of all about liberal democracy, which was based upon the national framing of state and society. This discourse was most prominent in post-unification Germany. The lecture will look at perceptions of ‘globalization’ and analyse the underlying assumptions about democracy and statehood. It argues that instead of a crisis of democracy, this was a crisis of national patterns of political thought dating back to the nineteenth century.

Julia Angster is Professor of Modern History at the University of Mannheim. Her fields of research include German contemporary history, transatlantic relations, the British Empire, and international relations. She studied at the University of Tübingen and St. John’s College, Oxford and completed her doctorate and habilitation at the University of Tübingen. From 2010 to 2012 she was professor of British and North American History at the University of Kassel.

Right-Wing Terrorism and the Historiography of the Federal Republic: The Antisemitic Double Murder in Erlangen in 1980 - Uffa Jensen (TU Berlin, Center for Research on Antisemitism)
28 February 2024 - 5:30pm (GMT) - GHIL/Zoom

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

On 19 December,1980, Shlomo Lewin, the former head of the Nuremberg Jewish community, and his partner Frida Poeschke were shot in their home in Erlangen. Instead of following the leads that would take them to the right-wing extremist perpetrator, the state lawyer and the police focused on Lewin’s social environment. This antisemitic murder is part of a long history of terrorist violence by the right in (West-)Germany that has been almost aggressively suppressed. This lecture reconstructs the lives of the victims and examines the activities of the ‘paramilitary sports group’ the murderer had belonged to, and those of its founder Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. It compares this attack to other attacks by right-wing extremists in 1980, discussing the problematic mechanisms behind how Germany as a whole and German historians dealt with right-wing violence.

Uffa Jensen, born in 1969, is a historian and deputy head of the Center for Research on Antisemitism. He focuses on various topics within the history of antisemitism and Jewish history, as well as within the histories of science, emotions, and images.

Medieval Letter Collections and Mobility: Quantitative and Digital Approaches - Laury Sarti (University of Freiburg)
19 March 2024 - 5:30pm (GMT) - GHIL/Zoom

Letters are the most pertinent and abundant source for understanding physical mobility in the Middle Ages. They connect individuals who, due to spatial distance, would not have been able to communicate otherwise. Apart from the implicit attestation of messengers who must have carried these letters to the respective recipients’ locations, letters often contain clues as to the further mobility of individuals in the authors’ vicinity at the time of writing. This lecture presents a new project that investigates mobility within medieval societies by analysing a selection of particularly extensive letter collections spanning the period from 800 to 1500. It addresses, using a primarily quantitative approach, questions related to those who travelled, their motives for doing so, and their travelling conditions, in order to gain new insights into medieval exchange processes and their underlying dynamics.

Laury Sarti is a senior lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Freiburg. Her monograph Orbis Romanus: Byzantium and the Legacy of Rome in the Carolingian World is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, and her student handbook Westeuropa zwischen Antike und Mittelalter was published last year. Her field of expertise includes the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, physical mobility, Mediterranean connectivity, the military, and the Roman legacy in the medieval West.

Religious Decision-Making in the Reformation - Matthias Pohlig (HU Berlin)
26 March 2024 - 5:30pm (GMT) - GHIL/Zoom

It is a widespread belief that the Reformation introduced the possibility of choosing between different variants of the Christian faith. In contrast, this lecture argues that the early German Reformation created a field of experimentation in which it was disputed who was able, and who was permitted, to decide on which faith options, and how. The Reformation gave rise to new questions of individual and collective religious decision-making, encompassing many different dimensions, such as faith options, the semantic and practical framing of situations in which choices were made, and the actors and procedures involved.

Matthias Pohlig is Professor of Early Modern European History at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. He is author of a monograph on Lutheran historiography in the sixteenth century (2007) and a monograph on information-gathering during the War of the Spanish Succession (2016). He has published widely on the Reformation, early modern religion, diplomacy and espionage, and questions of historical theory.