-
In Germany and around the world, the last residence of persecuted Jews and other victims of Nazi terror are marked by small brass bricks called Stolpersteine – Stumbling Stones. There are more than 70,000 of these 10 by 10 cm stones installed in cobblestoned and paved sidewalks all made by hand by the artist Gunter…
-
It’s official: I have a new job! I’ll be working at the University of Erfurt with the support of a Freigeist Fellowship from the VW Stiftung running a small research group on “Deviant Globalization and Transnational Criminality in 20th Century Germany” Here is the official press release from Erfurt and for more on this year’s…
-
I have a new book review of Sandrine Kott’s Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society out today with H-German. From the introduction of the review: In Communism Day-to-Day, Sandrine Kott explores the history of the everyday in state enterprises based in East Berlin. Published originally in 2001 in French and now available…
-
Today’s post is an online conversation between myself and Fiona Rintoul, the author of the historical fiction novel The Leipzig Affair. It is the story of Robert, a Scottish student who travels to the GDR in 1985, where he meets Magda, a young East German looking to escape. As a fan of the book, I…
-
On July 20, 1944 – 73 years ago today – Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out a plot to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. The attack failed and Stauffenberg along with several dozen military and conservative elites involved were arrested, tortured and executed. Since WWII, the bomb plot has been an important part of Germany’s…
-
The Other Globalisers: How the Socialist and the Non-Aligned World Shaped the Rise of Post-War Economic Globalisation 6-7 July 2017 Location: University of Exeter, UK Check out the full programme here
-
If you have ever seen even a single TV documentary about the collapse of East Germany, the image of a sign with the words Wir sind ein Volk – We are one people – is unavoidable. Protestors across the German Democratic Republic began to chant the slogan Wird sind das Volk – We are the…
-
I’ve got a new article out in the now available volume “Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives” edited by Konrad H. Jarausch, Harald Wenzel, and Karin Goihl and published by Berghahn Books. My contribution looks at the evolving ideas of human rights in East and West Germany and how they relate to processes of…
