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Over the six decades since it officially ended, the Algerian War has become a key event for marking, retrospectively, the beginning of a new era in European, Western and global history. This new era is characterized by the proclaimed end of Western hegemony – by the proclaimed end of European history as global, universal history. This era, our era, understands itself as the time after the domination of the West, a time or multiple times of “post”: the time of postcolonialism, but also postmodernity, postsecularism, posthumanism.
The times of “post” are characterized by a fundamental reconfiguration of the relations between European civilization and its Others, first and foremost by the proclaimed split between Europe and its Others, and more generally by the disintegration, disruption and dispersion of the – allegedly – unified space of culture, knowledge and discourse. The postcolonial era is an era of diversity and difference, an era of dispersions and diasporas, where the space of culture is a space of multiple cultures, a space of in-between, of “inter”: the space of the intercultural, but also the interreligious, interethnic, interracial and inter-epistemic.
This conference will reflect on the “inter” in the time of “post”. We invited scholars, thinkers, intellectuals and artists to discuss various aspects and models of intercultural dynamics that have been developed and articulated in the aftermath of the Algerian War or of other events that marked the decline of Western hegemony, such as the Second Vatican, May 1968 or the Vietnam War. How did the age of decolonization reshape the discourse and practice of intercultural relations? To what extent interculturality itself is a sign or a site of decolonization? To what extent, on the contrary, intercultural relations may reproduce colonial or generate neocolonial patterns?
Contributions examine the emergence of intercultural notions and practices in various intellectual traditions, European or non-European; the development of new categories and constellations of identity, otherness and dialogue; the interrelations between epistemic, cultural, discursive, religious and political aspects; as well as reactions to these new developments and various forms of critique and resistance. We are especially interested in how this reflection may shed light on socio-political and cultural phenomena, trends and concerns of the present time.
Captive Red Army soldiers made up the majority of victims of Nazi Germany’s starvation policy against Soviet civilians and other non-combatants and thus constituted the largest single victim group of the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. Indeed, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest victim group of all National Socialist annihilation policies after the European Jews. Before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it was clear to the Wehrmacht planning departments on exactly what scale they could expect to capture Soviet troops. Yet, they neglected to make the necessary preparations for feeding and sheltering the captured soldiers, who were viewed by the economic staffs and the military leadership alike as direct competitors of German troops and the German home front for precious food supplies. The number of extra mouths to feed was incompatible with German war aims. The obvious limitations on their freedom of movement and the relative ease with which large numbers could be segregated and their rations controlled were crucial factors in the death of over 3 million Soviet POWs, the vast majority directly or indirectly as a result of deliberate policies of neglect, undernourishment, and starvation while in the ‘care’ of the Wehrmacht. The most reliable figures for the mortality of Soviet POWs in German captivity reveal that up to 3.3 million died from a total of just over 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945 — a proportion of almost 58 percent. Of these, 2 million were already dead by the beginning of February 1942. In English, there is still neither a single monograph nor a single edited volume dedicated to the subject. This article now provides the first detailed stand-alone synthesis in that language addressing the whole period from 1941 to 1945.
"Writing with my professors”
(2023)
Kollaboratives Forschen quer zu hegemonialen Wissensordnungen gilt als wichtiger Baustein dekolonialer Wissenspraxis. Gemeinsame Schreibprozesse von Wissenschaftler*innen und ihren nicht-wissenschaftlichen Forschungspartner*innen sind allerdings selten und eine methodologische und forschungspraktische Reflexion fehlt. Die Beiträger*innen widmen sich diesen Lücken, indem sie erfolgreiche, aber auch gescheiterte Projekte kollaborativer Textproduktion zwischen Universität und Feld vorstellen und auf ihr Potenzial als transformative und dekoloniale Wissenspraxis befragen. So entsteht eine praktische Orientierungshilfe, die gleichzeitig die interdisziplinäre Diskussion anregt.
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy.
This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds.
Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.
Never again?
(2023)
The Holocaust was the most terrible atrocity of the 20th century. In many ways, it was also unprecedented in the history of atrocities: for its comprehensiveness and systematic nature; for the fanaticism with which its perpetrators scoured an entire continent in their pursuit of Jews; for the awful potency of the Nazis’ insinuation that the victims represented a pernicious and existential threat. Collectively, we have spent decades—and published millions of words—trying to understand what happened and why.
The holocaust in the USSR
(2021)
This paper sketches the current status of international scholarship on the subject of the Holocaust in the USSR and its place in the wider military conflict of the Second World War. Research on this topic over the last 20 to 30 years has been truly international and the findings of this research cannot be sketched here without pointing to the contributions made by German, American, Russian, Israeli, British and Australian historians. Historians from these countries have made important contributions to our understanding of key questions relating to this subject. These questions address, among other things, pre-invasion orders issued to German units; the radicalisation of German policy, culminating in the root-and-branch extermination of Soviet Jewry; the network of ghettos set up on Soviet territory; the nature of the killing and the methods used to murder these victims; the total death toll of the Holocaust in the USSR; and the relationship between war and extermination, in which genocide can be regarded as an actual strategy of warfare pursued by the German Reich.
In the Shadow of Ukraine
(2022)
In 2022, India captured global attention over its response to the war in Ukraine. While calling for both parties' return to diplomacy, India abstained from several United Nations resolutions condemning Russian aggression. For a country that ostensibly subscribes to the values of democracy and territorial integrity, its response appeared frustrating and contradictory, but it is broadly consistent with its long-standing policy of non-alignment. Although India's relationship with China is increasingly contentious, New Delhi is not yet fully convinced that it is in India's interest to swing westwards. The country's relations with Russia and China are deep, complex and substantive. In addition to the military and economic benefits it derives from its connection with Russia, New Delhi and Moscow share an avowed preference for a more equal, multipolar world. India will eventually have to reflect on the extent to which it can sustain its balancing act.
Spring Issue
(2024)
Scholars have long recognised the importance of contexts of reception in shaping the integration of immigrants and refugees in a host society. Studies of refugees, in particular, have examined groups where the different dimensions of reception (government, labour market, and ethnic community) have been largely positive. How important is this merging of positive contexts across dimensions of reception? We address this through a comparative study of Vietnamese refugees to West Germany beginning in 1979 and contract workers to East Germany beginning in 1980. These two migration streams converged when Germany reunified in 1990. Drawing on mixed qualitative methods, this paper offers a strategic case for understanding factors that shape the resettlement experiences of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in Germany. By comparing two migration streams from the same country of origin, but with different backgrounds and contexts of reception, we suggest that ethnic networks may, in time, offset the disadvantages of a negative government reception.
It has been highlighted many times how difficult it is to draw a boundary between gift and bribe, and how the same transfer can be interpreted in different ways according to the position of the observer and the narrative frame into which it is inserted. This also applied of course to Ancient Rome; in both the Republic and Principate lawgivers tried to define the limits of acceptable transfers and thus also to identify what we might call ‘corruption’. Yet, such definitions remained to a large extent blurred, and what was constructed was mostly a ‘code of conduct’, allowing Roman politicians to perform their own ‘honesty’ in public duty – while being aware at all times that their involvement in different kinds of transfer might be used by their opponents against them and presented as a case of ‘corrupt’ behaviour.
A different class of refugee: university scholarships and developmentalism in late 1960s Africa
(2022)
Using documents assembled in connection with the 1967 Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, this article discusses African refugee higher-education discourses in the 1960s at the level of international organizations, volunteer agencies, and government representatives. Education and development history have recently been studied together, but this article focuses on the history of refugee higher education, which, it argues, needs to be understood within the development framework of human-capital theory, meant to support political pan African concerns for a decolonized continent and merged with humanitarian arguments to create a hybrid form of humanitarian developmentalism. The article zooms in on higher-education scholarships, above all for refugees from Southern Africa, as a means of support for human-capital development. It shows that refugee higher education was both a result and a driver of increased international exchanges, as evidenced at the 1967 conference.
What is the nature of interactions between Jews and Muslims in contemporary Dubai, Berlin, and Warsaw? The purpose of the three presented case studies is to evaluate the state of affairs and identify newly emerging trends and patterns in the given trans-urban context. The methodology is based on qualitative anthropological research, emphasising an emic perspective that centralises respondents' own lived experiences and worldviews. The main research's findings made evident that interactions between Muslims and Jews in each examined location are, to various extents, acknowledged, and in some cases, also embody a formative part of public discourses. Perhaps the most visible manifestations of these relations are represented by the ambitious interfaith projects that were recently established in each geographical area in focus. The Abrahamic Family House (UEA), The House of One (GE), and The Community of Conscience (PL) reveal the aspirations of multi-faith religious leaders to overcome polarising dichotomies and search for common ground. One of the conclusive outcomes of the study is a somewhat diminishing impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish-Muslim relations; however, the extent differs in each destination in focus. Finally, an unpredicted observation can be made. A surfacing inclination towards embracing a joint Muslim-Jewish Middle Eastern identity was perceived.
How soccer becomes politics
(2021)
In this case study, the authors elaborate on the narrative structure of transnational popular media events. Drawing from Dayan and Katz's concept of media events and Julia Sonnevend's exceptional work on iconic global media events, they argue that fundamental changes in the way occurrences are being reported on and news is structured must be considered. Allowing for recent technological advancements, the role of the consumer and the compression of time in media use, the authors develop a methodological and theoretical framework fitting a more mundane and everyday life-based approach. They derive their results from the analysis of the "Podgorica Media Event," a news cycle emerging from a racist incident during an international soccer game between England and Montenegro. Based on the body of 250 international news pieces, they identify a primary mother narration and a distinctive narration as the typical ways of storytelling on a transnational level. While differing greatly in content, aspects of transnational popular media events serve to protect and reify the cultural background they are grounded in on a national level. Thus, we assume that sport, or, more specifically, soccer, may become political in media communication not by the impact of state government but by the consumers themselves choosing and developing a popular media event in the first place.