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 … Read more

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

Claire Greenstein is a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. She received her PhD in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in July 2018. Her dissertation focuses on … Read more

Ofer Ashkenazi is the Director of the Richard Koebner-Minerva Center for German History at Hebrew University. He is also a Senior Lecturer in the History Department and the School of Arts at the Hebrew University. He received his PhD in … Read more

Jakob Norberg is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University. This event is part of the North Carolina German Studies Workshop and Seminar Series.

The author of over 200 plays, August von Kotzebue (1761-1819) was one of the most prolific and successful writers of his day. Yet Kotzebue’s career was shadowed by controversy and bitter disputes, which culminated in his assassination by the student … Read more

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 … Read more

Prof. Dr. Kiran Klaus Patel is Professor and Chair of European and Global History at Maastricht University. He also serves as Jean Monnet Chair and Head of the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Before … Read more

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 … Read more