19 Dec 2025
Historian Veronika Settele examines cultural and moral transformations in the modern world—taking factory farming and sexuality as key examples.
Mostly conservative politicians in the EU are increasingly opposed to vegan or vegetarian products carrying names traditionally associated with meat. The terms burger, sausage, schnitzel and the like, they argue, should be reserved exclusively for real meat products. Their concern is that growing demand for vegetarian and vegan alternatives is harming agriculture and the meat industry. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the then-emerging meat industry—including the rise of factory farming—was indeed widely viewed as a blessing: Gone were the days of arduous, poorly paid work on small farms, and gone too the era when a roast appeared on the table only on Sundays. Suddenly, eating meat several times a week without having to worry about the cost became realistically feasible.
The history of factory farming and meat production is remarkably short and has, to date, received little attention in historical scholarship.
Professor Veronika Settele addresses this gap in two books: Revolution im Stall: Landwirtschaftliche Tierhaltung in Deutschland 1945–1990 (Revolution on the farm: Livestock keeping in Germany, 1945–1990) and Deutsche Fleischarbeit. Geschichte der Massentierhaltung von den Anfängen bis heute (German meat processing. History of factory farming from its beginnings to the present day). In her dissertation, written at Freie Universität Berlin, the contours of her broader approach to research are already visible—an approach that ultimately led her away from political science and toward history: “I am interested in how realities come into being, not only in how they present themselves today,” explains the historian, who has also studied and conducted research in Austria, France and the United States.
Her scholarship combines political history, the history of knowledge and social history. For her dissertation, she worked primarily with archival material from the agricultural ministries, supplemented by records from agricultural associations as well as agronomic and veterinary literature.
I am interested in how realities come into being, not only in how they present themselves today.Prof. Dr. Veronika Settele
Prof. Dr. Veronika Settele
© LMU/LC ProductionsIn exploring this topic, Settele examined animal husbandry in what used to be both West and East Germany. The methodological value of this all-German perspective, she contends, lies in “identifying common ground and noting differences without tacitly treating West Germany as the norm”. Particularly in the agricultural history of East Germany, “surprising parallels” emerged despite the differing political systems—for example in approaches to vertical integration, mechanization and cost accounting.
The shift in both parts of Germany—from viewing factory farming as a blessing to perceiving it as a curse—is one of several moral and ethical transformations in contemporary history that are of profound interest to Settele. Such transformation processes, and the ways in which they were arrived at in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, form the thematic link between her highly diverse research interests, which include labor migration, factory farming and, more recently, religion and sexuality.
Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, the church remained the primary port of call on personal and sexual matters.Prof. Dr. Veronika Settele
Her latest major project brings with it a shift of focus but retains the thematic link. “I am working on a history of sexuality in Germany and France,” she says. “I am seeking to understand why and how Christian actors—both clergy and laypeople—continued to shape notions of legitimate sexual behavior even in long secularized states.” The term sexuality itself emerged in the nineteenth century, initially through botany and, from the 1860s onward, through psychiatry.
Settele is especially interested in how Christian positions affected politic. For instance, she asks: “Why did Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, in its 1957 decision on the continued existence of Paragraph 175, invoke the values of Christian denominations?”
Church archives, she notes, constitute an exceptionally rich corpus of sources. “Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, the church remained the primary port of call on personal and sexual matters.” Issues surrounding legitimate sexual behavior were omnipresent in the confessional, in pastoral care and in marriage preparation.
In the archives of the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, files concerning mothers who had multiple children out of wedlock document a nineteenth-century system of sanctions ranging from pastoral counseling to public shaming in church services and even excommunication.
Settele is cautious about assuming a linear liberalization of individual sexual expectations. “I do not see an automatic decline in the influence of religious sexual teachings—especially if you broaden the geographic lens. Evangelical movements and right-wing Catholic converts in the United States, for example, illustrate how regression can be actively organized.” Even in today’s Germany, she notes that sexual norms have remained the outcome of “continuous processes of negotiation.” In her view, this ongoing negotiation is what makes the subject historically compelling and politically relevant today.
Settele describes her move to LMU Munich as “like hitting the jackpot”. “The broad thematic remit of the Chair of Contemporary History aligns perfectly with my interests.” In her teaching, she emphasizes close engagement with research: “I take master’s students into the archives, where, for example, we work with episcopal ‘immorality files’ in the context of sexuality.” At the same time, international perspectives are another natural part of her work. Her current seminar, Racial capitalism in US history, shows students “where the research frontier is particularly exciting right now”—even though her own empirical work remains focused on Europe.