Munich History Lecture

May 19, 2025: Contending with crises: The jews of medieval germany in the fourteenth century

Medieval Jewish communities in what is now Germany flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries, settling in towns and villages that grew as part of medieval urban expansion. By the late 13th and into the 14th century, however, rising animosity led to persecution, pogroms, and expulsions. Despite these hardships, survivors and exiles from other regions continually sought to resettle – sometimes in new places, but often in former Jewish communities. While this history is typically framed through persecution, Jews not only endured these crises but also developed their own strategies to navigate them. This talk explores these coping mechanisms, with a focus on family life, gender roles, and cultural creativity.

• Speaker: Elisheva Baumgarten
• Moderator: Julia Burkhardt and Eva Haverkamp-Rott

January 29, 2024: Ethics and Memory: The Struggle over Holocaust Remembrance

Germany playd a key role in moving away from nationalist cultures of remembrance and the developing Holocaust commemoration as a self-critical model of remembrance for Europe and the West. The shifting global balance of power and the rise of digital media have contributed to the establishment of a new anti-colonial paradigm of memory. Nationalism, Holocaust remembrance, and anti-colonial memory are sometimes perceived as incompatible alternatives, but this does not reflect the actual politics of memory. The question ist how Holocaust remembrance and anti-colonial memory can be responsibly and effectively linked on regional, national, and transnational levels.

• Speaker: Wulf Kansteiner
• Moderator: Michele Barricelli

May 13, 2024: Twofold Challenges: On German "Culture of Remembrance" and its enemies

The emergence of a self-critical engagement with the Nazi past in the Federal Republic of Germany was a difficult process, accompanied over decades by recurring scandals – and at the same time constitutive for the development of our libral democracy. In recent years, however, this supposedly firmly established ethic of remembrance has once again come under growing attack: initially primarily from the right, but now also from postcolonial quarters. Is a great forgettimg looming?

• Speaker: Norbert Frei
• Moderator: Michael Brenner

June 3, 2024: From the planetary to the global, and other lost histories of the 20th century

In 2023, the appointment of an ‘oilman’ to lead one of the most important climate change conferences of our time, COP28, raised some controversy. But it was not the first time that oilmen have taken the lead in international environmental governance. In this leture, Professor Glenda Sluga returns to this lost history of the involvement of ‘oilmen’ in the earliest examples of international environmental governance in order to recover the extent and significance of early 1970s’ debates focused on the ‘planetary’.

• Speaker: Glenda Sluga
• Moderator: Roland Wenzlhuemer

November 18, 2024: How Wars end

How can peace be achieved? Hardly any question today seems as urgent and at the same time as controversial. What lessons can be drawn from the history of war and war termination? Which phases do armed conflicts pass through before they come to a stable end? When and how does a "ripe moment" for making peace emerge? Which actors are crucial for achieving peace, and what instruments must they employ? What needs to be taken into account so that a ceasefire can develop into a sustainable peace agreement? Margaret MacMillan and Jörn Leonhard look back at the wars of the recent past and use historical insights to deepen our understanding of the present.

• Speakers: Jörn Leonhard and Margaret MacMillan
• Moderator: Marie-Janine Calic

January 9, 2023: A dispute over the emperor's beard? The advantages and disadvantages of the Hohenzollern debate

What began, in the early 1990s, as materila claims by the "heads of the House of Hohenzollern" against the state initially developed into a rather secluded expert controversy, and since 2019 into a heated public deebate in which historical, legal, political, and journalistic strands intersects. The original legal question – whether and to what extent a certain Prussian prince had effectively supported National Socialism – soon turned into an emotionally charged dispute, conducted in comedy shows, academic journlas, history seminars, school-leaving examinations, on CNN and the New York Review of Books, and has by now also attracted the interest of filmmakers. The lecture discusses different temporal layers and actors involved in a controversy that is more than a hundred years old and far from resolved.

In cooperation with the Institute of Contemporary History, Munich

• Speaker: Stephan Malinowski
• Moderator: Andreas Wirsching

April 24, 2023: The dark side of the European revolutions of 1989

Not so long ago, the explosive revolutions that swept across Eastern Europe in that momentous year were routinely celebrated as the great victory of liberal democracy over Soviet-style communism. More recent developments in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere on the continent should, however, prompt us to reconsider the impact of that fateful year in Central Europe from a different perspective. With some historical distance, the legacy of the "revolutionary autumn" appears more mixed and precarious, and this lecture addresses some of the darker aspects of that legacy

In cooperation with KFG "Universalismus und Partikularismus in in der europäischen Zeitgeschichte"

• Speaker: Paul Betts
• Moderator: Martin Schulze Wessel

May 9, 2022: Cadmus and the Power of Ruins. News from Seven-Gated Thebes

Thebes was one of the most flourishing cities in archaic Greece. Its inhabitants and visitors were surrounded by monumental ruins from a distant past, which fueled stories about the legendary founder of the city, Cadmus. In conjunction with the dynamic development of the urban space, its sanctuaries, and political organization, new local meanings and orientations emerged that spread far into Greeek culture from Kadmeia.

• Speaker: Hans Beck
• Moderators: Martin Zimmermann and Christian Reitzenstein-Ronning

July 4, 2022: The total future. Charlotte Beradt and Reinhart Koselleck on Dream Experience in the 1930s

How do experiences of time change during the transition from democracy to dictatorship? The dreams collected by Charlotte Beradt in the early years of the Third Reich show how, in the face of terror and pressure to conform in everyday Nazi life, the perception of political reality migrated into dreams. Only in dream images did the pull of future violence reveal itself. So is the attempt to seal off the future, even to the point of suspending historical time in the camps, one of the techniques of total domination?

• Speaker: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
• Moderator: Kiran Klaus Patel

November 8, 2021: The German Empire and the History of Modernity

The lecture takes as its starting point the current debate about the reformability and political legacy of the German Empire of 1871. It uses this discussion as an opportunity to focus on the structural patterns of modernity that emerged and became established in German society before and around 1900. This reveals aspects of a history of modernity whose consequences extend into the present day.

• Speaker: Benjamin Ziemann
• Moderator: Martin H. Geyer