Faculty of Philosophy, Historisches Seminar, Knowledge, Spaces, and Media, Research

Between Choice and Command: Migration and Return Across and Beyond Colonial Empires, 1900-1960

Date
1. Dec 2025, 9.00 am - 2. Dec 2025, 12.15 pm
Location
C23 – Staff building 1, senate hall (Campus)
Organizer
DFG Research group Voluntariness
Event type
Workshop
Event Language(s)
English
Audience
with registration

Workshop of the DFG Research Group Voluntariness at the University of Erfurt

with: Anindita Bhattacharya (Maynooth), Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth), Lena Engel (Erfurt), Gisela Ewe (Hamburg), Dónal Hassett (Maynooth), Ronald Hirte (Weimar/Buchenwald), Elise Mazurié (Freiburg), Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt), Patrice Poutrus (Berlin), Baijayanti Roy (Frankfurt), Jan Schubert (Florence), Mathilde von Bülow (St. Andrews), Gifty Nyame Tabiri (Erfurt), Florian Wagner (Erfurt). Andrews), Gifty Nyame Tabiri (Erfurt), Florian Wagner (Erfurt)

About

How far can we really call colonial migration to and from Europe voluntary? When millions from the colonies were pulled into European armies and labor forces during the World Wars? When Africans and Asians went to Europe to fight or join fascist movements? When students and labor migrants arrived after 1945 under unequal terms? This conference sketches out indigenous agency by probing what ‘voluntariness’ means in subaltern (return) migration across and beyond colonial empires.

Registration is requested at florian.wagner@uni-erfurt.de . The event is sponsored by the DFG and the Ernst Abbe Foundation.

Public evening lecture

As part of the workshop, the public lecture "The Great War of Movement: Thinking Critically about mobility, displacement, coercion and consent in the French Empire's First World War" by Dónal Hassett (Maynooth/COLVET) will alsotake place, to which the Voluntariness Research Group cordially invites interested parties at 5.30 pm. 

Program

Monday, December 1st, 9:00 am-7:00 pm, C23 Room Senatssaal (10th floor, take elevator to the top and then use stairs), University of Erfurt

9.00-9:30 am: Welcome and Introduction

Section 1: Chair: Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt)

  • 9:30-10:30 am: Anindita Bhattacharya (Maynooth): Imperial Anxieties, Post-war Provisions and Growing Discontent: A history of Indian veterans of the First World War
  • 10:30-11:30 am: Baijayanti Roy (Frankfurt): Return, Repatriation or Flight? Destinies of Indian anti-colonialists in Nazi Germany and thereafter
  • 11:30 am-12:00 pm Coffee Break
  • 12:00-1:00 pm: Ronald Hirte (Weimar/Buchenwald): Entangled Systems of Coercion: Deportees from Colonial Contexts in Buchenwald
  • 1:00-2:00 pm: Lunch break Mensa Erfurt 

Section 2: Chair: Gifty Nyame Tabiri (Erfurt)

  • 2:00-3:00 pm: Elise Mazurié (Freiburg): Changing Categorisations from the Interwar through National Socialism to the Post-War: The reparation claim of a Moroccan soldier against the Federal Republic of Germany
  • 3:00-4:00 pm: Gisela Ewe (Hamburg): Between Defiance and Alliance: Negotiating resistance, solidarity and political strategy in Hamburgs’s (post-)colonial context
  • 4:00-5:00 pm: Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth): From Ethiopia to Italy and Back: a family history of Italian colonialism
  • 5:00-5:30 pm Coffee Break
  • 5:30-7:00 pm Public Keynote Lecture: Dónal Hassett (Maynooth): The Great War of Movement: Thinking Critically about mobility, displacement, coercion and consent in the French Empire's First World War
  • 8:00 pm Workshop Dinner

Tuesday, December 2nd, 9 – 12:30, Room C19:00:02_3, Forschungsbau Weltbeziehungen, University of Erfurt

Section 3: Chair: Patrice Poutrus (Berlin)

  • 9:00-10:00 am Lena Engel (Erfurt/Florence): Women's Mobility in Entangled Systems of Coercion: The trajectories of Taous Merouane between (post)colonial Algeria, France and Buchenwald concentration camp
  • 10:00-11:00 am Mathilde von Bülow (St: Andrews): Algerian Migration to West and East Germany during the War of Independence
  • 11:00-12:00 am: Jan Schubert (Florence): Labour Migrants' Agency towards Return Migration and Their Dealing with Deportability in the GDR: Oral History of Algerian Labour Migration to Socialist Germany
  • 12-12:15 pm Final Discussion

Contact us

Florian Wagner
Dr. Florian Wagner
Project leader for ‘Migration’ in the DFG research group ‘Voluntariness’
(History Department)
C19 – research building "Weltbeziehungen" / C19.01.06 (Foschungsneubau Weltbeziehungen, 1.Stock)
florian.wagner@uni-erfurt.de

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