Lecture series

Tuesday Talks

The "Tuesday Talks" began in the summer semester 2021 and have continued ever since. The series was created in cooperation with the Erfurt professorships for the History of Science, North American History and Contemporary History as well as the Göttingen Chair of Modern History.

To the Tuesday Talks 2021-2024

The past of the present. A series in commemoration of the historian Rebekka Habermas

In December 2023, we received the sad news of the death of the outstanding historian Rebekka Habermas. On this occasion, the Centre for Transcultural Studies and the Professorship of Modern History at the University of Göttingen organised a memorial colloquium for Rebekka Habermas in the summer semester of 2024 and the winter semester of 2024/25. Events in Göttingen and Gotha honoured the academic work of Rebekka Habermas and kept her ideas and research alive.

Bettina Brockmeyer (Giessen) opened the first round in Göttingen with a lecture on "Indifferenz und Ignoranz statt Amnesie und Aphasie" and the West German way of dealing with the colonial past. Hubertus Büschel (Kassel) continued the series in Gotha with a lecture on psychiatry in colonial contexts and discussed the difficulties of understanding "suffering" as a historical concept. In Göttingen, Holger Stoecker (Göttingen) discussed the questions of provenance and restitution of ancestral remains from colonial contexts. The series was concluded by Lyndal Roper (Oxford) with her lecture "Thinking across Disciplines. Aufruhr and the German Peasants' War 1524-6" at the Centre for Transcultural Studies in Gotha.

The lecture series was continued in cooperation with the Professorship of Modern History. Isabel Richter (Berkeley) spoke on "Gegenkulturen und indigene Akteur/innen in den globalen 1960er Jahren". Alexandra Przyrembel (Hagen) focussed on the "Traum vom Luxus" and thus the "Super-Reichtum und den feinen Unterschieden der feinen Gesellschaft um 1900". In Gotha, Rebekka von Mallinckrodt (Bremen) discussed "Race Making from Below" and forms of resistance by people of colour in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Maria Rhode (Göttingen) concluded with a lecture on African ethnographica in divided Poland (1880-1920).

All of these contributions addressed central themes and perspectives of Rebekka Habermas' work.

Programme summer semester 2024 | Programme winter semester 2024/25

Evening lecture by Andrew Port: "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust"

The US historian Andrew Port (Wayne State University) was a guest of the DFG-Research Unit on "Voluntariness" at the University of Erfurt in June. Andrew Port works on modern German history and has become known for his studies on the GDR and socialism. In his public lecture "Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust", he discussed the question of how the experience of National Socialism and the subsequent confrontation with this difficult past determined German reactions to the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda and how this changed the understanding of history in the Federal Republic. The lecture was based on Port's recently published book Never Again (Harvard University Press, 2023).

The lecture took place on Tuesday, 20 June 2023, 6-8 pm at the Gotha Research Campus in the Centre for Transcultural Studies (Pagenhaus).

Reading: "Zerborstene Zeit. German History 1918 to 1945" by Michael Wildt

With the title "Das politische Buch im Gespräch", the Centre for Transcultural Studies continued the Tuesday Talks series in the summer semester 2023 with another public evening event: Professor Dr Michael Wildt (Berlin) was the guest with his study: "Zerborstene Zeit. Deutsche Geschichte 1918 bis 1945". In this book, which is aimed at both the academic community and a wider audience, Michael Wildt has presented a new political history of the interwar period that is unrivalled: after all, it rejects any attempt to provide a new master narrative and instead emphasises the fragmentary and incomplete. The book thus also sees itself as an invitation to enquiry and discussion. It was awarded the Preis des Historischen Kollegs in 2022.

The event took place on May 16, 2023 at 6 pm in the auditorium of the Myconiusschule in Gotha in cooperation with the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung and the Ernestinum Gotha.

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