The monthly newsletter of the Research Group for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Studies at the University of Osnabrück By Benjamin Look & Jessica Wehner In July, Team NGHM began the end-of-semester sprint and organized various formats in Osnabrück for exchanging ideas about the results of our work in research and teaching: in poster presentations, students presented results from advanced and specialization seminars, our fourth Tiny Desk Colloquium presented excellent master’s theses and deepened the discussion about Digital Humanities at UOS. However, this did not prevent Team NGHM from traveling in July as well, for example to Frankfurt to the German National Library for a joint workshop. Our July newsletter edition reports on the team’s diverse activities. Insights Team NGHM concluded the semester with a very eventful day where both students in the morning and Team NGHM in the afternoon presented their research projects and results: Students from three (advanced) seminars were able to present their posters on July 10 and 17, which they had created as part of events by Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Dr. Sebastian Musch, Jessica Wehner and Lukas Hennies. Thematically, the students dealt with the production of migration in the USA, the experiences of German exiles during the Weimar Republic, and the IRO and the resettlement of European post-war refugees and displaced persons. Students from specialization and advanced seminars in discussion (Photos: Gero Leege) On the afternoon of July 17, the fourth Tiny Desk Colloquium of the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Studies (NGHM) at the University of Osnabrück took place. Under the title “Digital History & Humanities,” graduates presented their outstanding theses and researchers from CRC 1604 provided insights into their work. The program was supplemented by exciting contributions about the possibilities of AI in teaching by Alexander Piwowar from VirtUOS and a presentation about FDM and DH infrastructures at the University Library by Dr. Marco Gronwald and Kerstin Strotmann-Frehe. We will soon report extensively on the fourth edition of the Tiny Desk Colloquium on the NGHM Blog. On July 14, Christoph Rass traveled to Potsdam to the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Federal Armed Forces. There he presented on two topics: The first lecture, titled “GOKnow – Knowledge Graph Europe under German Occupation 1939-1945. A Research Project,” served to prepare a joint research project; in the second part of the workshop, he discussed the methodology set developed at UOS in the eponymous research field from 2014 to 2024 under the title “Data, Dirt and Things. Methods of Conflict Landscape Research and their Potential for Military History.” On July 9, 2025, after a longer break, a working meeting of the “History of Jews” working group of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen took place at the Ada and Theodor Lessing Adult Education Center in Hanover. The organizer was Sebastian Musch. NGHM was strongly represented in the program – with contributions from Maik Hoops and Annika Heyen as well as through active on-site support from Gero Leege. Maik Hoops gave a presentation on antisemitic constructions of the ‘German people’ in the party press of the Socialist Reich Party (1949-52). He showed how neo-Nazi discourses after 1945 produced their völkisch self-images closely interwoven with antisemitic counter-images, but transformed these into significantly more latent and implicit linguistic manifestations compared to the discourses of earlier decades of the 20th century or the 19th century. Annika Heyen reported from the project “Carved in Stone. Digitally Experienceable Memory Discourses in the Urban Space of Lower Saxony and Eastern Europe” and also offered the use of a VR application. In the subsequent members’ assembly, Sebastian Musch was elected spokesperson of the working group. Mirko Przystawik from Bet Tfila – Research Center for Jewish Architecture in Europe (TU Braunschweig) was elected deputy spokesperson. Jürgen Bohmbach was confirmed in office as secretary. The next workshop of the “History of Jews” working group on the topic “Topographies of Religious Majority-Minority Constellations in Historical Comparison” will take place on October 16–17 in cooperation with Bet Tfila – Research Center for Jewish Architecture in Europe and the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation. From July 21 to 28, Annika Heyen participated in the “Summer School with Museum POLIN for Early Career Scholars,” organized by Zachary Mazur, in Warsaw. Together with 15 other early career scholars from Europe, the USA and Israel as well as experts, she exchanged ideas about the diversity of the field of Jewish studies – topics ranged from diaries of Jewish travelers in the 18th century to hygiene discourses around Jewish ritual baths (Mikveh) in the 19th century and Jewish discourses on nationalism to the history of the Holocaust – and was trained in topics of exhibition design, museum education, public speaking, and various career opportunities in this research field. Excursions took the group to the JCC Warsaw and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw as well as the Theater NN Grodzka Gate in Lublin. The participants of the summer school also explored the former Jewish quarters of both cities. Although the visits to these places had a strong focus on the history of the Shoah, the rich history and diversity of Jewish life in Poland before its destruction by the National Socialists was also addressed. History@CRC1604 From July 10 to 11, the team of the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Studies and the Collaborative Research Center 1604 “Production of Migration” visited the German National Library together with colleagues from the University Library Osnabrück. Within the framework of a joint workshop of the research study program “Hermes,” they discussed “The needs of digital humanities – tasks of cultural heritage institutions, data competencies between research and the GLAM sector.” Matthias Land and Jens Schneider presented the Collaborative Research Center 1604 “Production of Migration” as well as the challenges that the interdisciplinary research network poses for staff regarding data processing, securing, and preparation. Felicitas Hundhausen, Anneke Thiel, Kerstin Strotmann-Frehe, and Marco Gronwald from the University Library Osnabrück provided insights into the infrastructures that have already been developed in their institution to address such challenges. Maik Hoops and Dominic Sauerbrey dealt in their contribution with the “Library as Corpus,” from which projects A3 and A5 of CRC 1604 collect their data. Christoph Rass presented the transfer project of the CRC and discussed how non-text-based research data, such as the digital 3D models of objects used in the project, can be sustainably secured. The DNB team provided insights into the “German Exile Archive 1933-1945” and into the stacks of the National Library. Furthermore, they presented “Text+” and “DNBLabs” as two tools that are already available to researchers for collecting and securing research data. Within the framework of three different events, Maik Hoops presented CRC subproject A3 “‘You are guest worker children!’ Science, School and the Production of Migration Figures” in July. In the Graduate School/Integrated Research Training Group (IRTG), he presented the current state of project work to his fellow doctoral candidates in the Collaborative Research Center “Production of Migration” on July 7. At the HERMES workshop at the German National Library in Frankfurt, he spoke on July 11 about the project regarding the construction of the corpus consisting of four and a half thousand educational science texts and data collection. In the Tiny Desk Colloquium on July 17, he provided an interested audience with fundamental insights into the questions, theories, and methods of the project. Notes On July 8, Jessica Wehner and Christoph Rass were guests of students Jannik Singer and Timo Diener for a podcast recording. Together they discussed the category of “Displaced Persons” as well as the reaction of the majority society to these people. The podcast will be published as part of the digital exhibition “Displaced Persons in Varel,” which is expected to go online at the end of this year. Here, the students, under the direction of Sebastian Huhn, are dealing with the so-called nursing home for homeless foreigners, which existed from 1950 to 1959 and was one of the largest nursing homes for displaced persons in Europe. Sebastian Huhn has already published about the nursing home on our blog: Also traveling were Imke Selle, Jessica Wehner, and Lea Horstmann with about 15 students. On July 31, an excursion to the TimeCenter Civic Courage in Hanover took place. The TimeCenter is an interactive learning place about Hanover’s urban society during National Socialism. Under the guiding question “Participate or Resist?” democratic coexistence in the present and future is also in focus. During this excursion, students participated in a workshop on the topic of right-wing extremism. Part of the workshop was an interactive learning space in which a young person’s room was recreated, someone who was active in right-wing extremist networks. Back in Team NGHM since early July is Valentin Loos. After obtaining his master’s degree, he worked at the beginning of the year as a freelancer on revising several online exhibitions. Until the end of the year, he will be employed as a research assistant in a cooperation project with the Chamber of Industry and Commerce Osnabrück-Emsland-Grafschaft Bentheim. Since July 15, Jonathan Roters has been supporting the handbook project on the history of Emsland district during National Socialism as a research assistant. He will primarily be involved in the conceptual design of the handbook as well as the development and editing of individual texts. After a short break, Marlene Schurig returned to the NGHM team as a student assistant in July 2025. She now strengthens the project team “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation. Research-based Learning at the Interface of University Teacher Education, Memorial Site Education, and Participatory Digital Public History.” We are pleased about her support! Blog Posts in July Jessica Wehner and Benjamin Look: NGHM-Tracker (7/2025), July 3, 2025. Team NGHM: Announcement: Tiny Desk Colloquium: Digital History & Humanities – Research, Teaching and Infrastructures in Dialogue on July 17, 2025, July 7, 2025. Christoph Rass: Research@NGHM | Greek Government Recognizes Karya Station as ‘Historic Site’, July 10, 2025. Team NGHM: Out Now | Ramirez & Rass: Producing Integration. The Translation of Non/Belonging in Germany and the United States @ History and Theory Early View, July 12, 2025. Students of the seminar and Frank Wolff: There and Back Again | The Willy Brandt Seminar on Excursion to Berlin, July 15, 2025. Annika Heyen: History@CRC: Projects A3, A5 and T with the DH Team of the University Library as Guests at the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main, July 27, 2025. Imke Selle: Digital Public History Workshop “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation”, July 29, 2025. Team NGHM: Out Now | TRANSLATION, MIGRATION, NARRATIVE – Editor’s Introduction by Julie Weise and Christoph Rass in History & Theory, July 30, 2025. Outlook On September 1, the Tracker editorial team will take a short summer break. We will then return refreshed on October 1 with an August-September double issue!
This article is an English translation of the original German post: NGHM-Tracker (8/2025)