With the Inside.NGHM series, we regularly provide insights into research and teaching at the Chair of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück, but above all we introduce the scholars who work behind the scenes. In the second edition, Frank Wobig reports on his studies at UOS, his activities as a student assistant, and his daily work routine in the NGHM secretariat. Frank Wobig studied History and Sociology in the dual-subject Bachelor’s program and has been enrolled in the specialized Master’s program in Contemporary History at the University of Osnabrück since 2020. Since 2020, he has been a student assistant at the Chair of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research, and since October 2023 has been managing the secretariat as part of a temporary position. How did you find your way to the University of Osnabrück? My path to the University of Osnabrück and ultimately to my current function in the NGHM secretariat led me as a student through alternative education pathways: After completing training as a technical draftsman and office communication specialist and working professionally for several years, I realized that my activities neither fulfilled me nor corresponded to my interests. Some years ago, an adult education instructor advised me regarding career perspectives to pursue university studies through alternative educational pathways. I didn’t have to think long about it, because essentially the instructor merely confirmed what I had been contemplating for some time. However, since I lacked the Abitur qualification that would have given me access to university studies in my desired field of “History,” I subsequently enrolled in the preparatory course for the “Immaturenprüfung” at the Osnabrück Adult Education Center. After a period of intensive studying and successfully completed examinations—including with Professor Dr. Oltmer—I had made it and could matriculate at the University of Osnabrück in History and Sociology in the dual-subject Bachelor’s program. I then successfully completed my undergraduate studies with a thesis on forcibly recruited Luxembourgers who were interned as military prisoners of the Wehrmacht in the Emsland camps, in the Contemporary History period. What is your role in Team NGHM? I had and have the interest to make “more” out of my history studies and the opportunities offered to students at the university, and to always go one step further. For this reason, following my Bachelor’s thesis and at the beginning of the specialized Master’s program in Contemporary History, I sought a conversation with Professor Raß and inquired whether there might be an opportunity to start as a student assistant for Team NGHM. After working for several years in various projects, I have been managing the NGHM secretariat since October 2023 as part of a temporary position. My professional experience as an office communication specialist proves beneficial in this role. Furthermore, I am simultaneously preparing for my Master’s thesis, which will build on the experiences from my work as a student assistant. What does your daily work routine look like? What do you enjoy about your work? I would say that communication and organization are the essential attributes of my daily work in the secretariat: I serve as a contact person for organizational questions from students, instructors, as well as colleagues from the Historical Seminar and administration. In close collaboration, I support Professor Raß as well as the chair’s team assistants—Lukas Hennies and Jessica Wehner—in teaching and appointment organization, among other things, and provide organizational and administrative support for personnel matters, procurement, budget administration and invoice processing, organization of events with internal and external guests, and much more. The NGHM secretariat is open to the public Monday through Thursday between 8:30 and 12:30, and beyond that I work additional hours per week in the home office. Besides my work in the secretariat, I currently conduct an “OMEKA” tutorial for students as part of my employment as a student assistant, for those who are engaging with topics of forced migration, refugee policy, and society in Lower Saxony after World War II in a seminar with Sebastian Huhn. Regarding my work in the secretariat, I appreciate that beyond work routines, varied, responsible, and complex tasks challenge me. Furthermore, through my work I gain fascinating insights into the university cosmos: How does a university function? What is organizationally necessary for teaching, research, and administration to merge into the institution where we study, teach, work, and which enjoys high external reputation as the University of Osnabrück? As a “simple” student, these insights and the resulting understanding of internal processes would have remained largely hidden from me. Thus I have gotten to know the University of Osnabrück from a completely new perspective and continue to learn more about it every day. Not least, I also appreciate the good cooperation with colleagues in Team NGHM and the individual organizational units in Faculty 1 Cultural and Social Sciences: Beyond necessary hierarchies, we can rely on each other and support one another as a team with problems and questions. As a student assistant at NGHM, I engage with topics and methods on a project basis that go beyond the content of history studies. Initially, my work included collaboration in evaluating the Osnabrück foreign resident registration file. Subsequently, I moved to various projects with work focuses in Conflict Landscapes Studies, military history, and Holocaust Studies. My task in these projects includes, among other things, creating virtual exhibitions on the internet with OMEKA, an open-source web publishing system. This platform was specifically developed for presenting and managing digital collections, particularly in the humanities, museum work, archives, and libraries. OMEKA is also used at NGHM in teaching to introduce students to “digital storytelling” projects. Furthermore, I participate in field research, analyze historical aerial photographs and digital terrain models using geographic information systems (GIS). In addition to research in archives, I am also engaged in scholarly literature management, critical source analysis, and editorial work. What I particularly enjoy about working as a student assistant at NGHM is that I gain fascinating insights into various historical research projects and into the practice of scholarly work. As a “Hiwi” I stand, so to speak, in the middle of the action and am encouraged in my work, but also challenged to develop my abilities and contribute. For me, the direct insights into the multi-perspectival and interdisciplinary approaches in research and teaching that I receive through my work are particularly valuable, as they give me the opportunity to develop holistically as a person. I also greatly enjoy working as a tutor, where I can pass on my knowledge to fellow students within a limited framework. What sparked your interest in Contemporary History? One of the initial sparks for my interest in Contemporary History and historical topics in general was a cinema visit many years ago. At that time, I attended a screening of Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” with my class as part of a school project week on the topic of “Holocaust.” I can remember that the film was my first conscious visual confrontation with the fate of European Jews during the Nazi period, and this experience moved me deeply and lastingly. From then on, my interest in engaging with this historical subject complex grew. For example, I examined the topic of the “Wannsee Conference” on January 20, 1942, as part of the examination for obtaining my secondary school certificate. Furthermore, in retrospect, the presence of war-related “flight” and “loss” narratives in my family history certainly played a role, so that my initial interest in Contemporary History was significantly shaped by perspectives on Nazi tyranny and World War II. Social history questions and analyses are also fascinating to me, such as those concerning the social and geographical mobility of Displaced Persons as well as labor migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany: What individual negotiation processes condition(ed) this mobility, can patterns be recognized, and what conclusions can be drawn for current and future migration processes? These are just some of the questions I engage with in this context and for which my interest was awakened through various project work in history studies. What topic would you definitely like to attend a university course on? Building on the publications of Katrin Himmler, a great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, as well as Monika Hartwig, the daughter of the commandant of Płaszów concentration camp, Amon Göth, I would like to attend an interdisciplinary workshop that examines historical and action-theoretical questions about possible processing and repression processes within families of former Nazi perpetrators. I am interested in the multi-perspectival examination of individual and intergenerational strategies of action by actors in a family unit. What scope for action exists within an affected family in the ambivalence between justification and coming to terms with the past, and what effects do these have on the identity of individual actors and the family? Is their own history discussed and what narratives exist? How is their relative’s actions reflected upon? Are there indications of secondary traumatization and what specific symptoms can be identified? How were and are affected families perceived by society? I would like to discuss these and other questions and publish the results using possible case examples. Where would you like to organize an excursion? I would like to lead students on a visit to the Porta Westfalica concentration camp memorial and documentation site to trace war economy and forced labor in the final phase of World War II: At Porta Westfalica, the Weser breakthrough between the Wiehen and Weser mountains south of Minden, several underground sandstone quarries were requisitioned for armaments production starting in March 1944. The goal was to secure goods and operating materials needed to continue the war through the use of forced labor and protection from air raids in underground armaments relocations. The deployment of thousands of forced laborers, transferred to Porta Westfalica from concentration camps including Neuengamme and Auschwitz, who had to expand the underground facilities and work in production under precarious living and working conditions, was a repressed history in postwar society for a long time. The memorial site currently in the process of development is suitable for critical reflection on memory and commemoration of violence against forced laborers in the regional area as well as a site of the armaments industry in World War II. During a tour through the former underground relocation “Dachs I” in the Weser mountains, there is also the opportunity to visualize the enormous expenditure of resources used to maintain armaments production until shortly before the end of World War II and what living conditions the forced laborers faced when expanding the facilities. Students would thus have the opportunity to engage with the fascinating transformation process from repression to active examination of a “conflict landscape” shaped by Nazi tyranny. Questions about the discrepancy between present-day landscape and touristically marketed idyll on one side and historical violence on the other, as well as the search for the seemingly vanished traces of this “conflict landscape,” can be critically reflected upon by students here. Which museum did you last visit? My last museum visit was in 2023 and took place as part of an excursion by Maik Hoops and Jessica Wehner to the “Hospital Museum” at Bremen-Ost Hospital. The reason for the visit was the permanent exhibition “Insane?! Psychiatry – Society – Art,” which addressed the history of the “Bremen-Ost Hospital” psychiatry up to the recent past. In the exhibition, historical treatment devices illustrate to visitors the respective contemporary therapy and treatment forms. Interactive learning stations and audio stations offer the opportunity to listen to the experiences of patients, doctors, nursing staff, and relatives. The museum pursues questions such as “What is ‘crazy’?” or “How do we deal with illness?” and dedicates a focus to the history of Bremen psychiatry during the Nazi period. For me, the visit was a first more intensive engagement with the complex topic of psychiatry history, and I was able to take away many new approaches to thinking and can recommend a visit to this small but very informative museum. What interests do you have outside your work at the university? As a historian, I cannot escape my nature—and therefore it’s actually no surprise that besides my work at the university and as a student, I primarily engage with historical topics in my free time: for me, there is always something exciting to discover and explore. In this respect, there is no clear dividing line between professional and student interest on one side and private curiosity about historical topics on the other. Since I also enjoy being “on the road,” I frequently combine extended hikes and excursions with visits to historically interesting places such as war cemeteries or search for ancient ring wall systems and so-called “Lost Places” in the broadest sense. Of course, I also have a life beyond the stories from history: From my perspective, a society can only function if we contribute as actors and engage—within the framework of our individual possibilities. Thus I have been a member of the Volunteer Fire Department Bad Essen-Eielstädt-Wittlage since my youth and have been active there in the emergency response unit for many years. I have thus learned the firefighting craft “from the ground up” and can now look back on many years with exciting, but sometimes also (challenging) deployments. Entry and exit are voluntary—the rest is duty as a member of a volunteer fire department. This means that I am on call 24/7 and when an alarm sounds, I immediately go to the fire station, equip myself, and proceed with our emergency vehicles to the scene. This can be not only in the local former Wittlage district, but has also led me to places throughout Lower Saxony as part of disaster response, such as during the moor fire near Meppen in 2018. But regular participation in training exercises and courses also belongs to the duties one assumes in this volunteer service. This effort is rewarded by being able to contribute to helping other people when they find themselves in emergency situations—an experience that is repeatedly valuable and meaningful to me. I am particularly fascinated by the fact that no deployment is like another and one is repeatedly faced with new challenges. In the fire department, we must be team players, we must be able to rely on each other and catch each other when there might be need for conversation after stressful deployments. Besides my engagement in the volunteer fire department, I am a member of the local council of Bad Essen as well as an advisory member in the municipal council faction of my party, for which I have also been working as press spokesperson since 2014. What is exciting about municipal political work for me is that I have the opportunity to actively participate in shaping and developing my home community.
This article is an English translation of the original German post: Inside.NGHM | Frank Wobig