This post was automatically translated from the German original at
NGHM-Tracker (7/2025).
The monthly newsletter of the Working Group Modern History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück
By Benjamin Look & Jessica Wehner
In June, Team NGHM dedicated itself to research and teaching on site alongside preparations for the Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo in Sussex. In Osnabrück, the final framework event “Contentious: Between Lecture Hall and Debate Room – Studying (Un)politically?” for the exhibition #ChallengingDemocracy – From Helmut Schmidt to Today also took place.
Our June newsletter reports on the diverse activities of the team.
Insights
At the end of the month, Team NGHM travelled to England: From 23 to 27 June, Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Dr. Sebastian Musch, Annika Heyen, Imke Selle, Lukas Hennies and Johannes Pufahl participated in the “Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo” of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab. Under the title Exploring the Future of Digital Holocaust Memory, the Expo pursued the goal of bringing together actors from historical studies, Holocaust research, memorial pedagogy as well as from the fields of digital media, curatorial practice and technological development into an interdisciplinary dialogue. The focus was on questions about current forms and future perspectives of digital memory culture in the context of the Shoah.
The team also reported extensively in blog posts about the trip:
Team NGHM was represented with its own exhibition stand. There, selected projects were presented that deal with the historical research, digital documentation and communication of National Socialist sites of violence – including sites of the Holocaust and the German war of extermination. In addition to content insights, methodological approaches and participatory approaches were particularly in focus.
Furthermore, the NGHM team organised a workshop entitled Mapping the Past and the Production of History. Low-Tech, Participatory Approaches to Documenting Holocaust Sites and Conflict Landscapes. After an introduction to the working methods and methodology of the NGHM team and a discussion round, a practical part of the workshop followed. In this part of the workshop, participants could follow individual steps of the NGHM workflow themselves: from creating and editing 3D models through their contextualisation and publication to their integration into digital exhibitions.
The Expo not only offered the Osnabrück team the opportunity to exchange with international partners and present their own work, but was also used to demonstrate the application of low-threshold digital methods directly on site through the development of a digital tour of the Expo itself.
Christoph Rass also set off for Hanover in June to exchange with our cooperation partners there: Since the beginning of 2024, the City Archive of the State Capital Hanover and the team of the Chair for Modern History and Historical Migration Research from the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück have been cooperating in the project “Immigration Archive Hanover”. The common goal is to open municipal archives so that they are better able to secure the cultural heritage of our migration society. On 16 and 17 June, a two-day workshop brought together experts from archives and memory institutions to exchange practical experiences with migration society archival work. The format combined theoretical reflection with concrete strategy development for inclusive archival practices.
The theoretical framework was provided by Christoph Rass with his opening lecture on the systematic exclusions that are still too often produced in the practice of German archives from a migration society perspective. Germany has been a migration society for generations, but archives often do not yet adequately reflect this reality. In his lecture, Rass described archives not as neutral knowledge repositories, but as active producers of history and identities – archival work not only decides what is preserved, but ultimately also co-constructs what is considered worth knowing at all. Successful migration society opening therefore requires the relinquishing of interpretive power and genuine community control over their own stories and their archiving. Thus archives become spaces of societal negotiation of migration and migration society respectively.
The workshop translated these theoretical frameworks into an intensive discourse among the invited experts. An “experience map” using World Café methods collected experiences on three central questions: What attempts were there to collect migrant materials? What worked particularly well? Where did projects encounter limits? The format “The Stumbling Stone and the Star” enabled collegial exchange about concrete difficulties and successful actions. A compressed future workshop collected current obstacles such as mistrust, lack of resources and language barriers, in order to then outline ideal conditions for migration society archival work.
The Hanover project illustrates the practical challenges of this transformation. About a third of the city’s population has migration history, but the city archive has so far mainly preserved administrative files. The Immigration Archive now relies on outreach formats instead of expecting communities to come to the archive. With this strategy, the team does not aim for quick collection successes, but for long-term development and expansion of inclusive archival work.
On 4 June, Sebastian Musch spoke at the workshop “War Endings and New Beginnings on the Rhine and Ruhr 1945” of the LVR Institute for Regional Studies and Regional History in Bonn about “The Re-establishment of the Cologne Synagogue Community after 1945.” He particularly focused on the diverse connections of the community with Israeli institutions.
In the following week, he travelled to Italy to Lake Como. There he participated in the international conference “The “Excluded Third” in the Co-Production of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” at Villa Vigoni, the German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue. At this conference, organised by David Nirenberg (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Katharina Heyden (University of Bern), Mercedes García-Arenal (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Madrid) and Davide Scotto (Università di Pavia), Sebastian presented on the topic “The Buddhification or De-Judaification of Jesus: Imagining a New Abrahamic Triad without Judaism”.
On 12 June, the final framework event “Contentious: Between Lecture Hall and Debate Room – Studying (Un)politically?” took place in Osnabrück, which was part of the supporting programme of the exhibition #Challenging Democracy – From Helmut Schmidt to Today as a joint project of the Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt Foundation, the University Library Osnabrück and the Chair for Modern History and Historical Migration Research.
The discussion was moderated by Lisa Querner (BKHS), with participants Gloria Sherif, Frederik Göcke, both currently students at the University of Osnabrück, as well as Heike Tennstädt and Heiko Schulze, who completed their studies in Osnabrück in the 1970s.
Among other things, the discussion covered: How did the students of that time experience this change? How do today’s students use the democratic spaces available to them at UOS? The plenum was also expressly invited – through the fishbowl format – to participate in the discussion.
On 5 June, a workshop took place with students from years 11 and 12 of the Georgianum Lingen grammar school at the Esterwegen Memorial as part of the project “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation”. Together with Jacqueline Meurisch (Esterwegen Memorial), Lea Horstmann, Niklas Eilers and Imke Selle, supported by Tim Ott, conducted the event. The students evaluated the 360° tours of the former camp sites of the “Emsland Camps” developed in the project and participated practically in the digital documentation of the historical sites, for example through 3D scans and re-photography.
Sebastian Huhn also travelled on 13 June with a group of students to the Lothar-Meyer Gymnasium in Varel. Together they are working on a digital exhibition about the “Old People’s Home for Homeless Foreigners”. This home was founded in 1950 and was at times one of the largest old people’s homes for Displaced Persons. In an introductory workshop, the two groups first brought each other up to date: The students from Varel are currently working on the biographies of the home’s residents. The students from the University of Osnabrück also presented their projects: From an Excel spreadsheet with all the residents of the home to the attempt to approach the site architecturally, there are many areas that need to be worked on before the planned publication of the exhibition at the end of this year. The workshop was followed by a practical working phase in Varel. One group visited the historic cemetery in Varel, where several graves of former residents of the home are located. Another group positioned themselves in the pedestrian zone and wanted to know whether the local population in Varel can still remember the home.
History@SFB1604
The work in the transfer project has reached a new milestone: On 27 June, the first test workshop of the SFB 1604 transfer project “Reflexive Migration Research in the Museum” took place. For this purpose, the project staff Aladin El-Mafaalani, Lale Yildirim, Annika Heyen, Johannes Pufahl and Tim Ott together with students of History and the Master’s programme “International Migration and Intercultural Relations” (IMIB) were guests at the project’s external application partner, the Documentation Centre and Museum on Migration in Germany (DOMiD), represented by Bebero Lehmann and Sandra Vacca.
The aim of the workshop was to test various technical tools that are to be used in the transfer project, as well as time schedules under practical conditions, before beginning work with civil society, extra-university groups. After the participants had examined the Virtual Reality application “Fragments of Migration History”, which had been compiled in advance and shown at the international opening conference of SFB 1604 “Production of Migration: Figures, Infrastructures and Spaces“, they received a tour of the DOMiD premises and gained insights into the history of Germany’s largest collection of objects and testimonies documenting the diverse history of migration in Germany. An introduction to the DOMiD database enabled the students to search for such objects, which they converted into digital 3D models using their own digital devices – via photogrammetric scanning. These models are to be integrated into the “Fragments of Migration History” application in the coming weeks and further design requests from the students will be implemented by colleagues from the Chair of Computer Science Didactics.
The process was accompanied by a test of the digital questionnaire developed by Julia Becker, which is intended to assess the extent to which the use of digital methods enables a shift of agency towards people whose voices are underrepresented in the narrative of German migration history. The insights that the project team was able to gather during the test workshop regarding group size, duration of individual work steps, etc., will flow into the planning of further workshops that are to be conducted with external, non-university persons from migrantised communities in the further course of the project.
Notes
At the beginning of May, the Chair of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research together with the entire University of Osnabrück switched its online presence to a new website that we are still expanding and developing.
In June, Team NGHM supplemented the Study & Teaching section with additional guidance:
- Trouillot: The Production of History
- Tolstoy: History as Construct
- What is self-plagiarism?
- How is participation in courses regulated?
- What are the principles of academic work?
- How do I write my “Essay on the Lecture”?
- How can I use AI in coursework and qualification papers?
The team continues to expand the tips and tricks gradually.
In June, the excursion report on the excursion to the Haren/Mazków Documentation Centre, to the former Oberlangen camp site and to the Groß Fullen war cemetery was published, organised by Imke Selle, Lea Horstmann and Lukas Hennies, which was written by Lisa Marie Schophuis.
Blog Posts in April
- Jessica Wehner & Benjamin Look: NGHM-Tracker (6/2025), 3 June 2025.
- Lisa Marie Schophuis: There and Back Again | Excursion to the Haren/Mazków Documentation Centre, the former Oberlangen camp site and to the Groß Fullen war cemetery, 16 June 2025.
- Team NGHM: NGHM Website | Updates, 21 June 2025.
- Team NGHM: Sussex Dispatch #1, 23 June 2025.
- Team NGHM: Sussex Dispatch #2, 24 June 2025.
- Team NGHM: Sussex Dispatch #3, 25 June 2025.
- Team NGHM: Sussex Dispatch #4, 27 June 2025.
Outlook and Current Dates
On 17 July, 2-5 pm, the fourth edition of the Tiny Desk Colloquium of the Chair of Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research on the topic “Digital Humanities” will take place.
All interested parties are cordially invited! A detailed programme will follow shortly on our blog.
On 31 July, a day excursion to the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage in Hannover will take place under the leadership of Imke Selle and Jessica Wehner. The ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage is an interactive learning site focusing on Hannover’s urban society during National Socialism and places strong emphasis on a biographical approach. During the excursion, students will participate in a workshop on the topic of “right-wing extremism,” which also includes the implementation of an interactive youth room. Interested students can register immediately via Stud.IP.
Leave a Reply