This post was automatically translated from the German original at
NGHM-Tracker (8/2025).
The monthly newsletter of the Working Group for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück
By Benjamin Look & Jessica Wehner
In July, Team NGHM started the end-of-semester sprint and organised various formats in Osnabrück for exchanging ideas about the results of our work in research and teaching: in poster presentations, students presented the results from introductory and advanced 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 travelling in July as well, for example to Frankfurt to the German National Library for a joint workshop.
Our July newsletter reports on the diverse activities of the team.
Insights
The NGHM team concluded the semester with a very eventful day during which both students in the morning and Team NGHM in the afternoon presented their research projects and results:
Students from three (introductory) seminars were able to present their posters on 10 and 17 July, which they had created as part of courses 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.
On the afternoon of 17 July, the fourth Tiny Desk Colloquium of the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research (NGHM) at the University of Osnabrück took place. Under the title “Digital History & Humanities”, graduates presented their outstanding theses and researchers from the SFB 1604 provided insights into their work. The programme was supplemented by exciting contributions on the possibilities of AI in teaching by Alexander Piwowar from VirtUOS and a presentation on the FDM and DH infrastructures at the University Library by Dr. Marco Gronwald and Kerstin Strotmann-Frehe.
We will shortly report in detail on the fourth edition of the Tiny Desk Colloquium on the NGHM Blog.
On 14 July, Christoph Rass travelled to Potsdam to the Centre for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. There he gave presentations on two topics: The first presentation entitled “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 methodological 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 9 July 2025, after a longer break, a working meeting of the “History of the Jews” working group of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen took place at the Ada-und-Theodor-Lessing-Volkshochschule in Hanover. The organiser was Sebastian Musch. NGHM was strongly represented in the programme – with contributions by Maik Hoops and Annika Heyen as well as through active on-site support by 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 the 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’ meeting, Sebastian Musch was elected as spokesperson of the working group. Mirko Przystawik from Bet Tfila – Research Centre for Jewish Architecture in Europe (TU Braunschweig) was elected as deputy spokesperson. Jürgen Bohmbach was confirmed in office as secretary. The next workshop of the “History of the Jews” working group on the topic Topographies of Religious Majority-Minority Constellations in Historical Comparison will take place on 16–17 October in cooperation with Bet Tfila – Research Centre for Jewish Architecture in Europe and the Lower Saxony State Office for Monument Preservation.
From 21 to 28 July, Annika Heyen participated in the “Summer School with Museum POLIN for Early Career Scholars”, organised by Zachary Mazur, in Warsaw. Together with 15 other early career researchers from Europe, the USA and Israel as well as experts, she exchanged ideas about the diversity of the field of Jewish studies – the topics ranged from diaries of Jewish travellers 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 Warszawa and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw as well as the Theater NN Grotzka Tor in Lublin. The summer school participants 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@SFB1604
From 10 to 11 July, the team from the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research and the Collaborative Research Centre 1604 “Production of Migration” together with colleagues from the University Library Osnabrück were guests at the German National Library. As part of a joint workshop of the research study programme “Hermes“, they discussed the “Needs of the digital humanities – Tasks of cultural heritage institutions, data competencies between research and the GLAM sector”.
Matthias Land and Jens Schneider presented the Collaborative Research Centre 1604 “Production of Migration” as part of the workshop, as well as the challenges that the interdisciplinary research consortium poses for staff regarding data processing, securing, and preparation. Felicitas Hundhausen, Anneke Thiel, Kerstin Strotmann-Frehe and Marco Gronwald from Osnabrück University Library provided insights into the infrastructures that have already been developed at their institution to address such challenges. Maik Hoops and Dominic Sauerbrey addressed the “Library as Corpus” in their contribution, from which projects A3 and A5 of CRC 1604 collect their data. Christoph Rass presented the Transfer Project of the CRC and opened for discussion 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 the National Library’s repositories. Furthermore, they presented “Text+” and “DNBLabs” as two tools that are already available to researchers for collecting and securing research data.
As part of three different events in July, Maik Hoops presented CRC sub-project A3 “‘You are guest worker children!’ Science, School and the Production of Figures of Migration”. In the Graduate School/Integrated Research Training Group (abbreviated: IRTG), he presented the current state of project work to his fellow doctoral candidates in the Collaborative Research Centre “Production of Migration” on 7 July. At the HERMES workshop at the German National Library in Frankfurt on 11 July, he spoke 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 17 July, he provided an interested audience with fundamental insights into the project’s research questions, theories, and methods.
Notes
On 8 July, Jessica Wehner and Christoph Rass were guests with students Jannik Singer and Timo Diener for a podcast recording. Together they discussed the category of “Displaced Persons” as well as the majority society’s reaction 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 supervision of Sebastian Huhn, are examining 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 on the move were Imke Selle, Jessica Wehner and Lea Horstmann with around 15 students. On 31 July, an excursion to the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage in Hanover took place. The ZeitZentrum is an interactive learning site 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, the 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.
Valentin Loos has been back with the NGHM team since early July. After completing 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 15 July, Jonathan Roters has been supporting the handbook project on the history of Emsland district during National Socialism as a research assistant. He will primarily contribute to 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 is now strengthening the project team “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation. Research-based Learning at the Interface of University Teacher Education, Memorial Site Pedagogy and Participatory Digital Public History”. We are pleased to have her support!
Blog Posts in July
- Jessica Wehner and Benjamin Look: NGHM-Tracker (7/2025), 3 July 2025.
- Team NGHM: Announcement: Tiny Desk Colloquium: Digital History & Humanities – Research, Teaching and Infrastructures in Dialogue on 17 July 2025, 7 July 2025.
- Christoph Rass: Research@NGHM | Greek Government Recognises Karya Station as ‘Historic Site’, 10 July 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, 12 July 2025.
- Students of the seminar and Frank Wolff: There and Back Again | The Willy Brandt Seminar on Excursion to Berlin, 15 July 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, 27 July 2025.
- Imke Selle: Digital Public History Workshop “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation”, 29 July 2025.
- Team NGHM: Out Now | TRANSLATION, MIGRATION, NARRATIVE – Editor’s Introduction by Julie Weise and Christoph Rass in History & Theory, 30 July 2025.
Outlook
From 1 September, the Tracker editorial team will take a short summer break.
We will then return refreshed on 1 October with an August-September double issue!
Leave a Reply