With the new series Inside.NGHM, we regularly provide insights into research and teaching at the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück, but above all we present the scholars who work behind the scenes. In the third issue, Annika Heyen reports on her work as a historian. Annika Heyen studied History and Cultural Studies in a two-subject bachelor’s degree at the University of Bremen as well as the specialized master’s degree in History with a focus on Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2022, she has been pursuing her doctorate on “The Bermuda Conference 1943: Negotiations for the Rescue of Jewish Refugees and Their Failure?” and since 2024, she has been project coordinator of the transfer project “Historical Migration Research in Museums” of the Collaborative Research Center 1604 “Production of Migration.”
How did you become a historian?
I am a so-called “working-class child,” which means: there were no academic professions in my family environment. “Historian” was therefore not a profession that existed in my microcosm. After graduating from school, I planned to become a journalist. At that time, I had already been a member of the youth editorial team of the Nordsee-Zeitung for several years and enjoyed writing. To test whether this would really be a good profession for me, I spent several months as an intern at the Nordsee-Zeitung as well as in the press and marketing department of the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven. There, I shared an office with one of the historians, Christoph Bongert, during the first weeks and realized: Press work? Interesting, but what Christoph does there interests me much more! Journalism was not completely off the table for me yet, but for the next winter semester I enrolled in the two-subject bachelor’s degree with History as the profile subject and Cultural Studies as the complementary subject at the University of Bremen.
During my bachelor’s studies, it was especially the history of slavery – a focus area of the local Chair for Early Modern History – that aroused my interest. I was fortunate to work as a student assistant for Rebekka von Mallinckrodt in the EU-funded database project “German Slavery” and thus gain first insights into the work of historians at the university. At the same time, however, I also remained as a guide at the German Emigration Center, where books by a certain Jochen Oltmer repeatedly caught my eye in the museum shop. Through him, I became aware of the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and the resulting focus on migration research also in the field of history. For my master’s studies, I transferred to the University of Osnabrück. During my specialized master’s program with a focus on Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research, I was able to work as a student assistant for Jochen Oltmer and support him, among other things, in research for his publication “The Borders of the EU.”
At the beginning of 2022, my master’s studies seamlessly transitioned into the doctorate, funded by a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Without this scholarship, I would probably have left the university after graduation to switch to archival service, museum traineeship, or journalism again; the working-class child in me had not even thought about a doctorate until the concrete opportunity arose. Parallel to my dissertation, I supervised smaller projects on Digital Public History and remembrance culture of the crimes of the Nazi regime both in Lower Saxony and in Eastern Europe. This went quite well, and when the German Research Foundation approved the Collaborative Research Center 1604 “Production of Migration,” Christoph Rass suggested me for the position of project coordinator of the transfer project.
What are your tasks as project coordinator of the transfer project “Reflexive Migration Research in Museums” of the Collaborative Research Center 1604 “Production of Migration”?
Transfer projects in collaborative research centers usually have the task of carrying knowledge from the CRC to the public, i.e., establishing knowledge transfer. Therefore, it is somewhat unusual that we already have a transfer project in the first funding phase, because first knowledge must be generated before it can be carried outward. However, our transfer project “Reflexive Migration Research in Museums” goes a step further and also wants to bring knowledge from civil society into the CRC. Specifically, we examine to what extent digital tools, especially Virtual Reality, can be used to shift agency in the production and narration of history away from established actors and toward migrantized and therefore often marginalized persons.
For this purpose, we have developed two tools and project branches. The so-called Exhibition Builder enables members of civil society groups to tell their own stories in VR exhibitions. Here we work closely with our external application partner, the Documentation Center and Museum on Migration in Germany (DOMiD), which brings both Germany’s largest collection of migration-related objects and experience in museum education and exhibition design to the project. The so-called Place Changer works with real existing places, from which we create digital and changeable twins. Thus, we can, for example, erect monuments at places where people have become victims of racist violence. Seeing the place digitally transformed can in turn initiate debates about the real existing place.
Within the CRC alone, four different chairs from four different disciplines and subdisciplines at three locations are involved in the transfer project: the Chair for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research under Christoph Rass and the Chair for Social Psychology under Julia Becker in Osnabrück, the Chair for Didactics of History under Lale Yildirim at Kiel University, and the Chair for Migration and Educational Sociology under Aladin El-Mafaalani at the Technical University of Dortmund. In addition, there is our external application partner, DOMiD, as well as our technical application partners, Michael Brinkmeier from the Chair for Computer Science Education and Thomas Jarmer and Marcel Storch from the Working Group for Remote Sensing and Digital Image Processing.
My task as coordinator is to ensure that all project participants remain in dialogue with each other, coordinate appointments, monitor the project budget, and instruct the student assistants. At the same time, I am the spokesperson to the other projects of the CRC and to the so-called “Reflexivity Lab” as well as to the administration. Externally, I am the contact person for potential cooperation partners, most recently for the “Hermes” project of the German National Library.
What does your work day look like? What do you enjoy most?
There really isn’t a typical work day. While this is a challenge on one hand, on the other hand it’s also one of the beautiful aspects of our profession: every day is different; we meet many interesting people and get to travel to exciting places. How our days look is ultimately determined by what is currently pending. Right now, for example, we are having a very productive phase in the transfer project, in which we are revising our previous workshop concept for the Exhibition Builder and consulting with our partners about further proceedings. In such times, I might spend one work day or another in video conferences or answering emails, creating concepts, organizing workshops, and preparing conference contributions.
Additionally, my work day thrives on exchange with my colleagues in the collaborative research center, at the chair, and especially also the working group “Negotiating Migration,” in which we all work on themes of violence-induced migration as a result of World War II. Apart from regular presentations in the chair’s colloquium and in the Integrated Graduate School of the CRC, the discussions in this small group and the critical examination of one’s own research are an important and inspiring component of my university everyday life.
But there are also always quieter work phases, especially during lecture-free periods, in which I engage more intensively with my dissertation. This means primarily engaging with and analyzing my source material as well as repeated intensive writing phases, in which I put my findings to paper in the form of essays or dissertation chapters. I have just completed work on a contribution for a special issue on “Refugee Agency” for the Journal of Contemporary History. In such phases, I might sit in front of the PC from morning to evening writing.
Writing is one of three aspects that I particularly like about my profession, even though this process sometimes demands blood, sweat, tears, and considerable nerves from me. In such moments, I understand very well what Dorothy Parker means when she writes: “I hate writing, I love having written.” However, writing is also a way to express oneself creatively. Perhaps not exactly something that outsiders associate with academic work, but true: historians question existing narratives about our past and interpret and tell history anew, based on their source findings and guided by questions from the present.
The second aspect that I particularly like about my profession is traveling. I have the great fortune and privilege that the scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation also included a budget for research trips. This enabled me to travel to London, New York, Washington, D.C., and even to Bermuda for archival research. Conferences, workshops, summer schools, and project work have also taken me to various cities within Germany as well as to Brighton, Warsaw, Vilnius, and Odense.
The third favorite element is closely linked to traveling: archive visits. In archives, there is always this busy, excited, and simultaneously meditatively quiet atmosphere. Everyone is absorbed in their project and source material, and yet curiosity about the secrets of the past lies in the air as a connecting moment, as does the smell of dust and paper. A certain reverence for the old as well as for the archivists as strict and simultaneously service-oriented guardians of these treasures, the subtle thrill of the historian’s actual detective work and – ideally – the occasional eureka moment make archive visits repeatedly an exciting experience that cannot be reproduced in museums or libraries either.
Why did you choose your dissertation topic? What fascinates you about it?
Actually, it was the other way around: the dissertation topic chose me. My colleague and co-supervisor Sebastian Musch had stumbled upon the Bermuda Conference during his research and had applied for a project on this topic at the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2021, but could not carry it out himself due to other commitments. Since I was on the home stretch of my master’s studies at the time – I was just writing my thesis on the phenomenon of “relocations” in the Kingdom of Hanover between 1830 and 1866, supervised by him and Christoph Rass – and I showed great interest in topics of Historical Migration Research and specifically the development of the postwar refugee regime, he suggested me as an alternative recipient of the scholarship. To my great fortune, the Gerda Henkel Foundation agreed to the change, and I was able to begin my doctorate in February 2022 under the working title “The Bermuda Conference 1943. The Negotiations for the Rescue of Jewish Refugees and Their Failure?”
In my dissertation project, I attempt to retell the Bermuda Conference, which attracted the interest of historians especially in the 1970s and 1980s, from the perspective of historical migration research as a formative moment of the modern migration regime. Since the older research literature comes mainly from the field of Holocaust studies, little to no attention has been paid to this aspect so far. Moreover, there is still no monograph that deals exclusively with the Bermuda Conference. Ergo, the existing chapters and essays on this topic do not, in my view, do justice to the complexity of the conference.
The Bermuda Conference was a meeting between representatives of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, in which it was discussed what these two countries could do to solve the “European Refugee Problem.” In the middle of World War II, despite pressure especially from Jewish non-governmental organizations, the answer was: not much. The passivity of the Allies in the face of the million-fold murder of European Jews – which was actually at stake – triggered massive disappointment in world public opinion, and the Bermuda Conference, having “failed,” soon fell into oblivion.
The deeper I delve into the source material, the more previously unnoticed nuances become visible to me. Who were the actors involved in the events – organizations, government departments, and individuals – and what mandates did they pursue? What power did they possess to influence the refugee policy of the USA and the United Kingdom? And where were they limited? Which institutional, ideological, legal, or political path dependencies can be observed starting from the Bermuda Conference? Which is it the result of? How does the conference fit into the war events, into the course of the Shoah, and into the already advancing development of the postwar refugee regime? These and many other questions occupy me, and even when I think I have found an answer, it can be further developed and changed through the discovery of new documents in archives or conversations with colleagues.
What advice would you give to students who aspire to pursue a doctorate in history/would like to work as student assistants?
For me, it paid off on the path to the doctorate to have worked as a student assistant at the university early on. Both at the University of Bremen and at the University of Osnabrück, I owed my employment to the recommendation of instructors who made it based on the interest I showed and participation in discussions in their courses as well as my written performance. As a student assistant, I not only had the opportunity to support my supervisors in their research for their publications and thus develop a rough feeling for the post-master league in academia, but also to participate in conferences and enter into dialogue with scholars at various career stages. This makes one visible within one’s own university to potential supervisors for the doctorate; as mentioned above, I did not find the dissertation, but the dissertation along with supervisors found me.
Already as a student and as a student assistant, it therefore paid off to participate actively, interest-driven, and not only with a view to acquiring credit points in courses and to invest the extra bit of effort in working out term papers and even simple presentations; this way, the right people became aware of me. Perseverance, a certain degree of ambition, and interest in historical topics and research about them are no less important after the master’s degree, but all the more essential.
Beyond that, however, one also needs some – let’s call them – technical skills. First: writing. In our work, we produce primarily one thing: text. This means we must be able not only to string words and sentences together grammatically correctly, but also to carefully build our arguments and support them with evidence across texts of varying length. The end product should also be pleasant to read. At least in my research field, a major challenge is that I cannot write many of my publications in my native language German, since they are better placed in the Anglo-American sphere. The research literature and source material on my topic are also available almost exclusively in English. This means a second hard skill that one should bring to a doctorate: foreign language skills, especially English skills. The Latinum is already a basic requirement for history studies anyway. Each additional foreign language opens new research possibilities and access to further source material.
What interests/hobbies do you have outside your work at the university?
As much joy as my work as a historian brings me: sometimes I also need a break. And at the latest here, the complete nerd in me comes to light. Nerd activity No. 1: Classical choral music. My chamber choir Corona Vocalis works primarily on a cappella music from Renaissance to Modern, but sometimes also pieces with instrumental accompaniment. Right now we are already rehearsing for Christmas time, the last concert of the year traditionally on Thursday before Christmas Eve in the Small Church at the Cathedral. Twice a year, however, I also still meet with other alumni from the children’s and youth choir groups in Bremerhaven and work on pieces with them in women’s choir arrangement, usually also a cappella.
Why this hobby? Apart from the fact that choir singing is demonstrably health-promoting – breathing technique, posture technique, social interaction, etc. – it sometimes simply feels good to force the brain not to think about work. Learning new pieces in mixed positioning – that is, not sorted by voice parts – by reading one’s own staff line in a sometimes four-part, but often also eight-part or even more multi-part system, taking along the text, paying attention to the conductor, and watching what the other singers around you are actually doing is cognitively so challenging that not much brain power remains for other things.
Nerd activity No. 2: Pen and Paper Roleplay. I have been playing for about ten years. Brief explanation: A group of players invents and creates characters according to certain rules, with whom they experience adventures and tell a common story under the guidance of a game master, which is recorded via pen and paper – Pen and Paper, precisely. Polyhedral dice serve in the game as random generators that sometimes lend very unexpected turns to the stories. Currently, I am participating as a player in one campaign and leading another as a master. The appeal of this hobby? Collaborative storytelling, thinking oneself into characters and figures whose character traits do not necessarily have to correspond to one’s own, jointly developing problem-solving strategies, and not to forget: the thrill when the dice fall.
This article is an English translation of the original German post: Inside.NGHM | Annika Heyen