This post was automatically translated from the German original at
NGHM-Tracker (4/26).
The monthly newsletter of the Working Group on Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück
By Benjamin Look & Jessica Wehner
March was marked by movement – in both the literal and figurative sense. Several contributions revolved around the theme of excursions: students traveled to Nuremberg, explored the historical layers of a city that, like few others, carries within it the Middle Ages and National Socialism, and in doing so tested for the first time a specially developed web app as a digital companion tool. That historical learning can succeed even without physical presence was demonstrated by a hybrid excursion to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. Alongside these didactic experiments, Thomas Mann moved to center stage: a student conference devoted itself to his BBC radio addresses to the “Deutschen Hörer” [“German Listeners”] and asked what these sources reveal about exile, resistance, and forced migration.
Our March edition of the newsletter reports on the diverse activities of the team.
Insights
In the winter semester 2025/26, Team NGHM conducted a block seminar that explored Thomas Mann’s BBC radio addresses “Deutsche Hörer!” [“German Listeners!”] (1940–1945) as a historical document of the history of exile and migration. At the end of the course, a workshop day took place followed by a student conference at which fourteen papers were presented in four thematic panels. The panels were chaired by Annika Heyen, Sebastian Musch, Sebastian Huhn and Jessica Wehner; the concluding remarks were delivered by Christoph Rass.
At the center of the conference was the question of how intellectual resistance from exile could function. Mann recorded his addresses onto gramophone records in California; the recordings were transported to New York, transmitted to London via telephone line, and broadcast via the BBC’s German Service – a transatlantic production process that made visible the enormous infrastructural demands of this form of resistance communication. The students approached the body of sources from perspectives drawn from media history, rhetoric, intellectual history, and sociology. Particularly illuminating was the so-called “mirror thesis”: Mann’s reporting on the Holocaust followed less his individual state of knowledge than the publicly available level of information in the United States. Equally productive was the question of Mann’s dual role – between institutional integration into the BBC’s propaganda apparatus and his own intellectual aspirations.
After the block seminar on site, some colleagues from Team NGHM set off southward together with colleagues from the Chair in Medieval History:
From 17 to 19 March 2026, students from the Historical Seminary at the University of Osnabrück undertook a three-day excursion to Nuremberg – a city that, like few others, condenses historical layers and continuously renegotiates them. The trip was led by Christoph Rass (Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research) and Christoph Mauntel (Medieval History) – and accompanied by Lukas Hennies, Sebastian Huhn and Lara Jäger –, who deliberately adopted an interdisciplinary perspective. The guiding thread of the excursion was an insight as simple as it was unsettling: what is perceived in Nuremberg as historic building fabric is, to a large extent, reconstructed. The question of authenticity, staging, and reconstruction proved far less self-evident than the city’s picturesque surface might suggest. At nine stations in Nuremberg and Fürth, the students explored the city’s multilayered history. At the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, the focus was on the Behaim Globe of 1492/93 – the oldest surviving terrestrial globe, which at the same time depicted a world without the Americas. The exhibition “Nürnberg GLOBAL 1300–1600” illuminated not only the city’s global trade networks but also their darker aspects: Nuremberg merchant houses were involved in the transatlantic slave trade. A tour of the old town made tangible the scale of the destruction wrought on 2 January 1945, when 90 percent of the medieval old town was reduced to rubble. At the Kaiserburg, a guided tour showed how the National Socialists deliberately instrumentalized medieval symbolism to legitimize their regime. The Nazi Party Rally Grounds, in turn, brought to the fore a long-neglected aspect: the history of the prisoners of war and forced laborers deployed there. The excursion thus combined medievalist and contemporary historical perspectives into a productive tension – and raised fundamental questions about who constructs history, how, and for whom.
A somewhat different kind of excursion took place on 23 January 2026: a group of students from the University of Osnabrück undertook a digital excursion to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial under the leadership of Imke Selle. Originally planned as an in-person event, the format was spontaneously converted into a hybrid form due to snow and ice – a circumstance that in no way diminished the engagement with the site. The session began with a shared reading of a text by Detlef Garbe, who situated Neuengamme as a central concentration camp of the north-western German region. With more than 80 satellite camps and at least 42,900 victims among more than 100,000 prisoners, the historical dimensions of the site quickly came to the fore. Particularly illuminating was the discussion of the close entanglement between the Hanseatic city of Hamburg and the camp regime: the city had deliberately used the camp for the production of bricks for its monumental urban redevelopment plans. At the heart of the digital tour was a 360-degree walkthrough that made the extensive grounds experiential. Virtual reality headsets were also employed – an offering that the students assessed as innovative but also reflected upon critically. The larger-than-life representation in the VR environment actually worked against the intended sense of presence and prompted the fundamental question of whether technological immersion genuinely contributes to deeper historical understanding. Particular interest was aroused by the post-war history of the site: used for decades as a prison, an appropriate memorial could only come into being through pressure from survivors’ associations and the social transformation of the 1980s. The report by Jule Kumbrink demonstrated impressively how digital formats can enable a reflective engagement with memorial work – without replacing a physical visit.
But it was not only excursions that featured on Team NGHM’s agenda – fieldwork was also on the program: on 24 March 2026, Lea Horstmann, Marlene Schurig, Hannah Foth, Johannes Pufahl and Ilka Schwerdtfeger set out under the leadership of Imke Selle to the Emsland region to produce supplementary recordings at the sites of the 15 former Emsland camps and 9 camp cemeteries as part of the project “Die Emslandlager als Konfliktlandschaft in Transformation. Forschendes Lernen am Schnittpunkt von universitärer Lehrer*innenbildung, Gedenkstättenpädagogik und partizipativer digital public history” [“The Emsland Camps as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation. Research-Based Learning at the Intersection of University Teacher Education, Memorial Pedagogy, and Participatory Digital Public History”]. The aim was to complete the historical documentation and digitization of the former camp sites.
Computer Science meets Digital History: Workshop in Osnabrück
On 22 March 2026, a one-day workshop took place in Osnabrück at which Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass and Prof. Dr. Gernot A. Fink (Pattern Recognition Group, TU Dortmund) deepened the collaboration between their research groups. The two groups have been cooperating for several years at the intersection of historical studies and computer science: since 2023, they have been working on methods for systematically rendering large historical card indexes and other mass-preserved personal records machine-readable with the aid of AI. In the summer semester of 2025, a Dortmund master’s project group had already addressed this question using the CM/1 files from the Arolsen Archives as a case study — a central source for the forced migrations triggered by the Second World War. This cooperation also produced a joint publication at ICDAR 2025.
The workshop prepared a further master’s project group, which will engage with AI-assisted data extraction from historical sources at TU Dortmund during the summer semester of 2026. The Osnabrück historians will again accompany the project group in an advisory capacity, contributing their expertise on source-critical questions, the research context of historical mass data, and the substantive requirements for in-depth indexing. In this way, the cooperation between NGHM and the Pattern Recognition Group continues along a path on which the possibilities and limitations of LLMs and AI for archival work are being systematically explored.
Furthermore, on 9 March, Tim Ott and Annika Heyen participated in the presentation of Collaborative Research Centre 1604 “Production of Migration” by Vera Hanewinkel at the 21st LeLa Annual Conference, where they demonstrated digital tools developed within the transfer project “Reflexive Migration Research in the Museum” to the participants. The presentation of the Collaborative Research Centre included, alongside the Digital Public History station of the transfer project, a poster presentation on various sub-projects, associated projects, and the ReflexLab, and formed part of an excursion that also encompassed the State Archive and the Gestapo cellar. The LeLa conference — short for “Lernort Labor” [Learning Laboratory] — is an event organized by the Federal Association of Student Laboratories. Accordingly, the excursion participants were interested not only in questions concerning the narration of migration history and its present dimensions as well as the research thereof, but particularly also in the applicability of the digital tools when working with diverse groups.
For the online portal Geschichte(n) der deutsch-jüdischen Diaspora [Histories of the German-Jewish Diaspora], a hybrid publication project of the Academic Working Group of the Leo Baeck Institute (LBI) and the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ), University of Potsdam, Sebastian Musch has written a contribution on German-Jewish migrants in Sri Lanka. In the article, he shows how Sri Lanka (then British Ceylon), although situated away from the major migration movements that shaped German Jewry in the twentieth century, became a place of longing and refuge for German-Jewish migrants as the “holy land of Buddhism.” The article also introduces several German-Jewish figures who were active in the Asian sphere and continue to shape Sri Lanka to this day. These include Nyanaponika Thera (Siegmund Feniger), a German Jew originally from Hanau who was ordained as a Buddhist monk on the island and rose to become one of the most important thinkers of Theravada Buddhism in the twentieth century; the Buddhist nun Ayya Khema (Ilse Kussel); the Indologist Betty Heimann; and the writer Anna Ranasinghe.
History@SFB1604
Christoph Rass, Lale Yildirim, and Anna Kaim have published a new article in the series IMIS Working Papers under the title “Museen als Kontaktzone(n) der Migrationsgesellschaft?” [“Museums as Contact Zone(s) of the Migration Society?”]. The article asks how museums, as institutions of historical culture within a migration society, can become spaces in which migration is negotiated not as an exception or special case, but as a social norm — as a conditio humana. The authors begin by establishing a conceptual and terminological framework that understands migration as a constitutive structural feature of modern societies while critically reflecting on the mechanisms by which difference categories such as “migration background” are constructed. In a second step, the museum is examined as a social institution and site of education, with discussion of both its historical entanglement in national identity narratives and its potential as a space of encounter and negotiation — in the sense of a “contact zone” as proposed by Nora Sternfeld. Against this backdrop, the article analyzes existing strategies for the musealization of migration and reveals the conceptual difficulties arising from the fundamental tension between migration as a process of movement and the museum as an institution of fixity.
As a concrete contribution to overcoming these tensions, the article presents the workshop format “Family History as Migration History,” developed at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück since 2014. Through an approach grounded in everyday life that includes all participants, this format renders mobility and migration visible as a shared experience across four generations. The article also describes the transfer of this format into a museum context, piloted between 2017 and 2019 in cooperation with the Deutsches Auswandererhaus [German Emigration Center] in Bremerhaven, as well as the potentials for museum practice derived from this experience — not least the possibility of transcending spatial boundaries, fostering transcultural learning, and strengthening tolerance of ambiguity as a foundation for a plural culture of remembrance.
Notes
Sebastian Musch has reviewed for H-Soz-Kult the book “Nicht alles ist erlaubt, nicht alles ist verboten”. Die deutsch-israelischen Beziehungen in den Geisteswissenschaften (1950–1990) [“Not Everything Is Permitted, Not Everything Is Forbidden”: German-Israeli Relations in the Humanities (1950–1990)] by Sharon Livne, Irene Aue-Ben-David, and Silja Behre. The book traces the beginnings of the Israeli university-level institutionalization of research on German language, literature, and history, and supplements the existing scholarship on the history of (West) German-Israeli relations with a detailed history of science.
Gero Wollgarten, doctoral candidate at NGHM, published his contribution “‘Ein Österreichischer Minsk-Prozess?’ Biografische Zugänge zur österreichischen Strafverfolgung von NS-Tätern am Beispiel von Helmut Heiss (1913–1985) und Johann Kunz (1898–?)” [“An Austrian Minsk Trial? Biographical Approaches to the Austrian Prosecution of Nazi Perpetrators: The Cases of Helmut Heiss (1913–1985) and Johann Kunz (1898–?)”] in the edited volume “Biografien als Sonden der Transformation” [“Biographies as Probes of Transformation”]. The contributions to the volume originate from a workshop held at the University of Vienna in 2022.
The Professorship for Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research has pursued for years the goal of establishing digital methods not as an add-on, but as an integral component of historical scholarship training. This was most recently demonstrated in the context of field excursions: for the excursion “Nuremberg between the Middle Ages and National Socialism” in March 2026, the NGHM team led by Christoph Rass developed a dedicated web app that consolidates logistics, map materials, and historical contexts on a smartphone. Instead of WhatsApp groups, emails, and printed handouts, participants had access to a map-based application that presented all excursion stops as linked information nodes on an OpenStreetMap. Color-coded markers distinguished excursion stops, contextual sites, and infrastructure; a timeline automatically highlighted the current or next stop. The centerpiece of the app consisted of historically grounded introductory texts on nine key sites — ranging from Nuremberg’s rise as an imperial city and its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, through the Nazi Party Rally Grounds, to the Nuremberg Trials and the history of Jewish life in Franconia. Particularly experimental was the integration of a photogrammetrically created 3D scan of an artwork from the Street of Human Rights, embedded “on the fly” into the app. The application was developed using the approach known as “vibe coding” — AI-assisted programming in dialogue with an AI system, without conventional programming skills. This approach connected directly to the seminar “Digital History Workshop: AI & Personal Information Management for Historians,” in which students during the winter semester 2025/26 developed their own web apps and presented them at the first NGHM Web App Slam. The excursion app thus takes its place within the research group’s growing Digital History profile — and demonstrated in the field that situational access to contextual knowledge directly at historical sites is indeed achievable.
Blog Posts in March
- Jessica Wehner and Benjamin Look: NGHM-Tracker (3/26), 2 March 2026.
- Jessica Wehner: Student Conference Words and/as Resistance: Thomas Mann and the German Listeners, 6 March 2026.
- Team NGHM: “Deutsche Hörer!” [“German Listeners!”] — Students Develop Perspectives on Thomas Mann’s Radio Addresses, 9 March 2026.
- Sebastian Musch: Call for Papers | The Age of Humanitarianism. Jewish and Other Global Migrations Between Empire and Decolonisation, 12 March 2026.
- Imke Selle: There and Back Again | Digital Excursion to the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, 16 March 2026.
- Team NGHM: There and Back Again | Nuremberg between the Middle Ages and National Socialism — An Excursion into the Historical Layers of a City, 25 March 2026.
- Christoph Rass: NGHM-digital | An App for Excursions: HistOS’s Trip to Nuremberg as a Test for a DH Prototype, 26 March 2026.
Outlook & Upcoming Events
On 7 April, the summer semester 2026 begins at the University of Osnabrück. Team NGHM will be offering an exciting teaching program, which we will also be publishing on our blog shortly!