The monthly newsletter of the Research Group on Contemporary History and Historical Migration Research at the University of Osnabrück By Benjamin Look & Jessica Wehner After a brief summer break at the beginning of September, the Tracker editorial team returns with an August-September double issue of the NGHM newsletter. Team NGHM utilized the lecture-free period for conference travels, for example to Denmark and Israel, and for completing publication projects. Our August and September double issue of the newsletter reports on the diverse activities of the team. Insights On September 24, Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, Dr. Sebastian Huhn, Annika Heyen, and Jessica Wehner departed for Odense to participate in an international workshop on “Agency and Forced Migration” on September 25 and 26. This workshop was organized by Morten Baarvig Thomsen and funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Christoph Rass and Jessica Wehner opened the workshop with a joint keynote offering reflections on agency concepts in reflexive migration research, as developed and tested by the Osnabrück Collaborative Research Center 1604. In his presentation “Host Countries in the Global South as Co-Creators of the Post-Second-World-War Refugee Regime,” Sebastian Huhn discussed the ‘Western-influenced’ historiography of the post-war refugee regime. Using Venezuela as an example, he highlighted the role of Global South actors in shaping the post-war order. In her micro-study of Sol Bloom, one of the United States delegates at the 1943 Bermuda Conference, Annika Heyen examined the constraints on individual actors’ agency within larger processes and structures, as well as their strategies for pursuing their own goals. She argued that individuals like Bloom, through subtle interventions, nevertheless succeeded in helping to shape the post-war refugee regime despite restrictions imposed by a controlled environment. In September, Prof. Christoph Rass delivered several additional presentations in the context of various projects and collaborations. On September 8, he was a guest speaker at an event of the Association of Lower Saxony Sinti in Hannover, with the contribution “On the Relationship between Production and Projection. Reflexive Perspectives on ‘Antigypsyist’ Knowledge Orders.” In his presentation, he discussed the concept of Z-projection through the lens of the theoretical frameworks of the Osnabrück Collaborative Research Center 1604. On September 19, Christoph Rass was the keynote speaker at the 55th anniversary of the city of Georgsmarienhütte. In his contribution titled “An Unexpected Celebration. Notes on the Founding of the City of Georgsmarienhütte,” he reviewed the circumstances of the city’s founding, in which local actors successfully utilized the window of opportunity during Lower Saxony’s territorial reform to push through the city’s establishment in the Düte valley. On August 7, 2025, the GOKnow project group traveled together with our colleagues around Prof. Dr. Gernot Fink from TU Dortmund to Koblenz to meet with the AI specialists of the Federal Archives. The subject was the development of a research proposal that aims to utilize the possibilities of artificial intelligence for the in-depth analysis of archival material from the context of German occupation rule in Europe and North Africa during World War II. On September 30, a poster slam organized by the university library took place on the theme “Digital Future?” In this context, 13 posters were presented and discussed in short pitches to further advance interdisciplinary dialogue. Christoph Rass participated with a pitch on developing a dedicated “Digital Humanities and Social Sciences” certificate. Annika Heyen presented the transfer project of SFB 1604; Ahmet Celikten and Maik Hoops presented project A3 “‘You are guest worker children!’ Science, School and the Production of Figures of Migration.” Lukas Hennies presented the use of digital methods in the project “Deadly Forced Labor in Karya 1943.” Our student assistants Johannes Pufahl and Lea Horstmann respectively presented the projects “Mapping the Co-presence of Violence and Memory in Belarus” and “The Emsland Camps as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation.” The university library awarded a prize for the best pitch, which Annika Heyen managed to secure! Team NGHM at the poster slam (Photos: Jessica Wehner and Annika Heyen) On September 29, Imke Selle traveled to Kiel to participate in the conference of the working group “History Didactics Theory,” which was organized by our colleague Lale Yildirim. Based on precirculated papers, discussions were held in various sections on the theme “Historical Education: Prophet or Toothless Observer?” The central question was how and whether historical education can provide orientation in a crisis-ridden present – characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and war in Europe – or whether and to what extent history didactic theory must be expanded. In August, Sebastian Musch gave a presentation titled “The Israel Mission and the Reconstruction of Jewish Communities in West Germany” as part of the workshop “Beyond Wiedergutmachung: Unraveling the Legacies of the 1952 Holocaust Reparations Agreement.” The workshop was jointly organized by the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies (MALI) at Ben-Gurion University, and the Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. In September, he then participated in the workshop “Methodological Approaches and Research Techniques in Migration and Humanitarian Studies” at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow and gave a presentation on “The Transatlantic Migration from Nazi Germany and Global Intellectual History.” History@SFB1604 From September 9-10, 2025, the SFB 1604 retreat took place at the castle. On September 9, the A3 project participated in a workshop with SFB colleagues to exchange further ideas for book chapters planned for 2026. On behalf of the A3 team, Ahmet Celikten presented the draft of their chapter titled “Situating ‘Gastarbeiterkinder’: Science, School and the Production of Figures of Migration.” Following the presentation, a productive discussion session took place. On September 10, Christoph Rass and the A3 team provided comments on the ongoing work by Peter Schneck and Laura Zander titled “Migrancy in Law and Literature: The Figuration of the Migrant as a Subject of Rights.” Furthermore, other projects from Cluster A “Figures” presented their research work, followed by open questions and comments. Notes On August 13, the team of the project “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation” – Imke Selle, Lina-Sofie Winkler, Marlene Schurig, and Lea Horstmann – met with Jacqueline Meurisch and Sebastian Weitkamp from the Esterwegen Memorial to show them, as cooperation partners, the 360° virtual tours of the sites of the 15 former ‘Emsland camps’ – former concentration, prisoner, and prisoner-of-war camps in Emsland and the County of Bentheim – created within the framework of the project. Team NGHM was able to present several new publications in August and September: In September, the article “Virtual Reality and Digital Literacy in Theory, Teaching and Empirics. A Workshop Report” by Imke Selle and our Kiel colleague Lale Yildirim appeared in the collected volume “Researching History Didactics. Theory and Empirics in Dialogue.” The contribution shows through an empirical study that digital storytelling and the acquisition of digital competencies are central prerequisites for historical learning in a digitally influenced culture, and advocates for an expansion of history didactic theories with the concept of “digital historical-cultural agency.” In the current issue of the journal History & Theory (64/4), the forum “Migration, Translation, Narrative” edited by Julie Weise (University of Oregon, Eugene) and Christoph Rass has appeared, in which nine scholars from Germany and the USA, including literature and cultural studies scholars, historians, and representatives of ethnic studies, discuss the concept of translation of migration in interdisciplinary author teams. Also in September 2025, a contribution on AI-assisted analysis of historical sources appeared, in which the Osnabrück NGHM team, together with the Pattern Recognition working group at TU Dortmund around Prof. Dr. Gernot Fink, presents possibilities for making the so-called CM/1 files from the holdings of the Arolsen Archives machine-readable with the help of LLVMs. Fabian Wolf, Oliver Tüselmann, Arthur Matei, Lukas Hennies, Christoph Rass, Gernot A. Fink: CM1 – A Dataset for Evaluating Few-Shot Information Extraction with Large Vision Language Models, in: Yin, Xu-Cheng; Karatzas, Dimosthenis; Lopresti, Daniel (eds.): Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2025, Part II, Cham 2025, pp. 23-39. Sebastian Musch reviewed the monograph “The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the ‘Third Reich’” by Baijayanti Roy for the American Historical Review. At the end of September, Team NGHM bid farewell to Lina-Sofie Winkler. Lina-Sofie worked on the project “The ‘Emsland Camps’ as a Conflict Landscape in Transformation.” She actively supported the project from the beginning – both in digitizing the sites of the 15 former ‘Emsland camps’ and in processing the data into 360° virtual tours. Additionally, she actively supported project doctoral candidate Imke Selle through transcription and preparation of conducted interviews. We thank Lina-Sofie very much for her commitment and wish her all the best for completing her studies and her future path! At the end of September, Julia Lohmann also left the A3 project team of SFB 1604 “Production of Migration.” Since the beginning of the project, she worked closely with the A3 colleagues and provided valuable support in building and compiling the digital corpus as well as in literature research. Recently, Julia also submitted her master’s thesis, which deals with the figure of the “second generation,” a topic closely connected to the project’s theme. We thank Julia warmly for her commitment, support, and teamwork during her time at SFB 1604 and within the A3 project and wish her all the best for completing her master’s degree and her future professional career. Blog Posts in August and September Jessica Wehner and Benjamin Look: NGHM-Tracker (8/2025), August 2, 2025. Valentin Loos: Right-wing Populist Historical Politics for Destabilizing Democratic Systems | Summary of the Article by Valentin Loos in Historia Prima, 2. 2025, August 5, 2025. Imke Selle: Making History Production ‘Playable’ | The “Osnabrück Peace Chess.” The Negotiation of Memory in Game Format, August 7, 2025. Manuel Büchner & Leonie Güneri: There and Back Again | Excursion to the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage Hannover, August 14, 2025. Annika Heyen: History@SFB: DOMiD Workshop with Students of History and IMIB, August 29, 2025. Team NGHM: Inside.NGHM | Frank Wobig, September 8, 2025. Outlook & Current Events The Osnabrück Film Festival is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. On this occasion, the Osnabrück Film Festival, together with the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück and ThinkTank Migrationspolitik e.V., will look back at 40 years of cinematic narratives about migration, belonging, and identity on October 11, 3-5 PM, at the Felix Nussbaum House. From the “return of guest workers” in the 1980s, through the “baseball bat years” of the 1990s, integration debates of the 2000s, flight migration of the 2010s, to transnational identities of the 2020s – the film archive of the Osnabrück Film Festival shows how societal discourses and cinematic perspectives have changed. Discuss together with historian Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass, filmmaker Serpil Turhan, and cultural studies scholar and cultural practitioner Aurora Rodonò which narratives were formative, which breaks and continuities are evident – and how cinema can contribute to reflecting on and renegotiating Germany’s self-understanding as a country of immigration. The event will be moderated by Vera Hanewinkel (IMIS). Interested parties are cordially invited. Admission is free.
This article is an English translation of the original German post: NGHM-Tracker (9-10/25)