Research
Chair of Modern and Contemporary History – Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
Current research projects
Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
The project deals with the French Mexican campaign and France's related efforts to establish an empire in Mexico. The implications of the French intervention in Mexico for the development of the monarchy as a form of state will be examined from a transnational perspective. The importance of the monarchy in the 19th century has attracted increased attention in global historical research in recent years. A more traditional view is represented here by Jürgen Osterhammel, who states a "worldwide tendency toward monarchical decline" in the "Transformation of the World." He invokes the fact that the monarchical form of government has come under increasing pressure since the late 18th century as a result of the trend toward liberalization and democratization.
Recently, however, historians have increasingly pointed to the tremendous persistence of the monarchical form of government into the 21st century. Against this backdrop, the significance of the French Mexican campaign and its associated ambitions must be reexamined: For its failure had only a minor effect on the prestige of the monarchical form of government in France, as it did in Europe in general. For even if the withdrawal from Mexico ultimately ushered in the decline of the second French empire, only a small number interpreted it as the victorious self-assertion of the republic. Otherwise, many contemporaries saw themselves confirmed in their conviction that republican constitutions had a high potential for danger. There was widespread revulsion at the execution of the Mexican emperor Maximilian, and the end of his imperio was seen above all as a shameful triumph of anarchy and barbarism. Mexican President Benito Juarez was Indian, and so racist ideas, as they were gaining virulence in Europe at this time, lent additional force to this interpretation. Even one of Napoleon III's bitterest opponents, the staunch Republican Victor Hugo, wrote a letter urging Juarez not to take Maximilian's life: For his execution would mean the moral defeat of the Republic.
Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
Squatting is a risky form of living. The willingness of squatters to live with the risk of getting into legal trouble could be interpreted as evidence for the decreasing importance of the value of security. However, the study of the squatter movements in Hamburg and London in the 1970s and early 1980s shows that security as a value did play an important role for them, although it was perceived and understood in very different ways. The project examines the various conceptions of security that were negotiated and attempted to be implemented not in the squatter movements themselves, but also in response to them.
Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
Nationalism, which became increasingly virulent in the 19th century, understood the nation as a superior ultimate value, for which its members should go to their deaths if necessary. This put Jews under pressure to confess, as opponents of emancipation repeatedly argued that their loyalty was not to be trusted in the event of war. In the face of these doubts, the majority of European Jews reacted with an unequivocal patriotic commitment to their respective home nations. At the same time, however, many of them, because of their outsider position, recognized the Janus-faced nature of nationalism more clearly than other contemporaries. The project examines how this affected their views of war and peace.
Dr. Amerigo Caruso
The project aims to discuss the recent results of transnational and comparative studies on the revolutions of the 19th century and to develop them further within the framework of a three-year research program. This is a Franco-German-Italian network and funded by the DFG until 2024. The deliberately chosen, long period of investigation, covering the decades between the American Revolution (1776) and the Paris Commune (1871), makes it possible to focus on the medium- and long-term consequences of transfer and interdependence and thus to put the already well-researched short-term synchronous developments into a new perspective.
Dr. Amerigo Caruso
This project analyses the dynamics of continuity and transformation in the first age of global revolutions through notions such as ‘security’ and ‘resilience’, which have only been operationalized in recent years for the study of this period. Resilience, understood as a post-revolutionary ‘security program’, is a crucial factor to understanding political, cultural and ideological reorientations within the aristocratic-bourgeois elites. Using the example of aristocratic families in Sardinia-Piedmont, Saxony and Denmark the project focuses on the shift toward post-revolutionary politics, which is crucial to understanding the course of state-building processes, constitutional reforms and the formation of a new, composite elite, which would largely dominate European politics until the end of the nineteenth century.
Current postdoctoral projects
The multiple crises of the twenty-first century have brought into sharper focus emergency politics and the surrounding debates. However, this field remains a domain of political science, philosophy, and jurisprudence, whereas the practice and theory of emergency politics has not received the same degree of scholarly attention among historians. Most of the existing research focuses on national experiences, especially on the use and abuse of emergency legislation in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Furthermore, traditional approaches to the history of states of emergency explore primarily political and legal developments. The goal of my project is to provide a systematic historical study of emergency politics and the “mentality” underlying them. It follows a twofold approach: first, to displace the focus on the nation-state using a combination of the methods of comparative, transnational, and entangled history. Second, the project examines states of emergency not only within the framework of political and legal history but also as more complex social and cultural phenomena. It investigates transfers and entanglements between France, Italy, Germany and their colonies, which were particularly intense from the late eighteenth until the mid-twentieth century.
Current dissertation projects
Exhibitions by and for women in the 19th century that are not placed in the context of world exhibitions have been studied only sporadically and almost exclusively in national contexts. This renders an important means of communication for the dissemination of modern, emancipatory ideas and conceptions almost entirely unnoticed. The dissertation project addresses the significance of such exhibitions in a transnational context as a medium through which women could take a public stand and advocate for their concerns. Following on from this, the significance of such connections for emancipatory interests outside the organised women's movements will be illuminated. Against this backdrop, German and British exhibitions will be examined, revealing a central layer of the close cultural ties between Britain and the German Empire. The exhibitions considered, which were largely developed and realised by women towards the end of the 19th century, interpret and present the subject of female (paid) labour in multiple ways. On this basis, in a second step, networks of individual and collective actors are analysed to illustrate the emergence of an expanded scope for action.
National days of remembrance connect selected versions of the remembered past with current ideas and goals for the future. They bridge the gap between the layers of time and connect different levels of publicity: Grief as an essential, first and foremost individual, intimate emotion, is being more or less successfully scaled up and thus transferred publicly onto the collective. On a macrosocial scale or when the identity of the dead, the scale or the political context of the suffered loss is of national importance, this is mostly happening with the state itself involved. Thus, national days of remembrance can be a means of visualizing the powers at play in the politics of history on a national level.
This project examines the political, cultural and emotional mechanisms, languages and customs behind national acts of commemoration by looking at national days of remembrance since the end of the Second World War. Conducting an asymmetrical transnational comparison between Germany and the UK, it aims to provide an updated, theoretically based and transnational perspective on national days of remembrance. The period of investigation stretches from the end of the Second World War up to the present. The threshold of 1990 is explicitly crossed, because the increasing temporal distance of the commemorating collective to the object of remembrance – i.e. those, who are being commemorated – alters the working mechanisms of commemorative acts and should thus be taken into account.
There are various ways in which a commemorative event can be ‘national’ – the focus of remembrance, the nationally charged commemorative narrative, the organizational framework and scope, the organizer’s claim, the involvement of state, the outreach, the symbolism, the accessibility, the critical reception as well as the emotional connection with the wider public. All these points give rise to the fact that national days of remembrance are an essential part of the cultural memory of a society and a point of crystallization for a state’s relationship with its past and therefore with itself. Due to their annual repetition, they are an ideal tool for highlighting political, cultural, and social change.
The dissertation is being written as part of the DFG project "Resilience and Vulnerability. European Noble Families in Times of Revolutionary Upheaval 1760-1830" by Amerigo Caruso, which deals with adaptation and coping strategies of noble family networks.
As a case study serves a noble network around the families Reventlow, Bernstorff, Schimmelmann and Stolberg, which played a decisive role in politics and administration in the Danish state during the period under consideration. This corresponds to the focus of the project in the area of the European semi-periphery and is also of particular interest because the Danish monarchy, after a particularly long period of peace, found itself in the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and at their end on the side of the losers.
Kinship structures and their effectiveness in responding to and dealing with disruptive and crisis events will be examined. Theories from family resilience research will provide a new methodological approach to nobility and kinship research at the transition to the 19th century.
North Rhine-Westphalia's schools underwent unprecedented reform in the ten years between 1968 and 1978: The social-liberal coalition in Düsseldorf changed the elementary school, teacher training, political education, the gymnasiale Oberstufe, and pursued the plan to replace the tripartite school system with an integrated comprehensive school. All of this did not meet with the exclusive approval of the population on the Rhine and Ruhr. The aim of my work is to present the arguments of the supporters and opponents of these reforms.
and opponents of these reforms and to place them in the context of the debates in society as a whole at the time. My thesis is that the introduction of comprehensive schools and the reorientation of civic education, for example, were so controversial because they were not only aimed at equal opportunities, but also sought to change very different areas, such as the relationship of authority between teachers and students. New forms of school management and teaching were to be practiced, and a new education for "maturity" or "emancipation" was to be introduced. This, I suspect, gave both reforms the odor of ideological projects and contributed to the partisan polarization and sharpness of the counter-reactions. Whether this impression can be confirmed by the sources will be the guiding question of my investigation.
Conferences
Since the beginning of her term in office, the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has openly declared her support for a "feminist foreign policy", which for her can also justify deliveries of arms to Ukraine. In contrast, Alice Schwarzer, one of the most prominent German feminists, positioned herself in an open letter in the women's magazine Emma in April 2022 as well as in a manifesto for peace at the beginning of this year with the credo that interference in the war from a third party should only take the form of demands for negotiations. As contrary as these positions appear, both are based on the conviction that feminism brings a specific perspective to foreign policy conflicts, can play an important role in conflict resolution, and contribute to a lasting stabilisation of the peace order.
When politicians, not only in Germany but also in other Western countries, declare "feminist foreign policy" to be their programme, this is usually accompanied by the idea that a historical turning point is being reached. However, the idea that there are gender-specific ways of conflict resolution and reconciliation has a long tradition. Already in the early days of the women's movement, its activists used it as an argument to support the demand that women be given a political voice. From the end of the 19th century onwards, feminists in the international women's peace movement tried to influence international relations from a gender-specific position. They were convinced that they could make an important contribution to a lasting peace. An important role was played by the biologistic argumentation that women were destined to give life and therefore had to counteract war, which destroyed life. In the social sphere, too, women often defined their specific task as fulfilling a balancing, reconciling function, and also justified this with reference to "motherliness".
However, the invocation of motherliness in this context was ambivalent, because as an element of bourgeois gender ideology, it could equally serve to justify traditional gender hierarchies. Opponents of emancipation argued, for example, that women's political engagement would lead them to abandon their role as "reconcilers". They considered this a serious threat to social peace. And it seemed downright scandalous to many contemporaries when women deliberately decided to intervene violently in conflicts instead of working for reconciliation.
The conference aims to shed light on the significance of the category "gender" in conflict resolution and reconciliation processes from the 19th to the 21st century from a historical perspective. It does not want to concentrate solely on the women's peace movement, which has already been relatively well studied by historians, but to bring together research that asks about gender attributions in various forms of reconciliation efforts in different constellations of conflict – e.g. it in marriage, in neighbourly disputes, in class conflict or in war.
Special attention will also be given to a global history perspective. For the gender ideology described here was a European product, just as conflict resolution strategies in Europe had their own character, with Christian religious ideas being influential. And for both fields, Europeans were often convinced of their pre-eminence of civilisation. Thus, it is not surprising that from a postcolonial perspective, the approach of "feminist foreign policy" is also criticised as Western superiority thinking. This, too, prompts reason to critically analyse contemporary imaginaries and practices.
Im Mai 2024 jährt sich die Gründung der Bundesrepublik zum 75. Mal. Obwohl es nach dem Zivilisationsbruch durch den Nationalsozialismus gelang, eine stabile Demokratie zu errichten, trüben düstere Gegenwartsanalysen und pessimistische Zukunftsprognosen das Jubiläum: Die gesellschaftliche Polarisierung, die wachsende Anziehungskraft rechtsextremer und gegenüber Europa distanzierter Positionen, die Angst vor der Globalisierung und die Klimakrise mahnen eine kritische historische Rückschau an.
Mit der frühen Demokratiegeschichte, der Umwelt- und Energiegeschichte, dem internationalen Vergleich, der trans- und internationalen Dimension sowie dem bundesdeutschen Umgang mit der NS-Vergangenheit werden fünf Zugänge gewählt, die besonders gut zur neuen historischen Einordnungen dieser Zeit geeignet erscheinen und die in der Forschung aktuell intensiv diskutiert werden.
Im Rahmen der Tagung findet am 9. April 2024 um 18 Uhr im Bundesrat Bonn, Platz der Vereinten Nationen 7, 53113 Bonn eine Podiumsdiskussion in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Haus der Geschichte Bonn statt. Um Anmeldung über die Webseite des Haus der Geschichte Bonn wird gebeten.
Die Tagung findet in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Haus der Geschichte Bonn, der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V. sowie dem "Zentrum für die Historischen Grundlagen der Gegenwart" (ZHGG) der Universität Bonn statt.
James Krull
International conference in cooperation with the Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past at the University of York.
With the end of the Cold War and thus the ‘short 20th century’ came the feeling of entering a new era, of stepping over the threshold of a new epoch. The continuance of the ‘memory boom’ testifies to the fact that this did not include letting go of the past. Nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War, commemorative events, initiatives, customs and places have not lost (or have regained) their vital role in the shaping of national identities in Europe. However, especially in the last 30 years, several transformation processes have arisen that altered the way commemoration is performed, perceived and participated in. The digital revolution, the declining voice of contemporary witnesses and the increasing temporal and personal distance of younger generations to the commemorated past have led commemorative practices to evolve. Additionally, current political controversies (e.g. Brexit, 2015 European migrant crisis, climate change, Covid-19) as well as new conflicts (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine) influenced the public image of past wars and war crimes, which resulted in the necessity for narrative adjustment.
But how was the Second World War commemorated globally over the last 30 years? How did the ways in which the public perceived and participated in commemorative activity and consumption change? Which strategies to meet the numerous transformation processes and challenges proved to be successful – which did not? What kind of controversies were triggered, narratives adjusted, new formats developed, or new media utilised?
Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
International conference in cooperation with the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Tokyo, Komaba, TU Dresden and Leipzig University.
Dr. Amerigo Caruso
Conference at the Saarland University
Publication: Caruso, Amerigo / Metzger, Birgit (Hg.): Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich, Göttingen 2022.
Completed research projects
Prof. Dr. Christine Krüger
The social reforms of the late 19th century were fueled by the fear of revolutionary upheaval - this is a popular but hardly substantiated thesis. Growing social tensions, especially the two major port strikes in London in 1889 and Hamburg in 1896/97, dramatically threatened the urban culture of security. Christine Krüger shows: Revolutionary fears mostly led to demands for repressive measures aimed at social exclusion rather than inclusive social reforms.
Although security has been a central political concern for many eras, its various conceptual designs in nineteenth-century urban centers have hardly been studied in detail. In her exciting study, Christine Krüger compares for the first time the different urban security designs, questions the often drastic reactions and corrects apparent unambiguities in old basic assumptions.
The project was part of the SFB/TRR 138 "Dynamics of Security. Forms of securitization in historical perspective" of the Philipps-Universität Marburg and the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen as well as the Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung.
Publication: Krüger, Christine: „Die Scylla und Charybdis der socialen Frage“. Urbane Sicherheitsentwürfe in Hamburg und London, ca. 1880-1900, Bonn 2022.