Current
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.
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.
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.
Completed
I completed my PhD in the Department of History at Saarland University in 2016. The dissertation, now published as a book through De Gruyter, analyses the rise of modern conservatism and the process of nation-building comparing Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia in the mid-nineteenth-century. My work investigates both comparative and transnational perspectives in order to reach beyond teleological narratives of national history. It not only sheds new light on conservative nation-building but also demonstrates the persistence of revolutionary fears, monarchical loyalties, and local or regional identities within the context of nation-state formation.
This project sheds new light on social conflicts, protest movements, state repression, and the privatization of violence in late Imperial Germany. It focuses on the threat to the Wilhelmine order posed by mass strikes and democratic participation on the one hand, and the construction of insecurity on the other. This construction of insecurity is expressed through the criminalization of political opponents, the mediation of violence, the militarization of "loyal" citizens, and the connection between anti-socialism and nationalism. The project was part of the ERC “The Dark Side of the Belle Époque. Political Violence and Armed Associations in Europe before the First World War” led by Professor Matteo Millan and based at the University of Padova (Italy).
Publications:
- The Threat from Within across Empires: Strikes, Labor Migration, and Violence in Central Europe, 1900-1914, Central European History 54,1/2021, S. 86–111 (with Claire Morelon).
- “We can kill striking workers without being prosecuted”: armed bands of strikebreakers in late Imperial Germany, in: Matteo Millan, Alessandro Saluppo (Hg.), Corporate Policing, Yellow Unionism, and Strikebreaking, 1890–1930. In Defence of Freedom, London 2020, S. 186–202.
- Joining Forces against “Strike Terrorism”: The Public-Private Interplay in Policing Strikes in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914, European History Quarterly 49/2019, S. 597–624.
Accidents are moments of disruption that make the handling of fundamental issues of security, freedom, and social justice concrete and visible. They provide insights into the regulatory capacities of the state, social structures, and the self-understanding of a society. This project analyzed the media echo and political debates following major accidents in Imperial Germany. It was funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation from 2019 to 2021. The resulting edited volume was published by Wallstein Verlag in 2022.