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Summer Institutes

Inaugurated in 2001, the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in German and European Studies (TASI) aims to make a major contribution to the training of the next generation of experts on Germany and Europe by providing a unique research experience to graduate-level students from Germany and North America. Each summer, twelve graduate students from each side of the Atlantic receive fellowships to the 3-week institute. Topics change annually. Institute sites alternate between the University of Minnesota and major German universities. Each institute is led by a team of core faculty and enhanced by guest speakers.

 

Immigration, Citizenship and the Future of Multiculturalism in Europe and North America
Minneapolis, July 30 - August 10, 2007

presented in cooperation with the TIRES (Transnationalism, International migration, Race, Ethnocentrism, and the State) consortium at the Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, and Florida International University. Additional funding was provided by the DAAD via a StaDaF grant and the University of Minnesota's European Studies Consortium (ESC). We thank all sponsors for their generous support.

For the past half century the immigration of culturally and ethnically different groups has been transforming economies, societies and polities on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, Germany has experienced a transition from an ethnically homogenous to a multi-ethnic society, and the cultural diversity of the United States has dramatically increased. In the wake of these transformations, questions of immigration, ethnic and race relations, and the politics of citizenship and multiculturalism have come to the fore in public life, in particular since 9/11. We have seen a rise in xenophobia (and Islamophobia), the proliferation of racially motivated violence, and a retreat from rights and the recognition of cultural difference. Yet we have also witnessed greater efforts to foster the integration of immigrants, civic activism promoting and demanding immigrants' rights and a politics of recognition, and the proliferation of hybrid/multiple identities.

TASI 2007 used the prism of multiple disciplinary perspectives to examine how these processes have played themselves out at the national and local scales in different EU countries and the United States—from the perspectives of both immigrants and receiving societies and states. To what extent do existing theoretical models suffice to understand immigrants' incorporation in multi-cultural societies and polities? What do they suggest about the potential and the limits of multiculturalism and the facilitation of multicultural coexistence in Western democracies?

Core Faculty:

Germany and the East
Berlin, July 20 - August 4, 2006

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)

Germany has had a long, close, and complex relationship with its neighbors to the East—those close by like Poland and Russia as well as those further afield in the Balkans and Turkey. Eastern Europe was a prime site of German imperial ventures, which reached their nadir with Nazi domination and the Holocaust. German culture once reigned supreme in Tallin, L'viv, Budapest, and many other centers, while Eastern Europe has also been a source of large-scale immigration into Germany. The Soviet Union and Russia inspired many Germans, but Germany was also the focal point of East-West conflict during the Cold War. Since 1990 unified Germany has supported the expansion to the East of the European Union. Further to the southeast, diplomats, businessmen, and archaeologists saw great opportunities for Germany in the Ottoman Empire but feared Ottoman expansion and worried about the stability of the Balkans. Today, Berlin is Turkey's second largest city—even though citizenship rights of Turkish residents and the possibility of Turkey's admission into the EU are flashpoints of political conflict. TASI 2006 invited participants to explore Germany's relations with the East in all their forms, including diplomacy, war, genocide, economics, migration, and culture. What is the explanatory power of these themes for understanding the great breaks and continuities of German history in the 20th century?

Core Faculty:

 

Mass Cultures and Mass Media in 20th-Century Germany
Berlin, July 13 - July 28, 2005

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)
and supported with additional funding by the Volkswagen Stiftung

Mass cultures and mass media have fundamentally altered the forms of life in the twentieth century. These shifts in the cultural sphere are decisively linked to economic, technological, and political history and offer a fruitful opening for an interdisciplinary and transnational history of society in the modern era. Beginning in the 1880s, a new public emerged through the standardization of consumer goods and new forms of communication. The old markers of class distinctions were challenged by the rise of mass newspapers and then the cinema, gramophone, and radio, and by political parties that now had to compete for votes in the public sphere. The increasing commercialization of virtually all aspects of life and the new technologies of communication challenged intellectuals and artists to grapple with the meaning of modernity.

Core Faculty:

 

Germany in the Age of Globalization
Munich, July 19 - August 6, 2004

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)
and supported with additional funding by the Volkswagen Stiftung

Both in Europe and the United States, public discussion often presumes that globalization is a late twentieth-century phenomenon. Historical research on German foreign policy has often been limited to Germany's role in Europe. Yet globalization as a historical development reaches back to the late fifteenth century. And although it was shorn of its overseas colonies at the end of World War I, Germany has been linked to the larger world for hundreds of years through emigration and immigration, economics, intellectual and cultural exchange, imperial ventures, and the literary imagination. TASI 2004 examined Germany's multitudinous relations to the larger world by concentrating on the period from the founding of the Kaiserreich into the present. Based in the discipline of history, the seminar also gave serious attention to research and perspectives emanating from cultural studies and the social sciences. Topics covered included the establishment of German colonies in the late nineteenth century, Germany's two efforts to establish continental hegemony, Germany in the global economy, migration from the nineteenth century into the present, and visions of Africa in popular culture. Across the individual topics, seminar participants were concerned with issues of continuities and ruptures—for example, the degree to which racial ideology and racist practices were forged in the colonies and then were transferred back into Germany and Europe; foreign policy goals across the many different regimes that have governed modern Germany; and the links that have bound other countries and regions to the powerful German economy.

Core Faculty:

 

German Citizenship in the Twentieth Century
Munich, July 21 - August 8, 2003

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)
and supported with additional funding by the Volkswagen Stiftung

How do definitions of citizenship intersect with discourses of gender, changing definitions of the social and the political, and the large population movements that continue to transform Europe? Definitions of citizenship always entail mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. For a good part of its modern history, Germany has enabled a fairly broad scope of political inclusion. The Reich constitution of 1871 established universal male suffrage, and the electoral system of the Kaiserreich was robust. Germany also pioneered the welfare state, which served as a mechanism of inclusion, especially for male industrial workers. Yet female suffrage was achieved only in 1919, and the social welfare state tended to classify women as dependents. In the Weimar period, the expansion of the electorate and of social welfare programs coincided with intense conflicts in all areas of politics, society, and culture. The Third Reich, in using the legal code's linkage of citizenship to “blood,” gave its own, particularly brutal definition to the meaning of citizenship. As social actors and institutions have sought to reshape the parameters of full citizenship in both postwar German states, gender ideologies and the presence of foreign workers and refugees are challenging any simple definition of what it has meant to be “German.” What's the future of “being German”?

Core Faculty:

 

Violence and Normality in the Century of Total War
Minneapolis, July 15 - August 2, 2002

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)
and supported with additional funding by the DAAD, the Max Kade Foundation, and Allianz

The two world wars of the twentieth century altered the role of organized violence in German society. The work of victory depended on mass participation. Men were drafted into armies in vast numbers and women were sent to the factories and charged with promoting the family. The morale of the population at home became as vital as the abilities of the troops at the front, so the German state became a more ideological and political agent, propagandizing among the population and intervening in the most intimate spheres of life. The total wars of the twentieth century raised great hopes and desperate fears. They opened up vistas of power and pleasure in the future for those defined in German national or racial terms. But the wars also deeply unsettled German society, raising fears of betrayal from within and of the exactions that might result from failure on the battlefield. Both wars also promoted the salutary effects of political violence, which altered the prevailing norms of human interaction. They produced cultures of violence that massively imperilled populations, Jews in particular in World War II. The wars created a new mode of politics, one that combined the state's claim to total power with mass participation and that made the very composition of the population a central, defining issue of regime goals and strategies, leading ultimately to the Holocaust.

Violence was expressed not only in wartime. Violence occurred in the contested streets of Weimar, Germany, as rival paramilitaries battled for political control. It occurred in labor conflicts throughout the century; in New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s; in the stringent assertion of state power in the German Democratic Republic; and in the more recent emergence of the extreme right. Violence has also been expressed in the home, in strict approaches to child rearing and in the assertion of male dominance over women. The Institute's participants studied violence in Germany from economic, political, social, and cultural vantage points.

Core Faculty:

 

Germany in the Century of American and Soviet Power
Minneapolis, July 9 - July 27, 2001

presented in cooperation with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the Zentrum fuer Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam (ZZF)
and supported with additional funding by the DAAD

After World War II, Germany was, of course, divided into the Soviet-dominated German Democratic Republic and the largely American-influenced Federal Republic of Germany. The two superpowers critically shaped virtually all aspects of state and society in their respective spheres of influence. But the historiography of the last twenty-five years has amply demonstrated that neither superpower could simply exert its will. The Institute explored the policies and practices of the two superpowers in Germany, but also the drawn-out, at times highly frustrating process of interaction by which the two Germanies adapted, shaped, and occasionally blocked the efforts of their respective allies and protectors. Moreover, both Germanies developed in competition and in tandem, each carefully watching the other's moves across the Cold War divide. A key theme of the seminar was the mutual interaction of the two Germanies in a divided world.

Core Faculty:

 

Martin Geyer is Professor of Modern History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich. He is the author of Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne. München 1914-1924 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998) and editor (with Manfred Berg) of Two Cultures of Rights: The Quest for Inclusion and Participation in Modern America and Germany (Cambridge, 2002). He was formerly the Associate Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Konrad H. Jarausch is Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, and Director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam. He has written or edited more than twenty books in modern German history. Two of his most recent books are Die unverhoffte Einheit, 1989-1990 (Frankfurt, 1995) and the edited volume Versäumte Fragen. Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart/Munich, 2000), edited with Rüdiger Hohls.

Helga Leitner is a Professor of Geography and Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Gastarbeiter in der städtischen Gesellschaft (Campus Verlag, 1983). Her most recent publications include "Transnationalism and migrants' imaginings of citizenship" (Environment and Planning A 2006, 38, 9), and a special issue of Environment and Planning A 2006 (co-edited with Patricia Ehrkamp) titled Rethinking Immigration and Citizenship: New Spaces of Migrant Transnationalism and Belonging.

Thomas Lindenberger is Project Director at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam. He is the author of Volkspolizei: Herrschaftspraxis und öffentliche Ordnung im SED-Staat, 1952-1968 (Böhlau, 2003), and Straßenpolitik: Zur Sozialgeschichte der öffentlichen Ordnung in Berlin (J.H.W. Dietz, 1995). He teaches at the Universität Potsdam.

Sarah J. Mahler is Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies at Florida International University in Miami. She is the author of American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins (Princeton, 1995) and Salvadorans in Suburbia: Symbiosis or Conflict (Allyn & Bacon, 1996). Her research and publications focus on Latin American and Caribbean migration to the United States with special emphasis on the importance of gender.

Michael Minkenberg is Vice President for International Relations and Professor of Political Science at Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. His publications include Die neue radikale Rechte im Vergleich. USA, Frankreich, Deutschland (Opladen, 1998), Politik und Religion. PVS Special Issue 33/2002 (co-edited with U. Willems) and, most recently, "Democracy and religion—theoretical and empirical observations on the relationship between Christianity, Islam and liberal democracy" in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1/2007.

Gregor Thum is DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the prize-winning Die fremde Stadt: Breslau 1945 (Siedler, 2003).

Eric D. Weitz is Professor of History and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, 2003), and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, 1997).

 

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Last modified on January 17, 2008