Collaboratively written chapter for the open-access textbook The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000. Introduction: Political borders in twentieth-century Europe are usually thought of as lines on a map, separating one nation-state from another. In practice, however, there are many borderlands and border zones where belonging is ambiguous, arbitrary, or unstable. Throughout…
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I taught this course at NYU Berlin for three semesters in 2023 and 2024. Description: The history of Germany is inscribed into modern Berlin, which has served as the capital of an empire, a failed democracy, the Nazi experiment, a socialist state, and now Europe’s most populous country – all within less than a century.…
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Presented at the workshop “Between Deviance and Marginalization: Gendered Perspectives on Transnational Crime” at the Universität Erfurt.
Artikel veröffentlicht im Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 49. 2021, S. 174-216. Auszug: In vielen Fragen der Nachkriegsordnung waren Ost und West in der Politik der Bundesrepublik engstens verflochten. Der Fall des sequestrierten deutschen Vermögens in Frankreich und der „Annektierung“ des Mundatwaldes in der Pfalz zeigt in extremis, wie Fragen der verlorenen Ostgebiete auch…
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Sammelband rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult (18.11.2021). Veröffentlicht auch bei Soziopolis unter dem Titel “Erkundungen im Grenzgebiet”. Zusammenfassung: Die Beiträge eignen sich am besten zur eigenständigen Lektüre der einzelnen Themen, die allerdings klar mit übergeordneten Fragen verbunden sind. Entsprechend dem Ansatz der Herausgeber:innen, die Bandbreite der Grenzforschung vor allem in theoretischer und methodischer Hinsicht darzustellen, überwiegen insgesamt…
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In October 2021, I made several trips to Warsaw to conduct research in the Archiwum Akt Nowych. Equipped with my trusty camera (and sometimes with my GDR-made Pentacon 135mm lens), I photographed not only untold quantities of archive documents but also some of the sights of Stary Mokotów and central Warsaw.
Signs, text, graffiti, posters, and murals in Wrocław’s public spaces.
People in Wrocław.
Wrocław in the Springtime.
It has been an unusual year to do research abroad, as I have spent most of my time in Poland inside my own apartment, “Zoomed out” in front of a computer screen. Travel long remained restricted, restaurants and bars were closed, and public spaces felt risky due to the coronavirus pandemic. Spring 2021 felt like…
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Presentation for Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion/Université de Lille “Politicisations: Emotions, Sociabilities, Frontiers” seminar
Photos from the Winter in Wrocław, where I have been conducting a research project about the German-Polish border.
Monograph reviewed for German Studies Review 44 (1), 2021 (pp. 208-210). Summary: Taking on Technocracy covers a broad range of developments in the domains of technology, policy, and protest, analyzing them with nuance in the different contexts of East and West Germany. For those wanting to understand why the issue of nuclear power has remained…
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Monograph reviewed for German History in Volume 39, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 330–332. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghab008 Summary: West Germany and the Iron Curtain is an ambitious re-examination of German history from its literal margins. Eckert’s methodologically innovative analysis not only straddles the East-West divide but interrogates 1945 and 1989/90 as chronological caesuras. Refracted through the environmental…
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Article published in European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 28 (4), 2021, pp. 507-530. Abstract: During the 1970s, industrialised society seemed to be on the cusp of sweeping change, moving away from the Fordist ‘modern’ era and into an undefined ‘post-modern’ future. To contemporaries in France and West Germany, arguably nothing symbolized this…
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