Tätigkeitsbericht 2004-05 (PDF) - Zentrum für Zeithistorische ...

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.
13.-28.7. 2005 Mass Cultures and Mass Media in 20th-Century Germany
Transatlantic Summer Institute in German Studies
Eine Veranstaltung des Center for German and European Studies
(University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Prof. Dr. Eric
Weitz), der Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München (Prof.
Dr. Martin Geyer) und des Zentrums für Zeithistorische Forschung
Potsdam (Dr. Thomas Lindenberger).
Berlin
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.
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