2024-2025 Transatlantic Research Exchanges
CGES is focused transatlantic research exchanges such as:
1. Benefits of Diversity: Results of Cultures in Motion
Key UW-Madison Faculty: Sonja E. Klocke, B. Venkat Mani, Zach R. Fitzpatrick, Nâlân Erbil
Under the umbrella of “Benefits of Diversity: Results of Cultures in Motion,” we strive to bring together scholars, artists, activists, and archivists to engage in cross disciplinary, transatlantic, interinstitutional conversations about the intersections of migration, cultural diversity, and society in Germany’s past and present. Since we seek to continue to directly engage artists and writers whose work is read, circulated in original and translation, and located in the context of (post)migration and diversity, writer Ronya Othmann will participate in our workshop in Madison, and Deniz Utlu has indicated his strong interest in participating in the Berlin workshop in 2024. In our meetings and publications, we aim to foster exchanges across subfields, institutional settings, and minoritized communities. We consider it essential to also overcome the enduring East/West divide when we think about diversity and (im)migration, and therefore intend to take both West and East German (hi)stories of migration into consideration to discuss developments since unification. With the notable exception of Naika Foroutan’s work on intersectional perspectives on German-German unification, academic conversations still tend to focus on either East or West Germany. In addition, with the growing field of World Literary Studies we seek to investigate modes through which translation becomes central to the experience of migration, both as the migration of human beings, and through Bibliomigrancy (Mani), the material and figurative, physical and virtual migration of books (Mani 2017). DAAD funding will enable us to bring several scholars – from a variety of disciplines – and artists to UW-Madison. It will further facilitate travel for the UW faculty affiliates and their graduate students to conduct research and collaborate with co-authors based in Europe.
2. Diverse Musical Networks: Berlin and Madison in the 1960s
Key UW-Madison Faculty: Pamela Potter, Parry Karp, Jonathan Pollack
Our project will focus on those musicians who came to Madison, Wisconsin, the most prominent of which were the members of the Pro Arte Quartet, who were stranded here at the outbreak of the war and stayed on to become the first resident string quartet at any American university. Prof. Schmidt has uncovered the correspondence of Michael Kopfermann, a Berlin musicologist and performer who came to Madison to study with the Pro Arte’s violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Kopfermann’s letters to his mother, he offers a rare and detailed account of the intellectual life in Madison in the 1960s and the vibrancy of the community arising from the presence of so many German emigrés who landed there. The letters, all of which are housed in Berlin, would need to be supplemented by materials in the university archive at UW-Madison, such as the rich collection left by history professor George Mosse, the exiled heir to the Mosse publishing dynasty; along with other testimonies and documentation from various members of the German expatriate community, including Professor Jost Hermand. In Madison, we envision collaborations with colleagues in the Mead Witter School of Music (specifically, the current members of the Pro Arte Quartet), Mills Music Library, the University of Wisconsin Archives, the Max Kade Institute, and the newly established Rebecca Blank Center for Campus History, which would add historical depth to the question of German emigré musicians coming to Wisconsin against the backdrop of German migration and the history of Jews and other minorities at the University of Wisconsin. We will also work with Professor Jonathan Pollack, an expert on the history of Jews in Madison in the twentieth century. Colleagues in Berlin and elsewhere will include Dr. Schmidt’s co-director of the Forschungsstelle and archivist at the UdK, Dr. Dietmar Schenk; Privatdozent Dr. Matthias Pasdzierny (UdK); and the co-editors of the letters of Eduard Steuermann, a member of the original Pro Arte Quartet: Dr. Thomas Ertelt (Berlin), Dr. Dorothee Schubel (Washington, DC), and Dr. Regina Busch (Vienna).
3. Migration and Memory in Postwar and Contemporary Europe
Key UW-Madison Faculty: Brandon Bloch, Liina-Ly Roos, Leonie Schulte
Our research group aims to move beyond the polemics that have surrounded Europe’s most recent wave of memory wars. Instead, we ask a set of more basic questions about why debates about migration policy are frequently carried out as contests over historical memory. Our research is driven by questions such as: How have competing historical narratives (of World War II-era genocide and expulsion, postwar labor migrations, Communism, decolonization, and/or EU expansion) shaped elite and popular attitudes toward migration policy in Europe? How do current anxieties surrounding migration to Europe mirror or depart from cycles of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee backlash since 1945? How do recent immigrants to Europe engage with, adapt, and resist dominant historical narratives in their countries of residence? We specifically want to showcase scholarship that links migration controversies in Europe with colonial legacies and with the study of race, gender, and sexuality.
A hallmark of our research group is its interdisciplinary focus. Research on migration to Europe is often divided between social scientists working with ethnographies and data analysis, and humanities scholars focused on textual and cultural representations. We aim to bridge these approaches and bring them into dialogue. The core faculty organizers are working on research projects related to European migration from the perspectives of history, anthropology, and literary and media studies. Brandon Bloch is launching a new project on the international human rights activism of German-speaking refugee and expellee organizations in West Germany and Austria, from 1945 through the post-Cold War era. His research will examine how German and Austrian activists internationalized the memory of ethnic cleansing in Central Europe and thereby shaped key categories of modern international law, including the “right to the homeland,” “right against expulsion,” and “right of return.” Leonie Schulte’s current project explores the ways in which Germany’s language and integration policies impact newcomers’ access to the labor market, showing that language-based requirements for employment significantly slowed down rather than accelerate access to work (as was initially intended). Leonie Schulte’s work thus explores the lingua-temporal dimensions of migration, displacement, and policy-in-practice, exploring themes of temporal disruption, uncertainty, waiting, stuckness, and boredom. Liina-Ly Roos continues work on her project that explores how Baltic cultural texts deal with questions of whiteness, white privilege, and migration in a region that has defined itself primarily as a victim of Communism, but in the twenty-first century has realigned itself with Western Europe. Frances Tanzer’s current work examines the nostalgia and melancholy surrounding representations of Jewish absence after the Holocaust and its impact on displaced peoples since 1945. Looking at examples from Austria, she proposes that philosemitism has been a key element in cultural reconstruction since the Holocaust and in the establishment of contemporary discourses about migration.
Our list of proposed collaborators is similarly interdisciplinary, as well as international. In addition to scholars of German-speaking Europe, our collaborators include numerous specialists on Northern and Eastern Europe, regions that remain underrepresented in European Studies in North America. Migration controversies in these countries over the past three decades have intersected with wider political transformations, including democratic transitions, EU expansion, and NATO enlargement. Moreover, Baltic, and Eastern European states became countries of net immigration only after four decades of Communist rule, unlike Western European countries that recruited millions of labor migrants beginning in the 1950s. Our diverse collaborators will enable us to ask how the intersections of migration and historical memory differ in Northern and Eastern Europe from more familiar Western European cases.