German Historical Institute London - Autumn Lecture Series 2021/22 - German Historical Institute ...

German Historical
Institute London

 Autumn Lecture
  Series 2021/22

The Quest for a New World Order:
International Politics Between Visions
of Global Governance and Catastrophic
Failures in the 1990s

10 November 2021 5.30 p.m. (Zoom)

Fabian Klose (Cologne)
In cooperation with the Faculty of History,
University of Oxford

After the end of the Cold War, the 1990s mark the
beginning of the quest for a new world order. During this
decade new visions of global governance emerged, based
on a redefinition of fundamental principles such as peace,
security, sovereignty, and the idea of responsibility
associated with these multilateral approaches. Far from
being linear and triumphalist, however, these
developments were overshadowed by mass violence,
ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the international
community’s failure to prevent them. Investigating these
visions and accompanying failures offers a way of
historicizing the 1990s and analysing the decade’s lasting
impact on our world today.

Fabian Klose is Professor of International History and
Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Cologne. His
research focuses on the history of decolonization,
international humanitarian law, human rights, and
humanitarianism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. His most recent book, In the Cause of Humanity:
A History of Humanitarian Intervention in the Long
Nineteenth Century, will be published by Cambridge
University Press in February 2022.

On the Difficulty of Describing and
Interpreting the Present: Atto of
Vercelli’s Polypticum

16 November 2021, 5.30 p.m. (Zoom)

Barbara Schlieben (Berlin)

After many months of living through a pandemic, we know
how difficult it is to describe and interpret the present
without being able to assess what the future will bring.
Some idea of the future is always needed, as this talk will
discuss with reference to the writings of the northern
Italian bishop Atto of Vercelli in the first half of the tenth
century. The lecture will begin by examining the
contemporary issues that Atto responded to in his texts
before looking at his assumptions regarding the history of
knowledge. Finally, it will show that Atto’s understanding of
the office of bishop had a substantial impact on his specific
manner of describing the present.

Barbara Schlieben was awarded a Ph.D. from the Goethe
University Frankfurt for her thesis on the court of Alfonso X
of Castile and León. In 2009 she was appointed Junior
Professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After an
interim professorship at the University of Hamburg and a
fellowship at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich, she
became a Professor of Medieval History at the HU Berlin in
2017.

Sleeping Through the Ages: Two
Lectures on the History of Sleep in the
Seventeenth and Twentieth Centuries

7 December 2021, 5.30 p.m. (Zoom)

Wonderful Sleepers: Medical and Supernatural
Explanations for Extra-ordinary Sleep in
Seventeenth-Century England

Elizabeth Hunter (QMUL)

Seventeenth-century readers were fascinated with stories
of wonderful sleepers. Wonder books contained marvellous
and terrible tales of people who slept without interruption
for days, months, or even years, and of those who got out of
bed while still asleep to compose poetry, walk on rooftops,
or commit terrible acts of violence. These were linked to
descriptions of the amazing sleeping habits of the
dormouse and the snake in books of natural history, and to
accounts of witchcraft, possession, and ghost sightings.
While wonderful sleep might appear to provide evidence of
a world beyond the material, it was generally agreed that
the explanation could be found in the secret workings of
the body.

Elizabeth Hunter is an Honorary Research Fellow at Queen
Mary, University of London. She is currently writing a
monograph entitled The Secrets of Sleep, funded by the
Wellcome Trust. Some of this research has been published
in the journals Social History of Medicine (forthcoming) and
The Seventeenth Century (2020).

The Sleep of our Dreams?

Hannah Ahlheim (Giessen)

We sleep away almost a third of our lifetimes. This
unconscious, unproductive third often seems to be an
obstacle to a lively 24/7 society. At the same time, sleep is
not only vital for life and health, but offers space for
dreaming. How does a modern society governed by
science, rationality, and efficiency deal with the unruly
phenomenon of sleep? The lecture tells a history of sleep in
the twentieth century that is linked to a history of work and
tired soldiers, but also to a history of culture, consumption,
and the sciences.

Hannah Ahlheim is Professor of Contemporary History
at the University of Giessen. After studying in Berlin,
she received her doctorate from the Ruhr University
Bochum and taught at the University of Göttingen.
Her research interests include the history of National
Socialism and antisemitism, the social and cultural
history of sleep, and science and the history of time.

Charlotte Beradt and Reinhart
Koselleck on Dreaming in the Age of
Extremes

14 December 2021, 5:30 p.m. ( Zoom)

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Berkeley)

Recently, there has been an uptick of interest in the late
Reinhart Koselleck’s theoretical writings. Whenever
scholars across the humanities deal with issues of
temporality, with present pasts or past futures, Koselleck’s
work is invoked. Yet new histories of fascist and Nazi times
oddly omit one of Koselleck’s most incisive essays, ‘Terror
and Dream’. This talk will explore Koselleck’s thinking in
conversation with Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of
Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939, especially
their insistence that dreams are the most telling historical
source for understanding how experiences of time
fundamentally changed in the 1930s.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Associate Professor of Late
Modern European History at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is working on several books at the moment,
including an intellectual biography of Reinhart Koselleck
(1923–2006).

Following the Neo-Tories from Inter-
War Fascism to Post-War Democracy:
The Revolt of British Conservatives
against Political Modernity – and its
Aftermath

11 January 2022, 5.30 p.m.

Berhard Dietz (Mainz)
In co-operation with the Britain at Home and Abroad
Seminar, IHR

Why did right-wing extremism fail in interwar Britain? This
question is usually answered with reference to the failure of
British fascism. This lecture, however, argues that the threat
to British parliamentary democracy also came from a
network of radical British Conservatives known as Neo-
Tories. The Neo-Tories regarded liberal democracy as being
in a state of degeneration and worked towards anti-
democratic change through a ‘revolution from above’. The
lecture will examine this thread of political history from the
1930s, but it will also look at the aftermath of the story and
investigate whether and how the Neo-Tories came to terms
with the overseas immigration and European integration
which marked post-war democracy.

Bernhard Dietz teaches Modern History at the Johannes
Gutenberg University Mainz. He received his Ph.D. in history
from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010 and finished
his second book on the cultural history of West German
capitalism in 2018. He has been President of the German
Association of British Studies (AGF) since 2016.

Registration
Please that some lectures will take place online
                  via Zoom.

   For information on how to register for the
  individual lectures, please visit our website
(https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures). Please
   check the website for updates on the final
               format of an event.

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