Julia Lange

Julia Lange is a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg, Germany and was a Visiting Fellow at AGI in 2013-2014. In her dissertation, supervised by Prof. Dr. Susanne Rohr, she examines the interrelation between the politics of memory of German-American institutions and the Holocaust discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary focus of her work is on transnational discourses of victimization and reconciliation and the dynamics of the competing memories that have been produced by German-American and Jewish-American organizations since the end of the Second World War.

Ms. Lange has recently published a book entitled Herman the German: Das Hermann Monument in der deutsch-amerikanischen Erinnerungskultur (LIT Verlag) in which she examines the changing function of the German “Hermannsdenkmal” and its American equivalent, the Hermann Monument in New Ulm, Minnesota from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Both monuments commemorate Arminius the Cherusci and the Germanic victory over three Roman legions at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD, a battle which later became hailed as a German founding myth with the rise of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. Ms. Lange’s study explores not only how German-American identity is both shaped by and reflected in the meanings ascribed to the Hermann Monument, but also why its history of reception significantly differs from the monument’s German counterpart in North Rhein-Westphalia.

Ms. Lange studied American Studies, English Literature, and Law at the University of Hamburg and the University of Oxford. After receiving her Masters of Arts in 2011, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2012, followed by a Visiting Scholarship in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University in 2013. Ms. Lange is currently a scholar with the German National Academic Foundation and has previously been awarded a scholarship in the European Excellence Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).