The Entertainer: Mark Newton’s Raison d’être
When the door opens at Mark Newton’s condominium in Yardley, Pennsylvania, it is as if a curtain has been drawn back from the stage. One is immediately met with movie …
Catherine the Great and the Limits of German Memory Culture
Catherine the Great. Yes, the eighteenth-century Russian Czarina, who was originally German, is back in the news. As reported by Katrin Bennhold in the New York Times, the former chair …
How to Resist the Merger of Anti-Vaxxers and Anti-Semites
If International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 has any meaning, it is to prevent the banalization and memory loss of the Shoah. Yet sadly, Nazi-coronavirus comparisons have proliferated on …
On the Possibilities and Pitfalls of German Holocaust Memory Today
In the past week, we marked the eightieth anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi bureaucrats coordinated the murder of millions of European Jews in a beautiful villa outside …
Black Lives Matter
Activism for Reconciliation in a Divided Country Since a policeman killed Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, the United States has experienced a new phase of dealing …
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Support Our WorkMartin Leiner, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow
AGI is pleased to welcome Dr. Martin Leiner as a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow from October to November 2021. Martin Leiner is Professor for Protestant Theology and Ethics at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. …
What is Angela Merkel’s Legacy for German Memory Culture?
AGI Asks: How has Angela Merkel contributed to Germany’s culture of remembrance and influenced memory politics? Lily Gardner Feldman AGI Senior Fellow All German post-war chancellors have been committed to …
Alliance Relations and Berlin
Berlin posed the worst kind of alliance problem. Lying 100 miles inside East German territory, surrounded by 124 Soviet and East German divisions, Berlin was indefensible by the West. General …
The Berlin Wall
Sixty Years Since its Construction Sixty years ago on August 13, East German leader Walter Ulbricht tried to save his regime by closing off the escape route to West Berlin. …
Queer Activism and Human Rights
During gay pride season, it is always tempting – at least from a German perspective – to focus narrowly on the German elements of queer history and emancipation. These accounts might feature the precocious …
President Biden’s Recognition of the 1915 Armenian Genocide
Will the German Government Follow? On April 24, 2021, President Joe Biden recognized as a genocide the mass killings by the crumbling Ottoman Empire of 1.5 million Armenians, beginning in …