AGI

Society, Culture & Politics

The AGI Society, Culture & Politics Program focuses on crucial topics within the German-American dialogue, including: demographic change, migration/integration, and aging societies; electoral politics at the national, state, and European levels, and comparative analysis of Germany and the United States; diversity within Germany, Europe, and the United States; the politics of collective memory and identity, Holocaust remembrance and reconciliation, and shifting conceptions of national identity that shape perspectives and policy responses.
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Break the Bias

Achieving Gender Parity in European Parliaments The average share of women in national parliaments worldwide remains behind the times, amounting to around 25 percent. In Europe, the figures are only …

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 …

Festivals of Fools

Mardi Gras and Karneval In the United States, “Mardi Gras” evokes certain images: wild parties, massive parades with colorful floats, and strings of beads being thrown around. But among the …

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 …

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Germany’s Christian Democrats

What (Not) to Expect from Friedrich Merz’s Leadership Friedrich Merz is the new leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Four months after the Christian Democrats’ historic defeat in the …

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 …

Another Unmasterable Past?

The Humboldt Forum Part II As I wrote over a year ago, the new museum and cultural complex in central Berlin, the Humboldt Forum, has gradually opened since late 2020 …

Phasing Out Coal in Germany and Appalachia

Lessons Learned from Similar Experiences? The UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, known as COP 26, was held in November 2021, and it again showed that the world continues to face …

Transnational Breast Cancer Advocacy in the United States and Germany

In recent years, German breast cancer advocacy groups have begun taking a more American approach. Since the 2001 founding of Brustkrebs Deutschland e.V., with financial backing from U.S. cosmetics company …

Olaf Scholz’s New Cabinet

Something Old, Something New, Lots of Colors but no Blue For some, Olaf Scholz’s new ‘traffic light’ coalition government is no more than a marriage of convenience. After all, the …