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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AGI Profiles: Carsten Schneider

State Minister and Federal Commissioner for East Germany Carsten Schneider, from Erfurt, Thuringia, was elected to the Bundestag in 1998. He was appointed State Minister and Federal Commissioner for East …

AGI Profiles: Aydan Özoğuz

Vice President of the Bundestag Aydan Özoğuz is a SPD politician from Hamburg. After serving as State Minister and Federal Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees, and Integration (Staatsministerin bei der Bundeskanzlerin …

Episode 54: Diverse Communities, Questions of Identity, Polarization of Societies

On this episode of The Zeitgeitst, AGI President Jeff Rathke talks with participants in the AGI project on social divisions in Germany and the United States, which recently visited the …

German Policymakers Beyond the Cabinet

Similar to any modern democratic political system, power in Germany is concentrated in the cabinet—currently with fifteen ministers controlling various policy areas and respective bureaucracies. There is, of course, also …

Benjamin Höhne, DAAD/AGI Research Fellow

AGI is pleased to welcome Dr. Benjamin Höhne as a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow from April through July 2022. He is Deputy Director of the Institute for Parliamentary Research in Berlin. …

Episode 53: The Changing Dynamics of German Politics

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, and the Liberal FDP has just passed 100 days in office, faced with Russia’s war on Ukraine and …

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 …

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 …