The Ngonnso Statue
Germany Moves Forward by Facing its Past If you have been to an ethnological museum, you might be familiar with walking through exhibits titled “Africa” or “Oceania” and seeing a …
Documenta 15 and Anti-Semitism
Documenta 15: Curating the Meta-Collective, Translocating Art, and Anti-Semitism Artist collectives have gained heightened visibility in the twenty-first century, not only as a platform for virtual collaborations but also as …
The Anti-Semitism Scandal at Documenta 15
Documenta is one of the highest-profile contemporary art exhibitions in the world. Dating back to 1955, the exhibition runs for several summer months in and around the small central German …
AGI Profiles: Claudia Roth
Commissioner to the Federal Government for Culture and Media In 2021, Claudia Roth was appointed Commissioner to the Federal Government for Culture and Media (Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und …
Language of Remembrance
Over the last few years, American society has been entrenched in a debate about how to remember the past. Demonstrations calling for the removal of Confederate statues and the backlash …
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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 …
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 …
Martin 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. …
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. …
On the Passing of a German Generation
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my “Nazi aunt” (actually a great aunt) as I called her. Born a century ago in 1920 in northern Bavaria, Leni was a …
