Many refugees coming to Germany are highly educated. In late 2015, at the beginning of the so-called “European refugee crisis”, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research launched a 100 Million Euro four-year initiative to pave the way for refugees into the German higher education system. 200 universities are taking part in the programs rolled out by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), assessing the refugees’ university entrance qualification, offering preparatory language and propaedeutic courses as well as providing guidance and support by hundreds of volunteering student initiatives. Bernd Fischer, will give an evidence-based presentation on the programs and…

In her signature work, Körper (Bodies), Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz explores the visceral tangle of humanity from the perspectives of history, science, and architecture. Waltz premiered Körper in her first season as artistic director of the Schaubühne Theater in 2000 and now revives the work as she is poised to take on the co-directorship of the Staatsballett Berlin next year. Set on 13 male and female dancers, the movement evokes a staggering range of embodied experience through a series of living tableaux, both epic and intimate; the dancers morph and converge, meld and squirm, join and are torn apart, creating…

Dutch author, poet and playwright Jaap Robben will present his latest novel in English translation, You Have Me To Love

In The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton, 2017), Bryan Wagner (English) explores how the tar baby tale, thought to have originated in Africa, came to exist in hundreds of forms on five continents. Examining the fable’s variation, reception, and dispersal over time, he argues that this story of a fox, a rabbit, and a doll made of tar and turpentine is best understood not merely as a folktale but as a collective work in political philosophy. Circulating at the same time and in the same places as new ideas about property and politics developed in colonial law and political…

Please join us for our Annual Bucerius Lecture with David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, followed by a conversation with Jutta Allmendinger, President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. Unlike Europe, where there are two separate migration issues that are coming together in a complicated way, the US conversation on migration has until recently been more neatly divided between economic immigrants coming from Latin America and East/South Asia on the one hand and refugees being resettled in the country largely from the Middle East and Africa. But the unaccompanied minors crisis a few years ago,…

Environmental Change and Migration in Historical Perspective Sponsors: Institute of European Studies, GHI West – Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC, Gerda Henkel Foundation, Center for German and European Studies   Current debates about “climate refugees” have triggered interest in the larger connections between environmental change and migration. But what can history contribute to this new field of research? Focusing on historical case studies of environmental migration in general and displacement after natural disasters in particular, Uwe Lübken’s talk will highlight the potential of historical research for this debate. This lecture is part of the Gerda Henkel Lecture Series, organized…

Workshop for PhD students in German who are interested in applying for academic positions

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a pioneering community of Christian scholars laid the groundwork for the modern Western understanding of Islamic civilization. These men produced the first accurate translation of the Qur’an into a European language, mapped the branches of the Islamic arts and sciences, and wrote Muslim history using Arabic sources. The Republic of Arabic Letters reconstructs this process, revealing the influence of Catholic and Protestant intellectuals on the secular Enlightenment understanding of Islam and its written traditions. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, and Latin sources, Alexander Bevilacqua’s rich intellectual history retraces the routes—both mental and…

UC Berkeley’s students of German present poetry, skits, and music in their annual Cabaret Program

The voices and spaces of immigrants come together to form collective memories. This, in turn, constitutes an important basis of community knowledge. Evelyn Hu-DeHart reflects on this process with the example ofBarcelona, where she currently teaches about new Chinese immigrants. Her research examines the distant history of Chinese in the Spanish Empire, first in Manila in the 16th century, then in Cuba in the 19th century. Keynote Address for the Conference Migrant Knowledges: Concepts, Voices, Spaces on April 20 & 21, 2018 at GHI West, the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC.