After the October Revolution in Russia, Georgia took the path to independence. The German Empire became an ally of the new state in May 1918. In the Georgian republic, which had grown up on the ruins of the October Revolution, Germany was seen as the representative of European civilization. Georgian nationalists had been working with Germany's military authorities since 1914 to stage an insurrection against Russia in the Caucasus. After the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, the Georgian political elite supported secession from Moscow and German military intervention in Georgia to hold back the Young Turks as well as the Bolsheviks. For Berlin, rapprochement with Tbilisi represented a prerequisite for its Orientalist aspirations. The work (2022) examines German-Georgian relations during World War I, focusing on 1918, and is published by Brill I Schöningh (link to publisher's page).

Abstract (download)

The Soviet-German joint-stock company Wismut made the GDR one of the largest uranium producers of the Cold War by exploiting the deposits (among others) of the Erzgebirge. Although the company employed hundreds of thousands of people and left a clear mark - economically, in terms of the landscape, biographically and radioactively - it is hardly known today.

Based on methodological considerations by historian Gabrielle Hecht, this master's thesis (February 2024) outlines various ways of approaching the history of Wismut. In addition to discursive peculiarities of the company in the field of tension between propagandistic glorification and censorship, it also focuses on possible historical contextualizations and the category of nuclear work. The transfer of Hecht's research on uranium mining in Françafrique proved to be a very enriching perspective. It can, for example, provide explanations for the socio-cultural invisibility of uranium mining and contextualize the peculiarities of uranium mining in East Germany. Abstract - Link to download.

This master's thesis (August 2022) uses selected objects from the collection "Kindermedienwelten" (Children's Media Worlds) of the IfaK at the Stuttgart Media University to explore the nationalization process of childhood through children's media at the time of the German Empire. With its foundation in 1871, the empire represented the apparent endpoint of a long and unsteady process of unification of German states. In the following decades, a multitude of different measures intended to serve the internal formation of the empire can be observed. Alongside approaches such as the unification of infrastructures stand attempts to construct a nation with a long history through retrospectives and visions of the future. Children appeared in this system as an integral part of the "people's power." Subsequently, this work is dedicated to the question of how the nation integrated itself into the children's room and everyday life. For this purpose, four objects from the period of the German Empire in the collection "Kindermedienwelten" were examined more closely: Issues of the magazine supplement "Im Reiche der Kinder," a Laterna magica picture series, a scrapbook, and a German Red Cross postcard. Download (2 pages)