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Antje Vollmer
She is known as a Green Party politician and for her longstanding role as Vice President of the German Bundestag. After retiring in 2005, she became a freelance author. Her first book project “Doppelleben” (Double Life) tells the story of Heinrich von Lehndorff, one of the conspirators of the events of 20 July 1944 , and his wife Gottliebe. It is a moving biography of two young aristocrats that tells of their daring and their love.
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Down the Danube in the Ulm Box
A flat-bottomed wooden boat with a hut on top, sides painted in black and white stripes, and two very long oars at the front and back – that's an "Ulmer Schachtel" (Ulm box). This vessel, which seems curious today, was once an important means of transport on the Danube.
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Emigration, Forced Migration, and the Iron Curtain
Eastern Europe has been a "migration hot spot" since the late 19th century: Initially as a core area of overseas emigration, then of ethnic forced migration after the end of World War I. Emigration during the Cold War was nearly impossible. Today, many countries in this region benefit from the European Union's Freedom of Movement policy.
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Hungarian – Communist – Jew?
This article sheds light on some facets of the life of the philosopher Ernő Gáll, who as a Jew, a communist, and a Hungarian was both politically persecuted and a perpetrator. A committed intellectual, he acted as a mediator between different political factions and hostile ethnic groups throughout his life. In doing so, he developed an ethic of dignity and responsibility and coined the phrase "the dignity of individual character," which also has relevance for today's debates around the issue of identity.
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Important locations in Copernicus’ life
Nicolaus Copernicus rose to fame due to his interest in the stars. But where did he spend his life on Earth? Most of his sites of activity are found in present-day Poland, and many of them also relate to German history.
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Max Mannheimer and his silver-gray Tatra 87
Max Mannheimer (1920-2016) was an institution, as a painter and storyteller, as a Holocaust survivor and chairman of the Dachau Camp Community.
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Memorials in Wrocław
The Jewish community in Breslau, which was the third-largest in the German Reich in 1925, was forgotten for many years. However, after 1989, new interest in local history began to emerge in Wrocław, Poland. Nowadays, monuments and a commemorative procession serve as reminders of the Jewish people who lived in Breslau (the pre-1945 German name for Wrocław) during the pre-war period.
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Places of commemoration of the Shoa in Szeged, Hungary
The Jewish community of Szeged in Hungary has a rich heritage dating back two centuries. Many of their descendants perished in the Holocaust, when Szeged was made the main deportation center for the region. The purpose of the following post is to showcase the Holocaust memorials erected by the locals.
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Post-War Jewish Migration from the USSR and the refuseniki movement
The post-WW II Jewish migration from the Soviet Union (and also after its dissolution) is one of the largest in modern history. Altogether 2.75 million Soviet Jews left the USSR for Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere. The position of the Soviet state with respect to emigration was remarkably ambivalent: in some cases, it was allowed and even encouraged, in others, others; it was controlled and strongly limited. The Jewish emigration movement that arose in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s-1980s became an example of resistance and activism within the authoritarian system, which increasingly alerted international attention. In one way or another, it affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and changed the appearance of many cities and towns within the Soviet Union and outside it.
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Summer 1941: Jews from the Baltic States flee for their lives
The long shadow of the past. Only a few Jews from Lithuania and Latvia managed to escape the Holocaust in the Baltics. Here are some of their accounts and the reasons for their difficult escape.
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Swimming to Freedom
On the night of May 22-23, 1979, 36-year-old Gernot Eamandi swims across the heavily guarded Danube from Romania to Yugoslavia. His destination: the Federal Republic of Germany. With him: a backpack from his army days.
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The Białystok Ghetto Cemetery as a Setting of Historical-Political Disputes
The history of the necropolis in eastern Poland acts like a burning glass, a focal point of the upheavals of the 20th century and Polish-Jewish relations after the Shoa. Today, remembrance of this historically significant site alternates between disinterest, urban image cultivation, and a ritualized sense of duty.
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The Copernican network
Despite living in relative isolation, Copernicus maintained a number of significant contacts during his time as a scholar and cleric.
Astronomers from many parts of Europe carried on his work after his death.
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The Four Lehndorff Daughters
"I lost my home," Vera von Lehndorff once said, "but lost childhood is a better description." When her father was executed on September 4, 1944, she was five years old. Her sister Eleonore, "Nona," was six and a half, and Gabriele was two. Catharina was only 19 days old; she was born in the Torgau prison hospital. The Nazis had taken the girls and their mother Gottliebe into custody, a practice known in German as "Sippenhaft” or “kin liability". It was a traumatic time and was by no means over when the war ended in 1945.
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The debate between Austrian and Hungarian
The region of Burgenland was transferred to Austria in 1921. After the First World War the country was compensated with a territory which had previously been a part of Hungary. Since its “birth”, Austria’s historical claim to the region was contested by Hungarian historians. In contrast, Austrian historians were eager to integrate Burgenland into their new national histories. What follows is a comparative case study of how historians participated in creating histories based on nation, region, or ethnicity.
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The many names of Nicolaus Copernicus
What is the name of the astronomer who introduced the heliocentric worldview? In principle, there can only be one answer to this question. But, when it comes to the actual spelling of the name Copernicus, it varies massively depending on where you look.
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Wilderness without borders?
A boundless wilderness – or a mountain range divided both politically and culturally? The neighboring Bavarian Forest and Šumava National Parks on the German-Czech border share a complicated history in which the state border plays a key role.