Upending German Historiography: Polycentrism and Cultural Multiplicities in the Southern German Borderlands, 1800-2023

While scholars have filled rooms with books about the eastern German border:  where it was, where it should have been, how it moved, how its role in people’s lives shifted and changed across our clearly periodized political histories, the southern German border has received relatively little attention. In part, that is because of the hegemonic position of nation-states and the historians who study and promote them. For them, the eastern border was a perennial problem, one demanding solutions, which led to a great deal of violence. In contrast, the southern German border has not appeared to be much of a problem at all, which might seem to make it less important, less worthy of inquiry.  

In this talk, Glenn Penny argues that the opposite may be true: that this neglected region can tell us more about the contours of a globalized German history than those regions that were animated for so long by a series of titillating and often violent ruptures.

 

This event is funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA). 

 

 

Glenn Penny studies histories of belonging, knowledge, and migration from the middle of the eighteenth century until the present by pursuing German speakers and German communities all over the world. He is also deeply engaged in the workings of ethnological museums.

 

James Retallack teaches courses and supervises PhD field preparation in European history from 1770 to 1945. His research interests (1830-1918) include German regional history, nationalism, anti-Semitism, elections, and historiography. He is General Editor of “Oxford Studies in Modern European History” and was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011.