Virtual: Thirty Years of German Unification

Prof. Christiane Lemke will discuss the political, social, and economic implications of unification based on her years of research and teaching. In addition, she will also provide a personal perspective on studying, teaching, and living in West Berlin, Leipzig, and Potsdam, and then becoming a full professor in Hannover in 1996. She will address the following questions: What is the significance of unification in the collective memory? How has unification changed politics and German political parties? Are there still differences between the East and the West? And how is unified Germany viewed by its neighbors?

Professor Konrad Jarausch, UNC History Department, will serve as discussant. Kathleen Shanahan Lindner, Center for European Studies executive director, will moderate the discussion. Please RSVP for this virtual event by 12pm on Friday, September 4.

Speaker

Christiane Lemke is professor of Political Science and director of International Relations and European Studies at the Institute of Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover. Professor Lemke has been very involved in Center for European Studies teaching, research, and conferences for many years. She has been teaching in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Transatlantic Masters (TAM) program for over a decade and has been a recurring DAAD Visiting Scholar to UNC since 1988. In addition to her current position, Christiane Lemke, from 2010-14, held the Max Weber Chair at New York University. Professor Lemke received her doctorate of philosophy from the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Free University in Berlin and went on to earn her Habilitation Venia legendi in Political Science from the same institution. Professor Lemke has been a visiting scholar at a number of US institutions over the years as she has maintained her permanent faculty positions in Germany. She has taught courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford University, Harvard University, and Suffolk University. In addition, while on a leave from the University of Hannover from 2006 to 2007, Professor Lemke served as the director of State Parliament, Lower Saxony. professor Lemke’s academic areas of expertise include: European Politics, Democracy and Governance in the EU, Transatlantic Relations, Comparative Politics and Political Theory, and American Politics. She is the author/editor of numerous books and articles, including: Internationale Beziehungen: Grundkonzepte, Theorien und Problemfelder, 4th ed. (International Relations: Concepts, Theories, and Key Issues, 2018); Germany Today. Politics and Policies in a Changing World, 2018; Europäische Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik (European Foreign and Security Policy, 2010), Menschenrechte und Migration (Human Rights and Migration, 2009).

Discussant

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy professor of European Civilization in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Jarausch has written or edited about forty books in modern German and European history. Starting with Hitler’s seizure of power and the First World War, his research interests have moved to the social history of German students and professions German unification in 1989/90, with historiography under the Communist GDR, the nature of the East German dictatorship, as well as the debate about historians and the Third Reich. More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German history in general, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, and the relationship between Honecker and Breshnew. Some notable publications include: Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2015), Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton University Press, 2011), “Das stille Sterben…”: Feldpostbriefe von Konrad Jarausch aus Polen und Russland (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2008), Gebrochene Wissenschaftskulturen: Universität und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), and Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton University Press, 2002). Prof Jarausch is co-founder of the UNC Center for European Studies as well as the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam (ZZF).

This event is part of the TransAtlantic Masters Program Fall Friday Lecture Series.