2010 Fall Workshop
Thursday • NOVEMBER 18, 2010 • 4:00 — 7:30 PM
GERMAN REUNIFICATION: TWENTY YEARS LATER
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA at CHAPEL HILL
As a product of the peaceful revolution, which overthrew communism in 1989, the accession of the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic of Germany in October 1990 restored a German national state within an integrating European Union. Since this surprising development was accompanied with many historical anxieties as well as current concerns about the potential dominance of Germany over Europe, it is important to ask what consequences the reunification of the two German states has had during the last two decades: How has the unification process actually worked out for the participating East Germans and how has the emerging Berlin Republic used its economic, political and military influence? At the same time, the overcoming of German and European division has also rendered the framework of Cold War interpretations obsolete, posing the question of how to narrate the course of German history in the twentieth century from the perspective of this new caesura.
Keynote: PAUL NOLTE
4:00 pm
PAUL NOLTE is a professor at the Department of History at the Free University of Berlin and during the academic year 2010-11 Visiting professor at the UNC History Department. He is one of the leading German historians of his generation. Having been trained at Bielefeld and Johns Hopkins Universities, he has written on Liberalism in 19th century Baden and on concepts of social order in 20th century Germany. He is teaching at the Free University of Berlin and has held fellowships at Harvard and the Wissenschaftskolleg. Moreover, he is the editor of the social history journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft. However, he is best known as a public intellectual who has been arguing for a reform of the welfare state and for a new sense of civic responsibility.
Round Table: The Consequences of the
Reunification for Germany and Europe
5:45 pm
In conjunction with the Center for European Studies and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Refreshments and drinks will be served.
A registration is necessary:
Please register with Sarah Summers in a timely fashion.
Sponsored by Carolina Seminars, the Institute for the Arts & Humanities, and the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of History at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.