Wednesday, March 28, 2018 - 5:30pm Miller Learning Center, Rm. 147 Lecture The lecture, given by Dr. Cornelia Wilhelm, will explore the changing perceptions of “diversity” and “cultural difference” in Germany and will show how they were central in the construction of “self “ and “other” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting minorities such as Jews, Poles, and others, ultimately culminating in a blind and destructive racism, nationalism, the Holocaust and World War II. After 1945 the two Germanies, deeply shattered as a nation and split in two states, sought to depart from their Nazi past, while they stood at the center of the largest migration crisis in the 20th century, but did neither understand the historic connection between their racist and exclusionary attitudes and the outcome of World War II and the Holocaust, nor the importance to deal with still existing xenophobic attitudes for the democratic process. The lecture will explain how this and the pressures of the Cold War prevented a thoroughly new understanding of “self” and “other” in Germany, will highlight how this affected relationship with immigrants and minorities , particularly the Turkish labor migration, until 1989. It will make suggestions why the re-united Germany at the end of the Cold War concluding the postwar era, was finally able to reconsider immigration and naturalization legislation and break ground for a new approach to diversity in Germany. It will highlight how changing perspectives on the memory of the Holocaust and World War II and the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union were central to this process. The lecture will conclude with Germany’s asylum policy during the peak of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015/2016 and will analyze the unique challenge this recent migration poses once again to today’s Germany, which since 2012 ranks today only second to the United States as “country of immigration” and seeks to develop a coordinated European immigration policy.
