Amsterdam German Studies Lecture | Constantin Goschler
Waves of restitution, reparation and cultural memory after the Second World War

The debate on reparations and restitution for victims of war, persecution and human rights violations remains an ongoing process. In the last decades, the debates broadened thanks to globalization and an emerging memory culture. After the Second World War, the debates concentrated on restitution of property and on compensation for Jews who suffered persecution and were victims of the Holocaust. In the 1990s, the focus of the debate widened to former property in the GDR and to forced labour in wartime industries. Since 2004, compensation for the Herero and Nama genocide came into focus. Only recently, forms of compensation for descendants of slaves have been discussed. In his lecture, Constantin Goschler will explain why and how these debates have changed, due to a memory boom, globalization, changes in the domestic and foreign policy and generational shifts. He will discuss the changes in focus and intensity as an integral part of the history of Germany since 1945.

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About the speakers

Constantin Goschler is a well-known German historian with a broad view of postwar German history. After being a guest lecturer at the Charles-University Prague and a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, he continued his academic career at the Humboldt-University Berlin, the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the Ruhr-University Bochum, where he became a full professor for modern history in 2006. Professor Goschler received numerous research grants, organized many national and international research projects, and consulted a number of documentary films, most importantly “The Wings of History. The Story of the Luxembourg Agreements”. Among the many books he published we mention here 'Wiedergutmachung. Westdeutschland und die Verfolgten des Nationalsozialismus 1945–1954' and the edited volume 'Robbery and restitution. The conflict over Jewish property in Europe'. During the academic year 2022/23 he was Gerda Henkel Visiting Professor at the German Historical Institute London and the London School of Economics.

Lorena De Vita is Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University. She is the author of 'Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations, 1949-1969' (Manchester University Press, 2020; pbk: 2022), as well as of scholarly articles and public pieces that have appeared in, among others, Cold War History, International Affairs, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, and The Washington Post. Lorena held several competitive visiting fellowships, including a DAAD Visiting Fellowship at the Jena Center for Twentieth Century History (2013/2014), a Joseph Wulf Fellowship at the Memorial House of the Wannsee Conference (2015), a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for the Study of German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2019) and, most recently, at Oxford University (2023). She is principal investigator of the research project: Holocaust Diplomacy: The Global Politics of Memory and Forgetting funded by the Alfred Landecker Lecturer Programme (2021-2026) and she is leading the (NWO-SSH-XS) project Wording Repair at Utrecht University.

Hanco Jürgens is a member of the academic staff at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. He specializes in German and modern European history. He published on a variety of topics, such as the history of Dutch German relations, German EU-policy, the Third Way, and German missionaries in India in the Eighteenth Century. Currently, he focuses on the history of Germany since the fall of the Wall.