Turning points
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| free of charge - ticket required |
| Duration: 120 min |
| 14 years and older |
| German |
| Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| Belongs to: After Nature |
When a new class of students was ceremonially enrolled in the Palace of the Republic for the 1989 winter semester, none of them had any idea that their time at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin would be characterised by far-reaching political changes. These affected all Humboldtians, regardless of whether they worked as laboratory staff, in administration, in technical services or as academics. Were they able to shape change themselves, or did outside influences prevail? How did they find fellow campaigners when trust in others became a scarce resource and they had to fear repression? How did people become involved at all during the time of the ‘Wende’, the outcome of which was initially not at all foreseeable for their contemporaries? What was an opportunity, what created uncertainty; how did people even imagine the future?
Gabriele Metzler will discuss these questions with the two contemporary witnesses Hildegard Maria Nickel and Ulrich Miksch, as well as with the historian Mitchell Ash, a recognised expert on the history of German universities and science around 1989/90, who will provide a historical perspective on what happened.
Participants
Gabriele Metzler (moderator)
Prof Dr Gabriele Metzler has been Professor of the History of Western Europe and Transatlantic Relations at Humboldt-Universität since 2007. Since 2014, she has been the (founding) chair of the Historical Commission at the HU Presidency.
Hildegard Maria Nickel is a sociologist and was a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1992 to 2015. In the GDR, she initially specialised in the sociology of education at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences before becoming a university lecturer and deputy director of research at the Institute for Marxist-Leninist Sociology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She co-founded the Centre for Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies (now the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies) at the Humboldt University of Berlin and was its academic director for 10 years. Her research in the GDR focussed on family, youth and gender sociology. In the course of German reunification, she became interested in the double transformation of society that was taking place at different times in East and West Germany, particularly in labour and gender relations. She has published extensively on these topics. In 1994, she was the first winner of the Helge-Pross-Prize for family and gender research awarded by the University of Siegen. Most recent publication: In zwei Welten, Sozialer Aufstieg im Spagat von Anpassung und Distanz, In: Laura Behrmann/Marcus Gamper/Hanna Haag, Vergessene Ungleichheiten, Biographische Erzählungen ostdeutscher Professor*innen, transkript Verlag, pp.251-270 (forthcoming).
Mitchell G. Ash (PhD Harvard University) (he/him) is Professor Emeritus of Modern History with Emphasis in History of Science at the University of Vienna, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities as well as the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. His recent publications focus on the relationships of science, higher education and politics, society and culture in modern in recent history, for example on science and higher education policy during German (re-)unification, and historical and current debates on the politics of academic freedom in comparative perspective. Recent publications: Science in the Metropolis: Vienna 1848-1918 (sole editor. New York 2021); Diskurskontrolle an deutschen Universitäten – Bedrohungen der Wissenschaftsfreiheit? (Berlin 2022); Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft im Prozess der deutschen Vereinigung 1989-2002. Eine politische Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Göttingen 2023).
Ulrich Miksch, born in 1968 in Suhl/Thuringia, studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin from 1989 to 1997, first meteorology, then philosophy and cultural studies. As a student representative on newly elected institute and faculty councils from 1990-92, and from 1991 as editor of the student newspaper ‘unaufgefordert’, he contributed to the reorganisation of the university. From 2000, he wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, primarily about the transformation processes in East Germany. Since then he has worked as a freelance journalist. Together with the editor Ralf Poscher and Jan Dirk Bonhage, he published ‘Der Verfassungstag. Reden deutscher Gelehrter zur Feier der Weimarer Reichsverfassung’ Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1999.