The German Historical Institute London is dedicated to the promotion of historical research in the United Kingdom and Germany. It focuses on the comparative history of Britain and Germany, the global and colonial history of the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the history of British-German relations and transfers. The Institute runs academic events on topics spanning from the Middle Ages to the present. Lectures take place in a hybrid format and can be attended in person or virtually.

Programme :

20 October 2026 (5.30pm)
Blair, Schröder, and Work in Neoliberal Times
Bernhard Rieger (Leiden)

The promotion of neoliberalism ranks prominently among the charges levelled against Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder. Rather than protect citizens from hostile market forces, their governments stoked social polarization by intentionally exposing society to the play of supply and demand, or so critics past and present have maintained. To what extent did Blair’s New Labour and Schröder’s Red-Green administration succeed in combining social progressivism with pro-market agendas? Focusing on the deeply controversial welfare-to-work policies both countries implemented around the turn of the millennium, this talk highlights the achievements, limits, and social consequences of progressive policy in neoliberal times.

Bernhard Rieger is Professor of European History at Leiden University, where he moved from University College London in 2018. He is the author of the prize-winning book The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (2013), which has been translated into several languages.

27 October 2026 (5.30pm)
Surveying People—Policing Plants: Recasting Livelihoods in German Samoa
Anna Echterhölter (Wien)

The German colonizers took pride in the experiment of Samoan ‘self-rule’. Paramount chief Mata’afa Iosefo remained in authority, lineages still owned their land collectively—and apart from extensive surveying of every aspect of the Faʻa Sāmoa (the Samoan way of life)—the people were left comparatively unencumbered. Plants and agriculture, however, were subject to direct intervention and control. In every district, a resident was promoted to the rank of ‘plant inspector’. Soon, fines for improper gardening proliferated. In light of recent findings in the social history of surveys and colonial statistics, this arrangement is telling. Based on Samoan archives, I argue that the policing of plants and the surveying of people are two sides of the same coin: the making of a knowledge crucial to liberalism. The extensive collection of data allowed a whole socio-ecology to be recast by scarcely detectable means.

Anna Echterhölter has been Professor for the History of Science at the University of Vienna since 2018. She was an interim professor at the TU and at HU Berlin and has held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and the German Historical Institute Washington. She is acting editor of Science in Context. Research topics include the social history of quantification, metrology, and indigenous law in the Pacific.

10 November 2026 (5.30pm)
Contract and Monarchy: King James VI/I and Thomas Hobbes – Brothers in Mind?
Andreas Pecar (Halle)

Hobbes’ Leviathan and his theory of authorization are very prominent in the history of political ideas, whereas King James’ tract The True Law of Free Monarchies has been, on the whole, neglected. In this lecture I will compare both tracts and their concepts of contractualism, asking, furthermore, why both concepts cannot prevail within the debate on the legitimacy of monarchy in seventeenth-century Stuart England. And I would like to explain why the decisive difference between James’ and Hobbes’ contract theory is directly related to the respective political contexts in which they were written.

Andreas Pečar studied History and German Literature in Freiburg and in Cologne, before completing his PhD in Cologne in 2002 and his Habilitation in Rostock in 2009. Since 2010 he has been Professor for Early Modern History at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. He has published books on the imperial court in Vienna, political biblicism in Scotland and England under the Stuart Monarchy (the latter is also available in English translation), the Enlightenment in Europe, King Frederick II of Prussia as an author, and the relationship between the University of Halle and the Prussian Court in the first half of the eighteenth century.

24 November 2026 (5.30pm)
Talking to Strangers in Medieval Hungary
Nora Berend (Cambridge)

How did people who spoke different languages talk to each other? My paper will examine the evidence of medieval texts, including stories of direct communication in the medieval kingdom of Hungary. My sources include travel accounts, chronicles, and vocabulary lists. These sources convey real and invented interaction and communication between various groups living in the kingdom. I will focus in particular on exchanges between Hungarian speakers and German speakers. How was communication represented in the texts and what can we learn from them about the mechanisms of real interactions? Did communication contribute to more friendly, or at least less hostile, relations?

Nora Berend is Professor of European History at Cambridge, working on medieval religious and cultural interaction, the formation of identity, and uses of the medieval in the present. Her recent publications include Stephen I, the first Christian King of Hungary: From Medieval Myth to Modern Legend and El Cid: the Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary.

1 December 2026 (5.30pm)
Reflections on Writing a History of Europe under German Occupation During the Second World War
Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Wuppertal)

In co-operation with the Modern History Research Seminar, University of Oxford

At the height of the German expansion, approximately 230 million Europeans experienced Nazi occupation. How can the everyday history of Europe be written from the perspective of those living under German rule? Across the continent, people had to interact with the occupiers, adjust to situations they did not chose, cope with hunger and scarcity, try and protect their families from repression, and forge networks of solidarity. For Jewish communities, this was particularly harsh, as they endured both the hardships of occupation and the genocidal persecution of the Holocaust. In addition to presenting key findings from her research, Tatjana Tönsmeyer will reflect on the challenges of writing a pan-European history of everyday life under occupation.

Tatjana Tönsmeyer is professor for Modern European History at Wuppertal University. Her research focuses on European history of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the history of the Second World War, occupation, and occupied societies. Two of her latest publications are Unter deutscher Besatzung: Europa 1939–1945 (2024) and the two-volume source edition Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage: Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe (2021), co-edited with Peter Haslinger, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stefan Martens, and Irina Sherbakova.

Please sign up via our website: https://www.ghil.ac.uk/events/lectures

Kontakt :events@ghil.ac.uk

Source. H-Soz-Kult