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David Hopkins, University of Glasgow

The Dada movement (1916-1923) is normally seen as linked to specific locations: Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Paris and New York. Whilst common anti-war and anti-art sentiments are understood as uniting these centers, Dada activity in each location is customarily defined in terms of distinguishing characteristics. Zurich Dada is therefore seen as having an aesthetic tendency (in the direction of abstraction) whilst the Berlin group is considered more politically engaged. This paper seeks to challenge the too-easy separation between aesthetics and politics in accounts of Dada that has been encouraged by the above model. At the same time, it aims to challenge the model of static Dada locations and to promote a dynamic notion of Dada as constituted primarily by the principle of dissemination. The paper will look closely at a series of interactions between key Dada figures in far-flung locations. It will aim to show that magazines, letters or telegrams between these individuals are as much manifestations of Dada as anything else, and that, in line with this fluidity of communication, Dada is pledged to dissolving fixed notions of identity and place, as well as hard-and-fast distinctions between ‘aesthetics’ and ‘politics’. On this reading Dada’s distrust of borders (both geographic and conceptual) may in the end be seen as its most revolutionary impulse.

David Hopkins is Professor of Art History and Director of Institute of Art History at the University of Glasgow. His main research areas are Dada, Surrealism, Ernst, Duchamp as well as selected aspects of post-1945 art and photography. He is the author of the following books: “Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada” (2013, co-edited with Michael White), “Dada’s Boys: Masculinity After Duchamp” (2007), “Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction” (2004). One of his ongoing research projects is called “The Soul of the Toy: Legacies of Dada and Surrealism”.

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 11 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photo: Katharina Böcker

Klaus Weinhauer, Universität Bielefeld

Globally the years roughly between 1910 and the mid 1920s saw multiple and overlapping upheavals. Labor historians, mostly focusing on nation states, have studied strikes and social movements, while others have discussed the revolutionary, social and consumer protests of this phase. What we still need, however, are globally oriented studies of these important years. My paper employs a micro historical and space sensitive approach focused on the struggle about local order. In the phase of global upheaval, roughly between the 1910s and mid 1920s, not only hopes for revolution but on a massive scale also fears and imaginaries of threat surfaced. These fears (and also the hopes) were mostly about social change and about possible revolutions - the latter often inspired by the Russian Revolutions and later by the German Revolution. Transnational and translocal networks of communication, highly mobile intellectuals, and the network of shipping lines were instrumental in entangling these imaginaries of threat and order. The presentation will, firstly, study why the First World War evoked such fears and imaginaries of threat – even in countries which did not directly participate in the war (like Argentina). Secondly, the paper will argue that the threats and social tensions of these years were strongly influenced by confrontations between locally based models of order on the one hand and nation state based models of order on the other hand. These local-versus-central order contestations were rooted in a confrontation of and competition between diverse urban social movements (left and right), among which established trade unions and political parties were by far not the only players. Thirdly, the presentation will analyze why, globally, in 1919 these confrontations often escalated.

Klaus Weinhauer is Professor of Modern History and teaches Transnational and Comparative History at Bielefeld University. He received his PhD and his Habilitation from Hamburg University. He held fellowships at Oxford University, at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), and at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld. His research focuses on: transformations of the state (urban violence, security, policing, terrorism); labor history; history of protest and of social movements. He recently co-edited “Germany 1916-23. A Revolution in Context” (2015) and a special journal issue on “Terrorism, Gender, and History” (2014). Currently, he is working on a book about the phase of global upheaval between the 1910s and the mid-1920s.

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 10 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photo: Katharina Böcker

Abdulhamit Kirmizi, Istanbul Şehir University

The examination of the connections between the Russian Revolution and the “Anatolian Revolution” (as the Turkish war of independence is sometimes called) is exciting, yet understudied. My paper will deal with the intriguing question of how (post-) Ottoman actors responded to and navigated within a new world changed by the Bolshevik Revolution after 1917. A chaotic new world needed to be ordered with innovative configurations of current ideological trends in a time when many loyalties persisted together. Sources speak of an alliance between Turkish nationalism and Bolshevism after the revolution. The immediate impressions on the revolution must have prevalent effects on Turkish leaders’ future visions of order. After the war, Mustafa Kemal tried to get the support of Bolshevism from the very first moment he started organizing the “anti-imperialist” national movement and considered implementing its principles for the liberation of the country without endangering Islamic and Turkish traditions and values. But pragmatic consequences like getting material help and securing the northern borders constituted the greater part of this consideration. The idea of world revolution was sold to the Muslim world within an emballage of Pan-Islamism. The Bolsheviks wanted to use Ottoman leaders to organize an Islamic blended anti-colonial revolution against the Allied Powers mainly in Arabia and India, whereas the Ottoman leaders wanted to gain Bolshevik material support for the national movement in Anatolia. What was left from the Ottoman Empire after the WWI could be called a’raf, or purgatorio in Dante’s word, a place in between inferno and paradiso. This purgatory soon became a disputed field between the Anatolian independence movement headed by Mustafa Kemal, the war time leaders of the Unionist government, and the new Istanbul government, all competing to fill the power vacuum for the leadership of the emerging future state. During their struggle, how have competing leaders employed transnational entanglements (Bolshevism, World Revolution, Pan-Islam) against each other? Bolshevism and Panislamism provided supranational sources for the new national-identity-in-formation. My paper will examine how these sources were used during the formations of modern Turkey.

Abdulhamit Kirmizi is Associated Professor, teaches Historiography, Auto/Biography and late Ottoman History at Istanbul Şehir University, where he chairs the Department of History. He studied Political Sciences at Ankara University and received his MA from Hacettepe and PhD from Boğaziçi University. He was Visiting Fellow of The British Academy AHRC/ESRC at SOAS, University of London in 2009. His most important books include a biography of the grandvizier Avlonyalı Ferid Paşa (2014), and his dissertation on late Ottoman provincial government, “Abdülhamid'in Valileri: Osmanlı Vilayet İdaresi, 1895-1908” (2007). He is founding co-editor of TALID (Türkiye Arastirmalari Literatür Dergisi/Turkish Studies Review).

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 10 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photo: Katharina Böcker

Adam Tooze, Columbia University

The violent politics of counter-revolution in the aftermath of World War I are eye-catching. But focusing on them can lead us to underestimate a larger and more broad-based phenomenon of unsettlement and restabilization that operated in the more abstract arena of macroeconomic forces. Between 1919 and the mid-1920s a gigantic cycle of inflation and deflation rocked the world economy. Here too a politics of stabilization was at work. It is one that operated in a classically counter-revolution fashion against the left and organized labor. But it also served to contain the more violent forces of the nationalist right-wing. It is precisely in this sphere that a liberal politics of stabilization was at its most powerful and effective.

Adam Tooze is Professor of History at Columbia University. Previously, he was Professor at Yale University (2009 - 2015) and Director of International Security Studies at the University of Cambridge (1996 - 2009). He is an Invited Commission Member of the Ministerial Research Project “History of the Reichsministerium der Finanzen in the Third Reich”. In 2002, he won the book prize for modern history with his work on “Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge”. Moreover, he is the author of “The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy” (2006). His latest publication “The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931” was published in 2014 and won the LA Times History Prize. In 2015, he co-edited the “Cambridge History of World War II. Volume 3” (with Michael Geyer). That same year, he published a book on “Normalität und Fragilität: Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg“ (with Tim B. Müller).

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 10 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photo: Katharina Böcker

Jörn Leonhard, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

When the American President Woodrow Wilson developed his vision of a new world order in 1917, his focus on the right of national self-determination, particularly that of small nations, played an almost fundamental role. Against the background of the First World War and the hitherto unknown number of victims contemporaries sought to answer the question what the causes of this catastrophe had been. Wilson’s answer pointed to the suppression of nationalities: “This war had its roots in the disregard of rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life.” Both the war and the Wilsonian moment provoked globally rising expectations of what a peace settlement after a totalized war would have to achieve. The hitherto unknown number of war victims which had to be legitimized through the results of the peace, ever radicalizing war aims, the ideal of a new international order which would make future wars impossible, as well as the new mass markets of public deliberations and the new relation between “international” and “domestic” politics in an age of mass media and democratic franchise: all these elements contributed to a massive disillusion and disappointment when the results of the peace settlements became obvious. Turning away from the new international order, which seemed to have lost its legitimacy very soon, paved the way to multiple revisionisms. Against this background my lecture will look at the period from 1917 to 1920 as a period of globally rising expectations – political and social as well as national and anticolonial expectations, often overlapping with each other and thereby reinforcing complexity. By departing from the classical chronological compartment of 1914 to 1918, our image of the war changes if we open our European narrative into a global one. Thus the end of the war becomes highly ambivalent. The beginning of the war in early August 1914 marked a common experience for millions over thousands of kilometers. Yet the end of the war was no longer a synchronic moment in history. If we follow the aura of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, we focus on the end of war between states in Western Europe – while other wars continued or were about to start: in Ireland and Poland, where new nation states emerged in civil war or national war, in Eastern Europe as a whole, where the state war had already ended in 1917 and had transcended into a civil war, time and again overlapping with ethnic conflicts, that would continue into the early 1920s, in the Near and Middle East, in India, Asia and in many parts of Northern Africa. The formal end of the war gave way to a broad spectrum of new spaces of violence on a global level – wars of independence, ethnic cleansing, wars to revise terms of the peace-treaties – which transcend chronological compartment of 1914-1918.

Jörn Leonhard is Full Professor in Modern European History at the History Seminar of Freiburg University. He received his Doctorate (1998) and his Habilitation (2004) from the University of Heidelberg. From 1998-2003 he taught as Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Oxford University, from 2004-2006 as Reader in West European History at Jena University before coming to Freiburg. From 2007-2012 he was one of the Founding Directors of the School of History of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). In 2012/13 he was Visiting Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, where he completed a general history of the First World War. In 2015 he was elected member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2016/17 he will be a Senior Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich to complete his book “Overburdened Peace: A Global History 1918-1923”. His main publications include: “Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters“ (2001, edited with Ulrike von Hirschhausen), “Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich“ (2001); “Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationalbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750-1914“ (2008); “Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert“ (2nd edition 2010, with Ulrike von Hirschhausen); ”Comparing Empires. Encounters and Transfers in the Nineteenth an Early Twentieth Century” (2nd edition 2012, edited with Ulrike von Hirschhausen); “What Makes the Nobility Noble? Comparative Perspectives from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century” (2011, edited with Christian Wieland); “Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs” (5th edition 2014).

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 9 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Photo: Katharina Böcker

Ethnological museums in the 21st century have to embrace their influence on society not only thanks to a thoroughly knowledge of their collection but also by amplifying the civic discourse, accelerating the cultural and social change and contributing to contextual intelligence”. In his talk at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century", Mauricio Estrada Muñoz  describes the new plans for the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève and how the museum is coping with history and provenance issues. He focuses on the permanent exhibition “The Archives of Human Diversity” and how these are displayed in regard to different perspectives. Furthermore, he lines out different approaches on audience development and networking with different groups, for example diasporas installed in the vicinity of Geneva in order to promote their living traditions and intangible heritage.

Mauricio Estrada Muñoz is Head of Publics at the Museum of Ethnography, City of Geneva, and is in charge to develop along with his team outreach and educational programs that foster understanding and dialogue between audiences of all kinds. Until 2013 Mauricio contributed to the development and the implementation of Studio 13/16, Centre Pompidou’s teen gallery, and served as curator. Prior to museums, Mauricio worked as researcher in the field of social psychology. He holds a degree in psychology from the University of Geneva and obtained an M.S in Communication for Cultural Heritage from the University of Lugano with honors.

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Sophie Lenski talks at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century" about the legal aspects of the return of ethnological objects. She points out that the legal standards of the time when the objects were brought to Europe would have to be applied even today. But that leads to the dilemma that these legal standards do not fit the moral standards we would apply nowadays. At present, a problem for the legal return of objects lies in the traditional legal framework of the public international law and / or private law do not include clear procedures on how to replace objects to indigenous groups. Lenski presents different approaches like treaties and conventions trying to solve these problems.

Sophie Lenski studied law in Berlin (Humboldt University), Rome and Paris and has been a researcher at the Humboldt University Berlin from 2005 to 2006. After her PhD in law at the Humboldt University Berlin, she did her legal traineeship in Berlin (at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), in Venice and Paris from 2005 to 2007. From 2007 to 2012 she has been a senior lecturer in Public Law at the University Bayreuth and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. In her habilitation at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich she dealt with “The Public Law of Culture. Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage between Protection, Promotion and Valorisation”. Since 2012 she is a professor for Public Law, Media and Art Law.

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Larissa Förster held her talk at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century". She shares her ideas that base on four years on observing restitution processes with various continents. She therefore captures the present debate on the return of human remains and the restitution of objects in Germany. In the second part, Förster reflects on examples of repatriation from the past. Finally, she connects her analysis to present debates on restitution and the history of museum collections.

Larissa Förster is a research associate at the Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata at the University of Cologne and spokesperson of the Working Group on Museums of the German Anthropological Association. Her PhD is on the memory of colonialism in Namibia and she co-curated the exhibition "Namibia – Germany: a shared/divided history. Resistance, violence, memory" (Cologne and Berlin, 2004/05). In her current research she links issues of postcolonial memorialisation practices in Africa to a critical study of the history of European museum collections by looking at why, when and how human remains from European museum collections are (or are not) repatriated to postcolonial nation states. Most recently she (co-)edited the volumes "Transforming Knowledge Orders: Museums, Collections and Exhibitions" (Paderborn, 2013) and "Afropolis. City, Media, Art" (Johannesburg, 2012).

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Michael Kraus talks at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century". He presents a project between indigenous and scientific partners: in 2014, several anthropologists from Germany have invited four guests from Mitú to the ethnological museum in Berlin. The meeting consisted of two parts: a closed workshop and a public conference. The objects from the museums collections were taken in a time, when the relation between the indigenous society and the colonialist was not peaceful. In his talk, Kraus describes the meeting’s impact on both sides and how the indigenous guests structured it according to their cultural traditions.

Michael Kraus is lecturer at the Department for the Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn. He studied ethnology, comparative religious studies and sociology at the universities of Tübingen, Guadalajara and Marburg. In 2004, he received his PhD in ethnology for his work “Bildungsbürger im Urwald. Die deutsche ethnologische Amazonienforschung (1884-1929)”. As a research assistant, he worked at the University of Marburg and the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. He has also curated exhibitions for various museums (e.g. “Novos Mundos - Neue Welten. Portugal und das Zeitalter der Entdeckungen” at Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 2007 and “WeltWissen. 300 Jahre Wissenschaften in Berlin” at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2010). He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Guaraní (Gran Chaco, Bolivia) and Tukano (Upper Rio Negro, Brazil/Colombia). His research focusses on indigenous Cultures of Amazonia, Visual Anthropology, the History of Anthropology, Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, and Material Culture Studies.

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Völkerschauen, or human ethnological displays, promised to take visitors “around the world for fifty pennies”, providing a form of popular entertainment in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany while also satisfying deepening European curiosities about exotic peoples and places. For the Samoans – many of high social status – who traveled to Germany to take part in Völkerschauen, the displays were seen as an opportunity to establish political ties with the colonial power.

In her talk at the Herrenhausen Symposium "Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century", Hilke Thode-Arora, describes how she traced the history of these displays of “typically” Samoan forms of music, dance, and weapons performance that could be found in amusement parks, zoos, and even at Oktoberfest.

Hilke Thode-Arora is a social and cultural anthropologist specialised on Oceania. Having done research projects on behalf of most German ethnological museums, her specialization lies in material culture and the history of museum collections, interethnic relations and ethnic identities as well as images and stereotypes. From 2002 to 2005, while doing her fieldwork on Niuean weaving under the auspices of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, she held an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She currently is a Research Fellow at the Five Continents Museum in Munich.

Based on a three-year research project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, she curated the exhibition “From Samoa with Love? Samoan Travellers in Germany. Retracing the Footsteps”, which contextualized the history of the Samoan collection in Munich and was based on in-depth communication with Samoan descendants.

Photo: Philip Bartz for Volkswagen Foundation

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