Proceeding from the most recent controversies around decolonisation and grappling with historical conflicts through a culture of remembrance, this lab tackles different social actors’ reassessments of history as well as their societal repercussions in democracies, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. Prof. Dr. Arnold Bartetzky, Dr. Heike Liebau (Leibniz Centre Moderner Orient, ZMO) and Prof. Dr. Magnus Brechtken (Institute of Contemporary History, Munich, IfZ) jointly lead the lab’s coordination.

This lab focuses on the economic utilisation of the past. It shines a spotlight just as much on the cultural and creative industries’ marketing of history as on the past’s role in the cultural developments of cities and regions. Dr. Corinne Geering coordinates the lab jointly with Dr. Torsten Meyer (German Mining Museum, Bochum). The lab also includes Dr. Sabine Stach, whose research concentrates on the popularisation, commodification and authentication of contemporary history in today’s tourism industry. The lab receives additional support from Kaja Schelker, with her project about the use of traditional construction techniques and sustainability discourses in modern architecture.

The GWZO brings two further research topics into this lab. Dr. des Karin Reichenbach adopts a public history view to dedicate herself to popular history’s approaches to the politicised reception of the Early Middle Ages. Taking into account epistemic foundations and evidence practices, she examines the divergences of academic and non-academic knowledge production. Literature studies researcher Dr. Stephan Krause’s project investigates the type and function of processes of canonisation, paying equal attention to the canon’s power as an entity of cultural as well as literary and discourse historical significance as to the revaluations of, and alternatives to, its consistently judging mechanisms on in- and exclusion.