Project Manager: Reyazul Haque Project Status: running This project looks into newsreels (Der Augenzeuge) focusing on India which were produced by Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DeFA) in the German Democratic Republic between 1946 and 1980. In post-war East Germany, and later in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), India occupied a crucial and interesting place in these cinematic […]
German Botanists in and around India and their participation in colonialism
Project Manager: Dr. Tobias Delfs Project Status: running My habilitation project deals with the participation of German and German botanists in the imperial penetration of the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century through the generation of knowledge and imperial environmental discourses. The study period covers the timeframe between the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of […]
Vocational training in the Indian steel and engineering industries: histories of Indo-German co-operation, c. 1950–1989.
Project Manager: Josefine Hoffmann Project Status: running This PhD thesis is situated within the thematic complex of entangled West German and Indian social and economic histories. It identifies and follows bilateral vocational training co-operations in the steel and engineering industries on their trajectories through planning and implementation. Eventually, the project’s aim is to trace the […]
Mountaineering as transcultural encounters: labour in the German Himalayan expedition (1929–1953)
Project Manager: Nokmedemla Lemtur Project Status: running By the end of the nineteenth century the peaks of the Himalayan range, whose height surpassed any of those in the Alps, had become the new “playground” for many western nations to enact aspects of power and masculinity. This particular period witnessed the arrival and attempts of many […]
Indo-German Intellectual History — Religion and Spirituality in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic (1871–1933)
Project Manager: Dr. Martin Christof-Füchsle Direction: Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja Project Status: running The project aims at furthering the analysis of processes of entanglements between India and Germany in the sphere of intellectual history. The focus is on the developments in the era of Imperial Germany as well as the Weimar Republic. Around the year 1920 […]
Materialising Visibility, Preparing Recognition: The ‘cultural’ politics of GDR-India relations, 1952–1972
Project Manager: Dr. Anandita Bajpai Project Status: completed The German Democratic Republic was officially recognized by the Indian government in 1972. The trade representations established in 1956, however, became the ‘official mouthpiece’ of the GDR in India. Contacts between actors from both the sides can thus be traced much before official recognition was materialised. This […]
South Asia as a Cold War Arena — The two German States and India in the Bangladesh Liberation War 1971
Project Manager: Alexander Benatar Direction: Michael Mann Project Status: completed Ph.D. project The early 1970s saw two opposing trends in Europe and South Asia: while German-German détente was able to overcome the limitations of the Cold War, the Indian subcontinent bore witness to another division of a country, when war between India and Pakistan lead […]
From Berlin to Delhi: Education, Intellectual Exchange and Politics of Translation in the life and writings of Sayyid Abid Husain (1896–1978)
Project Manager: Dr. Martin Christof-Füchsle Direction: Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja Project Status: completed My research project examines the entangled nature of Indo-German intellectual history. I explore intellectual and cultural translations in the sphere of reform pedagogy or “New Education“ dominant at the turn of nineteenth-century Germany and follow their careers in late colonial and post-colonial […]