Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
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Spring 2020 The German Society of Pennsylvania Bulletin of the German Historical Institute | 66 Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Spring 2020 1607 NEW HAMPSHIRE AVE NW WWW.GHI-DC.ORG WASHINGTON DC 20009 USA [email protected] German Historical Institute Washington Fellows and Staff For further information, please consult our web site: www.ghi-dc.org Prof. Dr. Simone Lässig, Director History of knowledge; German social and cultural history; Jewish history; history of religion and religiosity; historical education; educational media and digital humanities PD Dr. Axel Jansen, Deputy Director History of the United States; history of science Anne Kadolph, Administrative Director Dr. Anna-Carolin Augustin, Research Fellow Modern German-Jewish history and culture, women's and gender history, Jewish material culture, Nazi art looting and post-war restitution, provenance research, history of collecting, the art market, and consumer culture Dr. Elisabeth Engel, Research Fellow Bulletin of the German Historical Institute North American history; race and empire; modern colonialism; Atlantic and transnational history; Washington DC postcolonial studies; history of capitalism Editor: Richard F. Wetzell Dr. Jan C. Jansen, Research Fellow Modern European, North African, and Atlantic history; colonialism and decolonization; Assistant Editor: Insa Kummer memory studies; migration studies; global history of freemasonry Dr. Albert Manke, Research Fellow The Bulletin appears twice a year and is available free of charge. Global and transnational history; transpacifi c migration; Cold War studies; social history of Cuba and Latin America; inter-American studies Current and back issues are available online at: Dr. Atiba Pertilla, Research Fellow and Digital Editor www.ghi-dc.org/bulletin Digital history, fi nancial history, U.S. history, 1865–1945, history of migration, To sign up for a subscription or to report an address change history of masculinity and gender, urban history please send an email to [email protected]. Dr. Claudia Roesch, Research Fellow History of the family; history of migration; gender and sexuality; transatlantic exchanges; For editorial comments or inquiries, please contact history of knowledge the editor at [email protected] or at the address below. Dr. Sören Urbansky, Research Fellow Global and transnational history; microhistory; Russia, the Soviet Union and China For further information about the GHI, please visit our (18th to 20th centuries); Chinese diaspora in the Pacifi c; borders and infrastructures web site www.ghi-dc.org. Dr. Andrea Westermann, Research Fellow and Head of GHI Pacifi c Regional Offi ce History of the earth sciences, environmental history, history of technology, For general inquiries, please send an email to [email protected]. material culture studies, history of knowledge German Historical Institute Dr. Richard F. Wetzell, Research Fellow and Editor of the GHI Bulletin Modern European history; modern German history; intellectual and cultural history; 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW legal history; history of science and medicine; history of sexuality Washington DC 20009-2562 USA Dr. Thomas L. Hughes, Senior Visiting Research Fellow Dr. Robert Gerald Livingston, Senior Visiting Research Fellow Phone: (202) 387-3355 Dr. Sarah Beringer, Head of Section, Research Strategy & Communications Fax: (202) 483-3430 Anna Maria Boß, Head Librarian Anita Brown, Library Associate © German Historical Institute 2020 Daniel Burckhardt, Technical Developer All rights reserved Susanne Fabricius, Foreign Language Assistant Heike Friedman, Program Coordinator, GHI West ISSN 1048-9134 Daniel Graham, Receptionist Brita Hanafy, Assistant to the Director Bryan Hart, Program Offi cer (Fellowships) and Webmaster Dr. Katharina Hering, Digital Project Librarian/Metadata editor Insa Kummer, Project Editor Alexa Lässig, Social Media Coordinator David B. Lazar, Senior Editor Elisabeth Mait, German Language Research Associate Dr. Kelly McCullough, Project Manager Ralph Miller, IT/Systems Manager Stephanie Oehrlein, Administrative Associate Josh Seale, Events Coordinator Melanie Smaney, Administrative Associate Dr. Mark Stoneman, Editor Dr. Patricia Casey Sutcliffe, Editor Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 66 | Spring 2020 3 Preface FEATURES 9 Moral Reasoning in the Wake of Mass Murder: Disability and Reproductive Rights in 1980s-1990s Germany Dagmar Herzog 31 The Object’s Afterlife: Nazi-Looted Precious Metal Objects, Art History, and Jewish History in Postwar Germany Anna Augustin 53 Between Ausländer and Almancı: The Transnational History of Turkish-German Migration Michelle Lynn Kahn 83 Free Chinese Migrants in the Americas in the Modern Age: Dynamics of Exclusion and Xenophobia Albert Manke CONFERENCE REPORTS 111 Global Knowledge, Global Legitimacy? Transatlantic Biomedicine since 1970 Susan L. Speaker 117 Sixth Junior Scholars Conference in Jewish History: Radicalism and Resistance in Modern Jewish History Anna-Carolin Augustin and Miriam Rürup 121 Eleventh Medieval History Seminar Paul Schweitzer-Martin 127 Digital Hermeneutics: From Research to Dissemination Tim van der Heijden, Juliane Tatarinov, Gerben Zaagsma 133 Third Annual Bucerius Young Scholars Forum. Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives Levke Harders and Andrea Westermann 137 Archives of Migration: Annual Academic and Policy Symposium “Innovation through Migration” Fatima El-Tayeb, Katharina Hering, Andrea Westermann 147 GHI NEWS 2019 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize New Staff Publications Staff Changes GHI Fellowships and Internships GHI Fellowship Recipients, 2019/20 GHI Research Seminar and Colloquium, Fall 2019 GHI Spring Lecture Series 2020 GHI Calendar of Events GHI Library 2 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 66 | SPRING 2020 PREFACE The issue’s fi rst feature article presents the German Historical Institute’s 33rd Annual Lecture, delivered last November by the distinguished historian Dagmar Herzog (CUNY Graduate Center). In her lecture, “Moral Reasoning in the Wake of Mass Murder,” Herzog examines the complicated ways in which increasing public aware- ness of the Nazi regime’s mass murder of people with disabilities infl uenced German debates over disability rights and reproductive rights in 1980s and 1990s. As Herzog shows, West Germany’s 1989 “Singer Aff air” — a controversial visit by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who called for legalizing the killing of infants with severe disabilities — helped to bring the Nazi euthanasia murders and the contemporary disability rights movement to the attention of a broader public. At the same time, Singer’s blurring of the dis- tinction between abortion and infanticide contributed to a drastic reconfi guration of the relationship between disability rights and reproductive rights. Whereas West German disability activists had previously defended women’s rights to abortion, including the so-called eugenic indication (if an embryo showed signs of dis- ability), in the late 1980s the tide turned as infl uential disability activists began to oppose abortion on eugenic grounds, thereby pitting disability rights against reproductive rights in a way that lent support to antiabortion activists and left a mark on the reconfi gured abortion legislation of unifi ed Germany. The long shadow cast by the Nazi regime is also at the center of Anna-Carolin Augustin’s article “The Object’s Aft erlife,” in which Augustin (Research Fellow at the GHI) traces how the Nazi loot- ing of objects — especially Jewish ceremonial objects — made of gold and silver infl uenced the trajectory of art history, connoisseur- ship, and Jewish history in postwar West Germany. By examining the intersecting careers of Wolfgang Scheffl er, an art historian who used the expertise he gained cataloguing these looted objects during the Nazi years to further his postwar career, and Bernhard Brilling, a Jewish historian and emigré who returned to West Germany to pursue his research on Jewish goldsmiths, Augustin sheds light on the disturbing ways in which Nazi looting opened up research opportunities from which scholars continued to ben- efi t aft er the war — and on the no less fraught ways in which some Jewish and non-Jewish German scholars, including some who PREFACE 3 were deeply implicated in the crimes of the Nazi regime, engaged in scholarly interaction aft er the war. The following two feature articles shift focus to the history of migra- tion. Michelle Lynn Kahn’s article “Between Ausländer and Almancı” presents her research on the transnational history of Turkish- German migration, for which she was honored with the 2019 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, awarded annually by the Friends of the German Historical Institute for the best dissertation in German history completed at a North American university. While there is now a great deal of excellent historical research on Turkish migrants in West Germany, Kahn explores a hitherto neglected aspect of Turkish-German migration, namely the re-migration of Turkish migrants living in Germany back to Turkey, be it temporary — many Turkish Gastarbeiter returned to Turkey every year during their summer vacations — or permanent, as happened on a large scale when, in 1983, Helmut Kohl’s government provided monetary incentives for Turkish migrants to return to Turkey permanently. By studying this transnational fl ow of migration and remigration, Kahn is able to elucidate the complicated fi gure of the Almancı, the dually estranged and dually discriminated migrant, who was treated as an Ausländer in Germany