Participants

Fact & Files – Think History! Historisches Forschungsinstitut Berlin has researched the basics of the colonial traces of industrial history in Reinickendorf and compiled the results textually and editorially for an exhibition at the Museum Reinickendorf.

Professor Dr. Robbie Aitken is a historian of Black Europe and Empire at Sheffield Hallam University. He has written extensively on the development of a Black community in Germany from the 1880s to 1945. He has written extensively on the development of a Black community in Germany from the 1880s to 1945. His publications include Black Germany, the Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884-1960 (with Eve Rosenhaft) and 'Denied a Certificate of Fitness to Marry: The Nuremberg Race Laws as a Threat to Black German Futures', Holocaust and Genocide Studies 39/1 (2025): 40-56. He is currently working on the compensation claims of Black Holocaust victims in the post-war period. He has worked with a wide range of non-academic audiences such as schools, museums, artists, film directors and community groups and has been involved in several public exhibition and memorial projects in Berlin, as well as in the development and implementation of his own travelling exhibition "Black Germany", which has been shown in the UK, Germany and Cameroon.

Carolin Alff is an art historian and is doing her doctorate on the topic of "Representation and Reality: The Images of Africa in Nuremberg and Augsburg in the 16th Century". She is curator of the project "Colonial Contexts 2023" at the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg.

Natalie Bayer is the director of the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin. Previously, curator for new formats and collaboration on "Migration moves the city" at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. Studied European ethnology, art history and ethnology at the University of Munich. Research and work focus: city, racism, historical politics and migration. Projects/exhibitions include "Urban history postcolonial. Perspectives, terms and knowledge at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum" (2020), "Labor 89 – New Perspectives on the Wendezeit" (together with Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, 2020), "GUESTures | Gostikulacije by Margareta Kern" (2019), "Museumslabor Westend" (2017), "Social Consequences of the NSU in Munich" (since 2016), "Crossing Munich. Places, Images and Debates of Migration" (2009). Advisory board and jury activities, including at the Migration Council Berlin (since 2021), Jewish Museum Rendsburg (since 2020), IMPACT Fund of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2020), Berlin Project Fund for Cultural Education (2018-2021). Teaching activities and supervision at the HTW – University of Applied Sciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, University of Applied Arts Vienna, among others. Member of "kritnet – Network for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research". Various article and book publications, including: Bayer, Natalie/Kazeem-Kaminski, Belinda/Sternfeld, Nora (eds.): Curating as an anti-racist practice (Berlin/Boston 2017).

Natalie Bayer is the director of the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin. Previously, curator for new formats and collaboration on "Migration moves the city" at the Münchner Stadtmuseum. Studied European ethnology, art history and ethnology at the University of Munich. Research and work focus: city, racism, historical politics and migration. Projects/exhibitions include "Urban history postcolonial. Perspectives, terms and knowledge at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum" (2020), "Labor 89 – New Perspectives on the Wendezeit" (together with Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, 2020), "GUESTures | Gostikulacije by Margareta Kern" (2019), "Museumslabor Westend" (2017), "Social Consequences of the NSU in Munich" (since 2016), "Crossing Munich. Places, Images and Debates of Migration" (2009). Advisory board and jury activities, including at the Migration Council Berlin (since 2021), Jewish Museum Rendsburg (since 2020), IMPACT Fund of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2020), Berlin Project Fund for Cultural Education (2018-2021). Teaching activities and supervision at the HTW – University of Applied Sciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, University of Applied Arts Vienna, among others. Member of "kritnet – Network for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research". Various article and book publications, including: Bayer, Natalie/Kazeem-Kaminski, Belinda/Sternfeld, Nora (eds.): Curating as an anti-racist practice (Berlin/Boston 2017).

Marie Becker is head of the archives and collections of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Museums. She studied history with a focus on colonial and scientific history. As a curator, she worked on the exhibition projects "Research Workshop: Colonial History in Tempelhof and Schöneberg" and "On the Traces of the Diek Family. Stories of Black People in Tempelhof-Schöneberg".

Sophie Buchholz studied educational sciences as well as museum management and communication in Potsdam and Berlin. She worked as a museum educator in various museums and was also involved in exhibition projects. Today she is a member of the education team of the Stasi Records Archive.

Flavia Cahn is an art and cultural educator and museum scholar with a focus on culture, visual language, resistance and colonialism. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Archaeology in Durham, UK and has been living and working in Berlin since 2017. She is co-founder of the "Art Dialogues" at HKW and organizes guided tours, workshops and participatory actions for study projects of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Since 2022 she has been involved in the project "First Viewing of the Collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin on Colonial Traces". She completed her Master's degree in Applied Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics at the University of Potsdam with the Master's thesis RESIST! The Art of Decolonizing European Ethnological Museums: The Case of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne in 2022.

Clara Ervedosa studied German and English in Lisbon and Regensburg and received her doctorate in Kiel and Coimbra. She then researched and taught at the Universities of Vila Real, Sheffield and Manchester as well as at the Gender Research Group at the University of Kiel. Her publications focus on the interdependencies between language, migration/racism and the nation, the comic as an aesthetic expression of shock and différance, as well as the literature of immigrant women authors (especially Yōko Tawada and Emine Sevgi Özdamar) and the Black German writer May Ayim. More recently, she has also dealt with discursive processes of exclusion as a stabilization strategy of fragile national and European identities, the alteration of the South and the Mediterranean region in German everyday discourses, such as the category "Southerners" in police reports.

Michael G. Esch is a freelance historian, translator and private lecturer in comparative social and cultural history at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Leipzig. He studied at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Warsaw and received his doctorate on German and Polish population policy 1939-1945. In 2007, he habilitated with a study of Eastern European migrants in Paris 1890-1940. He has published numerous books on the history of the late 19th and 20th centuries, in particular on the history of migration and on the social and cultural history of subversive music in the "long sixties".

Susanne Evers is an art historian and curator of the collection for textiles and glass at the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. She is co-curator of the project "Colonial Contexts 2023".

Laura Frey works as a historian and curator with a focus on gender history, migration and colonial history. Among other things, she co-curated the exhibition "Despite Everything. Migration to the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin" at the Museum Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and the exhibition "Solidarize Yourself! Black Resistance and Global Anticolonialism in Berlin 1919-1933" at the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf District Museum. Previously, she worked on the historical-artistic projects "RückERZÄHLT" and "EIGENSINNIGE LEBEN" by Vincent Bababoutilabo and Joel Vogel. At the Basel Graduate School of History, she is writing her doctoral thesis on the history of German citizenship law, with a focus on the intersection of gender, class and race in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lukas Fuchsgruber is an art historian based in Berlin. His research focuses on digitization in museums, photo archives and the history of the art market. In 2021, his book on the auction house Hôtel Drouot, where all art auctions in Paris took place in the 19th century, was published. He has also conducted research on the "Association of Museum Officials for the Defense against Forgeries". Since 2020, he has been part of the research network "Museum and Society – Mapping the Social". His case study focuses on the question of museums and data policy, especially in the design of interfaces and in the production and dissemination of museum data. In 2021, he was part of the open source project "cooArchi, community oriented archive interface", which published an interface for collaborative work on networked knowledge.

Wolfgang Fuhrmann is a film scholar with a focus on film history. He holds a PhD in German colonial cinematography from the University of Utrecht and has taught at various universities in Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Colombia. His research includes German colonial/postcolonial film history, early ethnographic film, transnational film history of German-speaking countries and Latin America, the history of Ufa in Latin America, and the aesthetics of post-conflict in Colombian film. Publications: Imperial. Projections: Screening the German Colonies (2015); "German films in Brazil: Immigration, Associations and National Film Culture". In: J. Terrill/K. Egan/M. Smith (eds.): Researching Past Cinema Audiences, pp. 86-101 (2022).

Studied history, political science and journalism at the Free University of Berlin. Exhibitions and publications, especially on the Nazi era in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Until 2017, she was responsible for regional history as head of the cultural office. Since 2018, she has been working as a freelancer on projects at the Museum Pankow.

Maren Fußwinkel studied history in Berlin and St. Louis with a focus on the history of the USA, racism and colonial history in a global perspective.
As a trainee, she researched colonial traces in the district at the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.

Alexander Paul Gütter studied architecture and urban planning as well as historical building research and monument preservation in Potsdam and Berlin. He wrote his master's thesis at the Technical University of Berlin under Prof. Dr. Thomas Drachenberg on the structural and art-historical research of the Hoffmann mausoleum at the Wilmersdorf forest cemetery in Güterfelde. The author now works for the German Foundation for the Protection of Monuments.

Lisa Hackmann studied art history and modern German philology in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. In 2020, she completed her dissertation on the transnational fame of the French history painter Paul Delaroche in the 19th century under the supervision of Bénédicte Savoy. From 2010 to 2015, she worked as a research assistant in the German-French research project ArtTransForm at the TU Berlin on the mobility of young painters between France and Germany (1793–1870). She is currently a project assistant at the German Lost Art Foundation (Magdeburg/Berlin). In her cultural-historical academic work, she is particularly interested in the mechanisms of the art market, the reconstruction of object histories, and the transnational entanglements of actors.

Philipp Holt studied history and English as well as public history in Berlin and Vancouver. After his studies, he curated numerous special exhibitions on district history for the Tempelhof-Schöneberg museums. In 2022/23, he was project manager of the exhibition "In the footsteps of the Diek family - stories of black people in Tempelhof-Schöneberg". He currently works as a research assistant at the museums of the Domäne Dahlem Foundation.

Gerdien Jonker, Ph.D. was born in Amsterdam and received her doctorate from the University of Groningen in 1993 with a study of the collective memory structures in ancient Mesopotamia. She is affiliated with the Erlangen Center for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE) at Friedrich-Alexander-University, where she researches Muslims in Berlin in the interwar period.

Sina Knopf studied art and cultural history at the Universities of Augsburg, Stockholm and Berlin and is currently doing her doctorate at the University of Zurich on the international art market under National Socialist influence and the translocation of cultural assets during the Second World War. She is a doctoral student in a research project on the Swiss art trade at the Swiss Institute for Art Studies (SIK-ISEA) and a researcher on provenance research and restitution, Nazi art policy, cultural property protection and the international art market. Until December 2021, she worked as a freelance art historian and provenance researcher on various Berlin art and cultural projects.

Katharina König is a trained educator and is studying sociology and educational sciences (B.A.) at the University of Potsdam as a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. For a time, she worked as a freelancer in political youth education work. She is politically active in various projects, including the Cottbus Postkolonial and Postsozialistisch group and the Cottbus '92 initiative. Both groups critically examine the city's colonial heritage against the backdrop of the GDR past; they are also concerned with a remembrance policy reappraisal of the racist pogroms that were perpetrated in August 1992 against the residents of a refugee shelter in the Sachsendorf district of Cottbus.

Imke Küster studied philosophy and art history in Göttingen and Berlin. Since 2010 she has been a freelance museum educator with a focus on Berlin history, Nazi history and modern history. In her student projects, she combines historical topics with theatre pedagogical approaches and artistic stylistic devices. In addition to her work as a museum educator, she also developed participation and hands-on stations for the various houses of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Together with Claudia Wasow-Kania, head of the Department of Education and Outreach at the Museum Reinickendorf, she curated the "interventions" on selected objects from the permanent exhibition with regard to their colonial history.

Paula Lange studied history, Eastern European studies and public history in Hamburg and Berlin. From 2019 to 2021, she completed a research traineeship at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum. Since January 2022, she has been working on her doctorate under Prof. Dr. Claudia Kraft at the University of Vienna on transnational interrelations between German, Jewish and Polish women's movements in the Prussian eastern provinces.

Dr. Ole Birk Laursen is a Researcher Communicator at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research focuses on South Asian history and literature, anti-colonialism, and anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In doing so, he examines political networks, representations of exile, and pacifism and terrorism. He is the author of Anarchy or Chaos: M.P.T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom (2023), editor of Lay Down Your Arms (2019), We Are Anarchists (2019), Networking the Globe (2017), and Reworking Postcolonialism (2016). In addition, he has published scholarly papers on transnational intersections between anticolonialism, socialism, and anarchism in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Yann LeGall is a research associate at the Institute of Art History at the Technical University of Berlin and a member of Berlin Postkolonial e.V. and the Potsdam Postkolonial initiative. He wrote his doctorate on the return of human remains from the colonial era and transnational culture of remembrance. Together with Anna von Rath, he developed an audio guide on traces of colonial history in Potsdam, where he also leads critical city tours. In his current research project "The Restitution of Knowledge", he examines spoils of war from so-called "punitive expeditions" that are still in German museums today.

Susann Lewerenz, historian and employee of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, works on post/colonialism, migration and racism. Her dissertation Shared Worlds. Exoticized Entertainment and Artists of Color in Germany, 1920–1960 was published in 2017.

Clemens Maier-Wolthausen is a contemporary historian, independent curator and publicist. He received his doctorate in 2007 from the European University Institute in Florence on the history of remembrance of the German occupation in Denmark and Norway and subsequently curated numerous exhibitions.

Mirja Memmen is a historian and freelance researcher in Berlin, currently working mainly on various projects on colonial traces in urban space. She studied history and ethnology in Göttingen for her bachelor's degree. After gaining experience in various museums and exhibition projects, she completed a master's degree in public history in Berlin. Her research focuses on German colonial history and its processes of remembrance and reappraisal as well as the history of the women's movement in the German context. She is currently working on a master's thesis project on the first wave of the movement and struggles against paragraph 218.

Linh Müller studied North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Middlebury College, and Yale University, and conducts research on affective reproduction and representation of national belonging in sports and pop culture. In her personal work, she negotiates the complexities that arise from her own Vietnamese and German family history, especially with regard to identity, language, war, and Nazism. She currently lives in Berlin and works on a project on migrant memory and the Statue of Peace, which commemorates the so-called "comfort women" in the Second World War in Berlin-Moabit.

Johanna Niedbalski studied history, European ethnology and sociology in Berlin and earned her doctorate on the culture of entertainment around 1900. Since 2018, she has been working as a freelance historian, especially on topics related to the history of the city of Berlin.

Paulette Reed-Anderson is a historian, studied history in California and Berlin, and received her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the author of numerous essays and studies on German colonial history and the development of the African diaspora in Berlin, as well as the dissertation "The Promotion of the "Colonial Idea" by Cultural Actors. The German Authority for Colonial Affairs in Berlin during the Weimar Republic (1919–1931)" http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/18452/23378.

Marie Schneider studied history and regional studies in her bachelor's degree and global history in Berlin. The focus of her work and projects was on European colonial history. During her studies, Marie Schneider worked in museum projects, in the field of history marketing and in science administration. She is currently researching the political history of rural areas.

Johanna Strunge is a historian and worked on the exhibition "Research Workshop: Colonial History in Tempelhof and Schöneberg" in 2017. Since then, she has not let go of research into colonial history. She is writing a doctorate on colonial goods stores and is active in postcolonial work at Göttingen.

Mark Terkessidis is a freelance author and migration researcher, he lives in Berlin and Cologne. He studied psychology in Cologne and received his doctorate in education from the University of Mainz on the topic of racism, published as: The Banality of Racism. Migrants of the Second Generation Develop a New Perspective (2004). He was editor of the magazine Spex (1992-1994), presenter for "Funkhaus Europa" on WDR (2003-2011) and lecturer at the University of St Gallen (2012-2018). In addition to his own books, he has published articles in Texte zur Kunst, Süddeutsche Zeitung, taz, Tagesspiegel, Zeit, Literaturen and Freitag, as well as on WDR and Deutschlandfunk. With Jochen Kühling, he founded "Heimatlieder aus Deutschland" in 2012. New Books: Whose Memory Counts? Colonial Past and Racism Today (2019); After the Flight. New Ideas for the Immigration Society (2017); Collaboration (2015).

Veronika Tocha is an art historian and art educator and has been a research assistant and curator at the Berlin Gipsformerei of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin since 2016, where she is currently responsible for the scientific processing of the collection of historical forms and models.

Miriam Friz Trzeciak is a sociologist and research assistant at the Department of Interculturality at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of critical migration and border regime research, queer theory, de- and postcolonial studies, postsocialist studies, qualitative research and activist/dialogical research practice. He is active in the group Cottbus Postcolonial and Postsocialist as well as in the Initiative Cottbus '92. Both groups critically examine the colonial heritage of the city against the background of the GDR past; they are also concerned with a remembrance policy reappraisal of the racist pogroms that were perpetrated in August 1992 against the residents of a refugee shelter in the Cottbus district of Sachsendorf.

Dr. Irene von Götz is a historian and director of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Museums. Since 2016, she has been dealing with aspects of colonial history and their consequences in the Berlin district of Tempelhof-Schöneberg in the form of exhibitions and publications.

Anna von Rath studied at the University of Potsdam, the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, and the University of Westminster in London. In 2019, she completed her PhD as part of the Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms. Her publications deal with ecocriticism, travel literature, and German colonial history. In 2022, her book Afropolitan Encounters. Literature and Activism in London and Berlin was published. After many years as a research assistant at the University of Potsdam, she now works as a freelance translator, editor, social justice and diversity trainer. In 2020, she launched the platform poco.lit. for postcolonial literature.

Claudia Wasow-Kania is an art historian and historian. She worked at the Stadtmuseum Berlin and the Mitte Museum as a curator of exhibitions on art and city history (with a focus on Nazi history) as well as in the field of education and outreach. Since 2018, she has been head of education and mediation as well as remembrance work at the memorial sites of the district at the Museum Reinickendorf/Department of Art and History. She has anchored interventions on colonial history topics of regional history in the permanent exhibition of the Museum Reinickendorf. She is continuously developing formats of education and mediation with various target groups on colonial historical aspects of the district.

Dr. phil., studies of Modern and Contemporary History, Sociology and History and Society of Southeast Asia at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Universidad de Catabria, Santander; doctorate at the Humboldt University. Research and teaching on cultural and social history, European integration history, history of European foreign policy, transnational history and the history of the "Cold War" at various academic institutions in Germany and abroad.

Clemens Wildt has been a trainee in the art department at the ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) in Stuttgart and Berlin since 2021. Previously, he studied French Romance studies as well as law and art at the universities of Halle, Paris, Naples and Berlin. For his master's project on France's foreign policy cultural strategy, he travelled to the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2018, among other places. His research focuses on (post)coloniality, cultural policy and institutional critique. He also worked as an education consultant at the Jewish Museum Berlin and has contributed as an author on several occasions, most recently with Isabelle Dolezalek, Bénédicte Savoy, Robert Skwirblies (eds.): Beute. An Anthology on Art Theft and Cultural Heritage (2021).

Malin Winter studied cultural studies, history and public history. As part of the research for her bachelor's thesis "Black and White Images. Media Representation of Colonial Content Using the Example of Selected Forms of Presentation in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg District", she was part of the curatorial team of the exhibition "Research Workshop: Colonial History" at the Schöneberg Museum.

Dagmar Yu-Dembski (1943-2023) studied journalism, art history, and Sinology at Freie Universität Berlin. She was chairwoman of the Society for German-Chinese Friendship Berlin, editor of the journal "The New China," and director of the Confucius Institute at Freie Universität Berlin. Her groundbreaking research on the history of Chinese presences in Berlin has resulted in publications and exhibitions, including "Chinese in Berlin" at the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf 13.9.–4.11.2007 and an autobiographical volume in 2013. Most recently, she supported two exhibitions at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum and the Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, both in cooperation with Dekoloniale Erinnerungskultur in der Stadt.

Sabine Ziegenrücker has been head of the Reinickendorf Department of Art and History as an art historian since 2022. At the Reinickendorf Museum, she initiated the reappraisal of traces of colonial history and was responsible for an exhibition on industrial history. She also curates contemporary exhibitions that take up postcolonial artistic discourse.

Stefan Zollhauser is a historian and city walker. In addition to his work for some Berlin district museums, he likes to rummage through archives and is interested in ordinary people and unusual perspectives. He prefers to work outdoors and he doesn't like monologues. More at www.berliner-spurensuche.de

Stefan Zollhauser works as a historian for Berlin district museums and places of remembrance, among others. He also conducts thematic city walks on the everyday history of the metropolis from industrialization to the present day: www.berliner-spurensuche.de