People involved

Facts & Files – Think History! The Berlin Institute for Historical Research has researched the background to the colonial traces in Reinickendorf’s industrial history and compiled the findings in written and editorial form for an exhibition at the Reinickendorf Museum.

Professor Dr Robbie Aitken is a historian specialising in Black Europe and the 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 researching the compensation claims of Black Holocaust victims in the post-war period. He has worked with a wide range of non-academic audiences, including schools, museums, artists, film directors and community groups, and has been involved in several public exhibition and remembrance projects in Berlin, as well as in the development and staging 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 currently completing her PhD on the topic ‘Representation and Reality: Images of Africa in Nuremberg and Augsburg in the 16th century’. She is the curator of the ‘Colonial Contexts 2023’ project at the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg.

Natalie Bayer is director of the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum, Berlin. Previously, she was curator for new formats and collaboration on the ‘Migration Moves the City’ project at the Munich City Museum. She studied European Ethnology, Art History and Ethnology at the University of Munich. Key areas of research and work: the city, racism, historical politics and migration. Projects/exhibitions include ‘Postcolonial Urban History: Perspectives, Concepts and Knowledge at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum’ (2020), ‘Labor 89 – New Perspectives on the Period of Reunification’ (in collaboration with Nicola Lauré al-Samarai, 2020), ‘GUESTures | Gostikulacije by Margareta Kern’ (2019), ‘Museum Laboratory Westend’ (2017), ‘The Social Consequences of the NSU in Munich’ (since 2016), ‘Crossing Munich: Places, Images and Debates on Migration’ (2009). Advisory board and jury roles, including at the Berlin Migration Council (since 2021), the Jewish Museum in Rendsburg (since 2020), the IMPACT Fund of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2020), the Berlin Project Fund for Cultural Education (2018–2021). Teaching and supervisory roles at, amongst others, the HTW – University of Applied Sciences, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Member of ‘kritnet – Network for Critical Research on Migration and Border Regimes’. Various articles 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 Archives and Collections at the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Museums. She studied history, specialising in colonial history and the history of science. As a curator, she has contributed to exhibition projects including ‘Research Workshop: Colonial History in Tempelhof and Schöneberg’ and ‘In the Footsteps of the Diek Family: Stories of Black People in Tempelhof-Schöneberg’.

Sophie Buchholz studied Education as well as Museum Management and Communication in Potsdam and Berlin. She has worked as a museum educator in various museums and has also been involved in exhibition projects. She is currently a member of the education team at the Stasi Records Archive.

Flavia Cahn is an arts and culture educator and museum scholar specialising in culture, visual language, resistance and colonialism. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Archaeology in Durham, UK, and has been living and working in Berlin since 2017. She is a co-founder of the ‘Kunst-Dialoge’ at the HKW and organises guided tours, workshops and participatory activities for study projects at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Since 2022, she has been involved in the project ‘Initial review of the Stadtmuseum Berlin collection for traces of colonialism’. She completed her Master’s degree in Applied Cultural Studies and Cultural Semiotics at the University of Potsdam in 2022 with a Master’s thesis entitled RESIST! The Art of Decolonising European Ethnological Museums: The Case of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne.

Clara Ervedosa studied German and English Language and Literature in Lisbon and Regensburg and completed her PhD in Kiel and Coimbra. She subsequently conducted research 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 nation, the comic as an aesthetic expression of shock and différance, and the literature of immigrant female authors (notably Yōko Tawada and Emine Sevgi Özdamar) and the Black German writer May Ayim. More recently, she has also examined discursive processes of exclusion as a stabilisation strategy for fragile national and European identities, and the ‘othering’ of the South and the Mediterranean region in everyday German discourse – 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 completed his PhD on German and Polish population policy from 1939 to 1945. In 2007, he completed his habilitation with a study on Eastern European migrants in Paris from 1890 to 1940. He has published numerous works on the history of the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly on the history of migration and the social and cultural history of subversive music during the ‘long 1960s’.

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

Laura Frey works as a historian and curator, specialising in gender history, migration history and colonial history. Among other things, she served as co-curator for the exhibition “In Spite of Everything: Migration to the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin” at the Museum Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, as well as for the exhibition ‘Show Solidarity! Black Resistance and Global Anti-Colonialism in Berlin 1919–1933’ at the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf District Museum. Previously, she contributed to the historical-artistic projects “ZurückERZÄHLT” and “EIGENSINNIGE LEBEN” by Vincent Bababoutilabo and Joel Vogel. At the Basel Graduate School of History, she is writing her PhD thesis on the history of German citizenship law, focusing 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 digitisation in museums, photographic archives and the history of the art market. In 2021, his book on the Hôtel Drouot auction house was published; this was the venue for all art auctions in Paris during the 19th century. He has also conducted research into the ‘Association of Museum Officials for the Prevention of Forgeries’. Since 2020, he has been part of the research consortium ‘Museum and Society – Mapping the Social’. His case study within this project focuses on the relationship between museums and data policy, particularly in the design of interfaces and the production and dissemination of museum data. In 2021, he was part of the open-source project ‘cooArchi, community-oriented archive interface’, which released an interface for collaborative work on networked knowledge.

Wolfgang Fuhrmann is a film scholar specialising in film history. He completed his PhD at Utrecht University on German colonial cinema and has taught at various universities in Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Colombia. His research encompasses German colonial and post-colonial film history, early ethnographic film, the 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 cinema. 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 focusing in particular on the Nazi era in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Served there until 2017 as head of the Cultural Affairs Office, responsible for regional history. Since 2018, has been working on a freelance basis on projects for the Pankow Museum.

Maren Fußwinkel studied history in Berlin and St Louis, focusing on the history of the USA, racism and colonial history from a global perspective.
As a trainee, she carried out research at the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum into traces of colonialism in the district.

Alexander Paul Gütter studied architecture and urban planning, as well as historical building research and heritage conservation, in Potsdam and Berlin. He wrote his Master’s thesis at the Technical University of Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Dr Thomas Drachenberg on the architectural and art-historical study of the Hoffmann Mausoleum at the Wilmersdorf Waldfriedhof Güterfelde. The author now works for the German Foundation for Monument Protection.

Lisa Hackmann studied art history and modern German philology in Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. In 2020, she completed her doctoral thesis on the transnational fame of the French history painter Paul Delaroche in the 19th century, supervised by Bénédicte Savoy. From 2010 to 2015, she worked as a research assistant on the Franco-German research project ArtTransForm at the Technical University of Berlin, which examined the mobility of young painters between France and Germany (1793–1870). She is currently a project researcher at the German Centre for Lost Cultural Property (Magdeburg/Berlin). In her cultural-historical research, she is particularly interested in the mechanisms of the art market, the reconstruction of the histories of artworks, and the transnational interconnections between key figures.

Philipp Holt studied History and English, as well as Public History, in Berlin and Vancouver. After completing his studies, he curated numerous special exhibitions on the history of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district for the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Museums. In 2022/23, he was project manager for 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 obtained her doctorate in 1993 at the University of Groningen with a thesis on collective memory structures in ancient Mesopotamia. She is affiliated with the Erlangen Centre for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE) at Friedrich-Alexander University, where she conducts research on Muslims in Berlin during the interwar period.

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

Katharina König is a qualified early years educator and, as a scholarship holder of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, is studying sociology and educational sciences (BA) at the University of Potsdam. For a time, she worked on a freelance basis in political youth education. She is politically active in various projects, including the group ‘Cottbus Postcolonial and Postsocialist’ and the ‘Cottbus ’92’ initiative. Both groups critically examine the city’s colonial legacy against the backdrop of its GDR past; they also engage in a process of coming to terms with the racist pogroms perpetrated in August 1992 against the residents of a refugee shelter in the Sachsendorf district of Cottbus, through the lens of the politics of memory.

Imke Küster studied philosophy and art history in Göttingen and Berlin. Since 2010, she has been a freelance museum educator specialising in Berlin’s history, Nazi history and modern history. In her projects with school pupils, she combines historical themes with theatre-based educational approaches and artistic techniques. In addition to her work as a museum educator, she has also developed participatory and hands-on stations for the various venues of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Together with Claudia Wasow-Kania, Head of the Education and Outreach Department at the Museum Reinickendorf, she curated the ‘Interventions’ on selected objects from the permanent exhibition, focusing on 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 pursuing her PhD under Prof. Dr Claudia Kraft at the University of Vienna, researching transnational interrelationships 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 this work, he examines political networks, representations of exile, as well as pacifism and terrorism. He is the author of *Anarchy or Chaos: M.P.T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Freedom* (2023), and the editor of *Lay Down Your Arms* (2019), *We Are Anarchists* (2019), *Networking the Globe* (2017) and *Reworking Postcolonialism* (2016). He has also published academic articles in specialist journals and anthologies on the transnational intersections between anti-colonialism, socialism and anarchism.

Yann LeGall is a research fellow at the Institute of Art History at the Technical University of Berlin, as well as a member of Berlin Postkolonial e.V. and the Potsdam Postkolonial initiative. He completed his PhD on the repatriation of human remains from the colonial era and transnational cultures of remembrance. Together with Anna von Rath, he developed an audio guide to traces of colonial history in Potsdam, where he also leads critical city tours. In his current research project, ‘The Restitution of Knowledge’, he is investigating spoils of war from so-called ‘punitive expeditions’ that are still held in German museums today.

Susann Lewerenz, a historian and member of staff at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, conducts research on post-colonialism, migration and racism. Her doctoral thesis, *Divided Worlds. Exotised Entertainment and Artists of Colour in Germany, 1920–1960 was published in 2017.

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

Mirja Memmen is a historian and works as a freelance researcher in Berlin, currently focusing primarily on various projects relating to traces of colonialism in the urban environment. She studied for a Bachelor’s degree in History and Ethnology in Göttingen. 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 the processes of remembrance and coming to terms with the past, 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 the struggles against Paragraph 218.

Linh Müller studied North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, Middlebury College and Yale University, and her research focuses on the affective reproduction and representation of national belonging in sport and popular culture. In her personal work, she explores the complexities arising from her own Vietnamese and German family history, particularly with regard to identity, language, war and Nazism. She currently lives in Berlin and is working on a project concerning migrant memory and the Peace Statue in Berlin-Moabit, which commemorates the so-called ‘comfort women’ of the Second World War.

Johanna Niedbalski studied history, European ethnology and sociology in Berlin and completed her PhD on the culture of entertainment around 1900. Since 2018, she has been working as a freelance historian, focusing in particular on topics relating to Berlin’s urban history.

Paulette Reed-Anderson is a historian; she studied history in California and Berlin and completed her PhD at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in 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 doctoral thesis ‘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 for a Bachelor’s degree in History and Regional Studies and a Master’s degree in Global History in Berlin. Her work and projects have focused on European colonial history. During her studies, Marie Schneider worked on museum projects, in the field of history marketing and in academic administration. She is currently conducting research into the political history of rural areas.

Johanna Strunge is a historian and contributed to the 2017 exhibition ‘Research Workshop: Colonial History in Tempelhof and Schöneberg’. Since then, she has remained deeply engaged with the study of colonial history. She is writing a PhD thesis on colonial goods shops and is active in the postcolonial scene in Göttingen.

Mark Terkessidis is a freelance writer and migration researcher; he lives in Berlin and Cologne. He studied psychology in Cologne and completed a PhD in education at the University of Mainz on the subject of racism, publishing a thesis entitled: The Banality of Racism. Second-generation migrants develop a new perspective (2004). He was an editor at Spex magazine (1992–1994), a presenter for ‘Funkhaus Europa’ on WDR (2003–2011) and a lecturer at the University of St Gallen (2012–2018). In addition to his own books, he has published articles in, amongst others, *Texte zur Kunst*, *Süddeutsche Zeitung*, *taz*, *Tagesspiegel*, *Zeit*, *Literaturen* and *Freitag*, as well as on WDR and Deutschlandfunk. Together with Jochen Kühling, he founded *Heimatlieder aus Deutschland* in 2012. New books: Whose Memory Counts? The Colonial Past and Racism Today (2019); After the Flight: New Ideas for an Immigration Society (2017); Collaboration (2015).

Veronika Tocha is an art historian and art teacher; since 2016 she has been a research assistant and curator at the Berlin Plaster Cast Gallery of the State Museums in Berlin, where she is currently responsible for the scholarly catalogueing of the collection of historical moulds and models.

Miriam Friz Trzeciak is a sociologist and research assistant in the Department of Intercultural Studies at the BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. Their teaching and research interests lie in the fields of critical migration and border regime studies, queer theory, decolonial and postcolonial studies, post-socialist studies, qualitative research and activist/dialogic research practice. They are active in the group ‘Cottbus Postcolonial and Post-Socialist’ as well as in the ‘Cottbus ’92’ initiative. Both groups critically engage with the city’s colonial legacy against the backdrop of its GDR past; they also engage in a political reappraisal of the racist pogroms perpetrated in August 1992 against the residents of a refugee shelter in the Sachsendorf district of Cottbus.

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

Anna von Rath studied at the University of Potsdam, the University of English and Foreign Languages 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 focus on ecocriticism, travel literature and German colonial history. Her book *Afropolitan Encounters: Literature and Activism in London and Berlin* was published in 2022. After many years as a research assistant at the University of Potsdam, she now works as a freelance translator, editor and 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 urban history (with a focus on Nazi history), as well as in the field of education and outreach. Since 2018, she has headed the education and outreach department at the Museum Reinickendorf (Art and History Department), as well as leading remembrance work at the district’s memorial sites. She has incorporated interventions on colonial history themes within the region’s history into the permanent exhibition at the Museum Reinickendorf. She is continuously developing educational and outreach programmes for various target groups on aspects of the district’s colonial history.

Dr. phil., studied Modern and Contemporary History, Sociology, and the History and Society of South-East Asia at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Cantabria, Santander; completed her PhD at Humboldt University. Research and teaching on cultural and social history, the history of European integration, the 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 Arts Department at the ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) in Stuttgart and Berlin since 2021. Prior to this, he studied Franco-Romance Studies, Law and Art History at the universities of Halle, Paris, Naples and Berlin. For his Master’s thesis on France’s foreign policy cultural strategy, he travelled to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, amongst other places, in 2018. His research focuses on (post)coloniality, cultural policy and institutional critique. He has also worked as an education officer at the Jewish Museum Berlin and has contributed as an author on several occasions, most recently to: Isabelle Dolezalek, Bénédicte Savoy, Robert Skwirblies (eds.): *Beute. An Anthology on Art Looting and Cultural Heritage* (2021).

Malin Winter studied cultural studies, history and public history. Whilst conducting 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 for the exhibition “Research Workshop: Colonial History” at the Schöneberg Museum.

Dagmar Yu-Dembski (1943–2023) studied journalism, art history and Chinese studies at the Free University of Berlin. She was chair of the Society for German-Chinese Friendship Berlin e.V., editor of the journal *Das neue China*, and director of the Confucius Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Her pioneering research into the history of the Chinese presence in Berlin resulted in publications and exhibitions, including ‘Chinesen in Berlin’ at the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum, 13 September–4 November 2007, and an autobiographical volume published in 2013. Most recently, she supported two exhibitions at the FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum and the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Museum, both in collaboration with ‘Decolonial Remembrance Culture in the City’.

Sabine Ziegenrücker, an art historian, has headed the Art and History Department in Reinickendorf since 2022. At the Museum Reinickendorf, she initiated a project to examine traces of colonial history and was responsible for an exhibition on industrial history. She also curates contemporary exhibitions that engage with postcolonial artistic discourse.

Stefan Zollhauser is a historian and city walk guide. Alongside his work for various Berlin district museums, he enjoys delving into archives, with a particular interest in ordinary people and unusual perspectives. He prefers to work outdoors and doesn’t like monologues. Find out more at www.berliner-spurensuche.de

Stefan Zollhauser works as a historian for, amongst others, Berlin’s district museums and memorial sites. He also leads themed city walks exploring the everyday history of the metropolis from industrialisation to the present day: www.berliner-spurensuche.de