Funding Period: 21.04.2022 – 21.07.2022

How to research and communicate institutional history as part of the present? How can the questioning of one's own institutional history be more than an end in itself? How can historiography be a participatory practice? The history of the Gropius Bau, which is still only incompletely researched, is characterised by the interweaving of Germany’s central regimes of violence in the 20th century: colonial rule, as well as the Nazi and GDR regimes have left their traces and testimonies here. The present Kreuzberg, however, is characterised by its turbulent history as today's urban centre of Berlin. The students will work with methods of mediation and develop audio walks as an output of the seminar, based on conversations with historians, activists, contemporary witnesses and communities as well as archive research. This seminar is not only about researching the present and histories of the Gropius Bau and its immediate surroundings, but also about communicating the research results. The seminar focusses on how to deal with the historiography of the Gropius Bau and how history and the present relate and interlink.

This seminar is aimed at students with the following areas of interest: curatorial practice, ethnography, museum mediation, oral and local history.

Course language: German
Schedule: thursday, 10 a.m.-12 p.m.
Place: Room 408, IfEE, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) or online

Contact: margareta.von.oswald@hu-berlin.de / mammana@gropiusbau.de