Wednesday, September 16th, 2015 German Reunification - 25 Years Later

Description

** Watch the live webcast of this event starting at 2 p.m.**

After more than four decades of division, Germany’s East and West were officially reunited on 3 October 1990. This panel discussion will focus on the historical importance of this momentous event and will examine the progress achieved by the Federal Republic since then as well as the challenges that it continues to face.

In an informal setting, our panel of distinguished experts will reflect on a series of questions. How does Germany look 25 years after the heady days of 1989/1990? Which fears were realized, which not? How well integrated is East Germany? How did Reunification impact Germany’s position in regional and global political contexts?

Doris Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies. Her research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. Her books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003 and 2009); The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries (edited, 2004); Lessons and Legacies VIII (edited, 2008), and Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen Reich 1941-1945 (co-edited with Andrea Löw and Anna Hájková, 2013). She has held grants and fellowships from the SSHRC, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the DAAD, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and she has taught at the Universities of Warsaw, Pristina, Tuzla, Notre Dame, and Vermont.

Randall Hansen is Director of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Munk School of Global Affairs and Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He works on migration and citizenship, eugenics and population policy, and the effect of war on civilian populations. His published works include Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after July 20, 1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Fire and Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany (Doubleday, 2008), and Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (OUP, 2000). He has also co-edited Immigration and Public Opinion in Liberal Democracies (with David Leal and Gary P. Freeman) (New York: Routledge, 2012), Migration States and International Cooperation (with Jeannette Money and Jobst Koehler, Routledge, 2011), Towards a European Nationality (with P. Weil, Palgrave, 2001), Dual Nationality, Social Rights, and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. And Europe (w. P. Weil, Berghahn, 2002), and Immigration and Asylum from 1900 to the Present (w. M. Gibney, ABC-CLIO, 2005).

Konrad H. Jarausch has written or edited about forty books in modern German and European history. Starting with Hitler’s seizure of power and the First World War, his research interests have moved to the social history of German students and professions, German unification in 1989/90, with historiography under the Communist GDR, the nature of the East German dictatorship, as well as the debate about historians and the Third Reich. More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German history in general, the learning processes after 1945, the issue of cultural democratization, and the relationship between Honecker and Breshnew. His latest book is Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton 2015).

Walter Stechel is the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Toronto. Mr. Stechel is originally from Darmstadt, Germany. After obtaining his diploma in economics, he continued his education at the diplomatic academy in Berlin from where he moved to his first postings in Santiago de Chile, San Francisco, Buenos Aires and Ottawa. From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Stechel was the Deputy Head of Mission at the German Embassy in Addis Ababa. Following a posting at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, he served as Consul General in Mumbai from 2006 to 2010. His career took an academic turn in 2010 when he spent one year as a Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. After two years as an adviser to the Secretary-General for the German representation in the OECD in Paris, Mr. Stechel became Consul General in Toronto in 2013. He is expected to remain in this position until 2016.

Stephen F. Szabo is the executive director of the Transatlantic Academy (TA). The TA, which is a partnership between German Marshall Fund and the Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius Zeit Stiftung of Hamburg, Germany, the Robert Bosch Stiftung of Stuttgart, Germany, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a forum for research and dialogue between scholars, policy experts, and authors from both sides of the Atlantic. Dr. Szabo has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the American Academy in Berlin. Szabo received his Ph.D. From Georgetown University in political science and has a bachelor’s and master’s from the School of International Service, the American University. He is the author of a number of books on German foreign policy, most recently Germany, Russia and the Rise of Geo-economics (2015) and teaches German politics at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS.

Rebecca Wittmann (PhD University of Toronto) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Historical Studies at UTM. Her research focuses on the Holocaust and postwar Germany, trials of Nazi perpetrators and terrorists, and German legal history. She has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). She has published articles in Central European History, German History, and Lessons and Legacies. Her book, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Harvard University Press, 2005) won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. She is currently working on her second book project entitled Guilt and Shame through the Generations: Confronting the Past in Postwar Germany.