My first journey to Derry (or Londonderry, depending on one’s political orientation and identity) brought me directly into the city’s living history. I arrived to attend the annual Think Left conference, held each year on the first weekend of October to commemorate the civil rights march of 5 October 1968, a pivotal moment often described as the symbolic opening to the Troubles. Sponsored largely by the city’s left-wing community, particularly the party People Before Profit, the conference served as a contemporary reminder of the enduring resonance of 1968. This year’s discussions centred heavily on Palestine Action, featuring speakers from Gaza and addressing the mounting restrictions on protest in the UK. The seamless interweaving of past and present was most palpable when Eamonn McCann, veteran of the Northern Irish civil rights movement (especially in the locality of Derry) and lifelong activist, reflected on his decades of political engagement and on how socialist frameworks have shaped both his understanding of protest and his imagination of social change.
As a historian, one may ask why I would immerse myself in a space where activists exchange ideas, mobilize campaigns, and articulate contemporary grievances. The short answer lies in the focus of my PhD project: I study how historical events are remembered, mobilized, and reframed across time, and how their meanings shift depending on who invokes them and for what purpose. My background in history and global studies has trained me not merely to reconstruct events historically, but to interrogate the narrative processes through which these events acquire significance and meaning up to the present day—for both the (historical) actors and historians alike. In other words, I work at the intersection of history and memory, assuming that the two are never separate but continuously shape one another.
From Leipzig to Derry: A Comparative Curiosity
Growing up in Leipzig, in the former East Germany, I was constantly confronted with the afterlives of division in a state officially reunited. Public debates, whether about differing responses to the Covid-19 pandemic or the rise of right-wing populism and the AfD, regularly returned to the unresolved question of whether ‘East’ and ‘West’ were ever truly unified. Popular works by scholars such as Steffen Mau and Dirk Oschmann further highlight the persistence of division in societal discourse.1 Over the past two years, Germany has commemorated thirty-five years since the Peaceful Revolution and thirty-five years of unity, while new institutions, such as the Centre for Future German Unity and European Transformation, and symbolic interventions, like the laying of a cornerstone for a unification monument in Leipzig, continue to reproduce contested meanings of unity.
My doctoral project grew out of these reflections. While German unification has been extensively studied at both national and local levels, I wanted to adopt a comparative global-studies approach to ask broader questions. How do social movements in divided societies envision unity (if at all)? How do their memories travel over time? And how does the idea of unification itself change depending on (historical) context?
Initially, I examined Korea as a comparative case and was drawn to the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, an event with immense national significance for South Korean democracy. Yet I soon realized that a binary comparison with Leipzig 1989 risked becoming a discussion of isolated cases rather than revealing transnational entanglements. To challenge this, I searched for a third case that would introduce new dynamics into the comparison and analysis. This brought me to Irish history, where, as in Korea, scholars have long engaged with division/partition, conflict, and peace processes. Recent initiatives in Leipzig have also begun exploring Irish–German comparisons, making the connection all the more compelling. This triangulation has the conceptual aim of not only avoiding the shortcomings of traditional comparative studies, but also specifically shifting focus to the connections and cultural transfers between social movements, based on three cases that at first glance appear spatially and temporally disconnected rather than entangled.
Within Irish historiography, one locality stood out: Derry, often framed as the crucible from which the Northern Irish civil rights movement gained global visibility in 1968. Here, questions about division, rights, sovereignty, and the memory of protest converge in particularly intense ways.
Derry 1968: The “Ideal” Place for Protest?
The civil rights campaign of the mid to late 1960s emerged from longstanding, structural socio-economic and political inequalities in Northern Ireland. Gerrymandering, discriminatory housing allocation, and high unemployment disproportionately affected the Catholic/nationalist population, though cross-community frustrations also simmered among Protestant/unionist working-class groups and students. Earlier campaigns, including the Dungannon social justice campaign led by Patricia and Conn McCluskey and Austin Currie’s 1968 sit-in in a house in Caledon, signalled a strategic shift toward civil disobedience, inspired partly by the US civil rights movement and the global protest culture of 1968.
On 5 October 1968, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), alongside local groups such as the Derry Housing Action Committee and the Young James Connolly Association, organized a march in Derry from the Waterside to the Diamond. The march went ahead despite being banned, and met violent resistance from the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Images of police officers attacking unarmed protesters were broadcast internationally, marking a turning point that propelled the movement into global consciousness. Derry thus became central to the narrative arc that, according to mainstream historiography, moves from civil rights activism to increased repression, escalating conflict, and ultimately the onset of the Troubles.
Archival Research: A Multilayered Landscape
Over the past several months, I have examined how the civil rights movement was framed and understood by activists, governments, journalists, local communities, and international observers. My archival research began at the National Archives in Kew, where I consulted documents that reveal how the movement was represented in official correspondence. Much of the material reflected the perspective of the Belfast-based government, offering insights into how authorities often attempted to portray civil rights activists as radicals or IRA-aligned agitators, while privately acknowledging the legitimacy and professionalism of certain individuals they came into personal contact with. Popular figures such as Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey), then the youngest MP in Westminster, were used alongside the news media to refer to, negotiate with, and understand the civil rights movement, especially on the national scale.
To broaden the picture beyond British state archives, I also conducted research at Maynooth University, where collections include pamphlets, newspapers, and political materials from organizations across the island. Visits to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and the British Library in London were also particularly revealing in tracing the international reception of the movement. Devlin’s autobiography, The Price of My Soul, for instance, was translated into French and German as early as 1969–70, demonstrating how quickly audiences in other countries took interest in events in Northern Ireland.
Yet archival materials in distant institutions can only go so far. To understand how people in Derry remember and narrate their past today, I spent a month in the city conducting field research.
Memory in Place: Derry as a Living Archive
The Bogside, historically the centre of nationalist life in Derry, remains dense with memory. The Free Derry Corner, originally the gable wall of a house, still bears the iconic phrase ‘You are now entering Free Derry’. Although the wall’s imagery changes regularly, the recent addition of a large Palestinian flag and the phrase ‘One world, one struggle’ encapsulates how the community links its historical experience to contemporary global injustices.
The Museum of Free Derry, an independent, community-run institution, plays a central role in shaping public understanding of events such as Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972), when British soldiers killed thirteen civilians during a civil rights march. The museum documents not only the political and social context of the massacre, but also the long struggle for truth and justice, including the community’s challenge to the discredited Widgery Tribunal and the decades-long campaign that culminated in the Saville Inquiry (1998–2010) and David Cameron’s 2010 apology.
My conversations with the museum’s curator, Adrian Kerr, offered invaluable insights into how local memory practices intersect with broader political debates, including contemporary discussions of Irish unity. Access to the museum’s extensive digital archive, which contains over 30,000 digitized items, further revealed layers of grass-roots documentation: community newsletters, photographs, political pamphlets, murals, music albums, and posters.

In contrast, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, a national, government-funded institution, presents a wider, more formally balanced narrative. Its exhibition on the Troubles emphasizes that Northern Ireland has a ‘shared history without a shared memory’, allowing visitors to navigate multiple perspectives on civil rights, paramilitarism, peace activism, and victims’ experiences. My discussion with curator Karen Logan highlighted the immense challenge of creating an exhibition that must be at once inclusive, academically rigorous, and politically sensitive.
Transnational Echoes: Germany, Japan, and Beyond
A complementary dimension of my research involves tracing the international entanglements of the civil rights movement. At the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, I explored the political collection of NICRA, finding correspondence between the Belfast and Derry branches that revealed internal tensions and contrasting priorities.
Even more surprising were the records of international exchanges. One folder contained letters from both West and East Germany, including a 1971 request from a student in Jena seeking materials for a thesis on the Irish struggle. Documents also showed that the GDR Peace Council invited Northern Irish representatives to East Berlin as part of its broader solidarity agenda. Meanwhile, left-wing groups in West Berlin engaged with the movement through fundraising tours and political exchanges, as materials in Maynooth confirmed too, and connections extended as far as Japan, where activists in the peace and anti-nuclear movements saw parallels with Northern Ireland.
These findings demonstrate that the civil rights movement in Derry was never simply a local or national story. It resonated across ideological boundaries, Cold War blocs, and global protest cultures, forming part of a wider transnational conversation about protest repertoires, rights, justice, and state violence.
Conclusion: Rethinking ‘Unification’ through Connected Histories and Memories
The sources I have gathered—archival documents, community materials, international correspondence, and reflections from curators and activists—highlight the multiple layers through which the 1968 movement has been narrated, contested, and remembered. By studying Derry not in isolation but comparatively, alongside Leipzig 1989 and Gwangju 1980, my project seeks to rethink the very idea of unification. Unlike Germany, where unification was the supposedly natural political outcome, Korea and Ireland remain divided; yet social movements in all three contexts have articulated visions of unity, sovereignty, or solidarity in complex ways over time.
Through a combined lens of cultural transfer and entangled history, my research asks: does unification matter to these movements? Who imagines it, when, and why? And if so, how do such visions transform as they travel across borders and through time? National unification is not a timeless category, but has played and continues to play very different roles for social movements in different parts of the world—roles that, interestingly, can change dramatically in a very short period of time, as seen recently in the north and south of the Korean peninsula. This historical observation may help to detach the idea of national unification from the normative status it has in some contexts, but also to counter the ways in which it is understated in the analysis of social movements. Derry’s story, rooted in local struggle yet globally resonant, offers a powerful entry point into these wider questions.
Feature image: Free Derry Corner, Bogside, Derry. Photograph by the author, October 2025.
- Steffen Mau, Ungleich vereint: Warum der Osten anders bleibt (Berlin, 2024); Dirk Oschmann, Der Osten: Eine westdeutsche Erfindung (Berlin, 2023). [↩]
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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lea Middell (May 4, 2026). The Derry Civil Rights Movement: Between Historical Memory and Ongoing Struggle. Combining Archival Research and Fieldwork. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved May 12, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16606
