Research – German Historical Institute London Blog

‘Consider Margaret Thatcher’s premiership as ground zero for the mess we are in now.’ The British Housing Crisis in Non-Fiction

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis that is causing hardship for millions of Britons. Over the past few years, the worsening situation has been reflected in the market for non-fiction books. In a small bookshop in north London, I counted more than half a dozen new titles dealing with the housing crisis —and a more systematic search brings the number up to at least fifteen published in the last five years. How do these books explain the crisis? In what follows, I would like to take a close look from a historian’s point of view. To what extent are these accounts informed by the contemporary history of housing and housing policy? I am not attempting a comprehensive collective review, but I would like to consider the following non-fiction books: Nick Gallent’s Whose Housing Crisis? and Liam Halligan’s Home Truths (both 2019), Bob Colenutt’s book on The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (2020), the award-winning Tenants by Vicky Spratt (2022), A Home of One’s Own by Hashi Mohamed (2022), and All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In by Kieran Yates (2023). This selection takes in books from very different backgrounds, including those by journalists and social scientists, but also by activists and people affected by the situation, whose books resemble memoirs. This not only reveals the breadth of the debate and its broad political horizon. Since none of the books eschews a historical perspective, the selection also makes visible a widespread understanding of the neoliberal history of recent decades and its strengths and weaknesses in explaining the present.

Too German for Holocaust Research? Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong on the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 1952

In October 1952, Alfred Wiener and Louis de Jong compared notes on the still relatively new Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (Institut für Zeitgeschichte, IfZ), wondering whether its staff members would be capable of conducting research on National Socialism. While non-Jewish German researchers claimed that Jews were too preoccupied with and emotional about the Holocaust, these two Jewish researchers raised questions concerning the Germans’ political affiliations.

Britain’s View of the German Cult of the Dead: A Media History Perspective

In September 1943, at a time when the Second World War was turning into a military debacle for the German Wehrmacht, the Leicester Evening Mail published an article entitled ‘The New German Valhalla: Nazis’ Pagan Cult of Death’. In it, the author analysed the current state of German wartime society and focused in particular on the central importance of the cult of death in German warfare:

Understand Germany’s morbid addiction to the Nibelungenlied, and you will understand also Germany’s official mood after Stalingrad, when for weeks the radio played funeral marches and newspapers, newsreels and Nazi speakers wallowed in a revolting orgy of death, morbidity and shameless self-pity . . . This sadistic longing for the ‘glorious’ and universal death is a dangerous element in the German make-up we must not forget, however much we may despise it . . . Everything that comes out of Germany these days reveals that the cult of death and immolation is spreading in the Reich . . . But perhaps, with bombs raining from the skies in ever-increasing volume . . . the Germans may yet learn that death is far from sweet and glorious even under a tyrant of their own making.¹

‘The New German Valhalla: Nazis’ Pagan Cult of Death’, Leicester Evening Mail, 22 Sept. 1943, 3. [↩]

‘Political Balance’ or ‘Natural Growth’? The British Mandate, Meir Dizengoff, and the Struggle over Tel Aviv Port in the 1920s and 1930s

On 24 February 1938, a crowd of 30,000 onlookers gathered in the rain awaiting the official opening of Tel Aviv port to passenger traffic. Due to bad weather conditions, however, the ceremony had been moved inside a ‘gaily decorated warehouse’ on the shore of the Mediterranean in the north of the ‘first Hebrew city’. To make matters worse, the rough seas prevented the landing of passengers at Tel Aviv port on that day, and the SS Har Tsiyon had to be redirected to Haifa.¹

Yet such adverse conditions did little to dampen the Tel Avivians’ celebratory mood. The city’s port had been a project long in the making, and it held great significance not only for Tel Aviv, but for the Zionist project as a whole. Although long disregarded by a historiography focused on the Zionist ‘return to the land’, visions and schemes of a maritime revival—as part of national self-fulfilment and realization—were an integral part of Zionist thought.

‘New “Gateway to Zion” Inaugurated’, Palestine Post, 24 Feb. 1938, 1; ‘Tel Aviv—Sha‘ar Tsyion, Derekh Ba Ya‘avru ha-Ge‘ulim’, ha-Arets, 24 Feb. 1938, 1. [↩]

Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation

Thirty years ago, in 1993, Cambridge University Library acquired a substantial quantity of materials from the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonial territories. This repository originally came from the Colonial Society, which over the decades became the Royal Colonial Institute, then the Royal Empire Society, and finally the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS).¹ This institution had begun collecting and archiving these documents around 1868, when it received funding to rent a suite in the Westminster Palace Hotel, and did so more intensively after 1900, as the collection grew and moved to larger premises. By the time the RCS library was integrated into the special collections of Cambridge University Library, it housed extensive and invaluable archives, including ancient texts in cuneiform script dating back to around 2200 BCE, as well as documents from the twentieth century.² Among the latter were ten boxes of postcards from different regions of the former British Empire, printed between 1890 and 1969.³

See the history of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) collection, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
See the RCS Library, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
Cambridge University Library, GBR/0115/RCS/PC, Postcard Collection. [↩]

Museums Under Construction: On Loss, Disorder, Destruction, and Objects in Storerooms

Archaeological artefacts from the Ottoman Empire have only recently attracted attention in current debates over decolonization and restitution. Mirjam S. Brusius of the German Historical Institute London is researching the excavation of objects, the role of the local population, and why certain items have languished for decades in the storerooms of European museums.

The Welsh Fasting Girl: A Morbid Spectacle

The story of Sarah Jacob is a tragic one.¹ On 17 December 1869, when she was not yet 13 years old, she died of starvation. There was no shortage of food or unwillingness to provide her with food, had she asked for it. Her family, trained nurses, and male doctors were around her when she passed away, but they all quite literally watched her die.

E.g. ‘The drama of the Welsh fasting girl […] has ended tragically’. Anon., ‘The Week. Topics of the Day’, The Medical Times and Gazette, 25 Dec. 1869, 738 (my emphases); ‘The second act of the Carmarthen Tragedy has been played out’. Anon., No Title, The Western Mail, 27 Dec. 1869, 2. [↩]

‘No Shows’ and Other Forms of Refusal: Reading Missionary Letters about the Loyalty Islands

As part of my PhD study, I am investigating and tracing the history of the island communities of the Ruapuke Mission Station in the Foveaux Strait in southern New Zealand and of the Loyalty Islands north-east of New Caledonia.

Competition between Profit and Principles: The ‘Natural’ Market Niche in 1980s Britain

Below are findings that are part of my research for my doctoral thesis on the entanglement of commercial business and moral responsibility in the 1970s and 1980s. My access to archives across England, and specifically London, was made possible by the opportunity to stay at the German Historical Institute London in July and August 2023. In particular, the Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive in Nottingham and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London provided me with relevant sources.