World Refugee Day (June 20) honors those who leave everything behind to escape war, persecution, or terror. This day celebrates the courage and resilience of refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, stateless persons, and returnees, as the plight of those fleeing conflict is often met with overwhelming uncertainty and assault on human rights.
Connecting German-Turkish and Syrian-Turkish Stories By SUSAN BETH ROTTMANN, Özyeğin University
This week marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Iron Curtain was assembled in the middle of Berlin in August 1961 and expanded over the following months to ultimately divide West Berlin from the surrounding East Germany, prohibiting East Germans to pass into West Germany for decades. Browse our relevant […]
Victory Day celebrated through Europe on 8 May 1945 to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces marketing the end of World War II in Europe. Victory Day in Russia, as well as some former Soviet Union republics, is celebrated on May 9 […]
Two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 28 November 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a 10-point program calling for the two Germanys to expand their cooperation with the view toward eventual reunification. On 18 May 1990, the two German states signed a treaty agreeing on monetary, economic and social union. On October […]
On August 13, 1961, Berlin woke up to a shock: the East German Army had begun construction on the infamous Berlin Wall. The Wall was initially constructed in the middle of Berlin, and expanded over the following months. It entirely cut off West Berlin from the surrounding East Germany, prohibiting East Germans to pass into West […]
By Dolores L. Augustine, author of Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. Energy policy has recently gained a good deal of public attention. “Germany, as far as I’m concerned, is captive to Russia because it’s getting so much of its energy from Russia,” President Trump argued at the NATO […]
by Anna Saunders, author of Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989. Recent years have witnessed fierce debates about the existence of controversial monuments around the world – most notably Confederate monuments and memorials, but also numerous structures built in honour of wealthy benefactors with murky pasts. The outcomes of such debacles have been varied. […]
The year 1968 brought a wave of anti-authoritarian political activity across Europe and beyond which may have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The protests and social movements of 1968 comprised a worldwide escalation of social and political conflicts and marked the climax of protests that simultaneously captured most industrialized […]