Christian Wicke

• Utrecht University

Der komplexe Band Stadtwende. Bürgerengagement und Altstadterneuerung in der DDR und Ostdeutschland eröffnet neue Perspektiven bezüglich der Erforschung der deutschen Vereinigung von 1990. Herausgegeben von Jana Breßler, Harald Engler, Constanze Kummer, Detlef Kurth, Jannik Noeske, Wiebke Reinert und Max Welch Guerra, bieten die verschiedensten Bei...

The first part of this chapter introduces key concepts relevant for a history of urban activism, and sheds light on developments relevant to the problem of historicising urban (social) movements during the ‘long 1970s’, when a convergence of ideological and economic changes coalesced with the social and spatial consequences of the urban crisis. The...

The chapter brings together a series of events and processes in the industrial city of Turin in northern Italy between 1968, when a strong wave of radical protests over urban problems began, and 1975, when political changes brought a break to this wave. This is the first comprehensive narrative on the combination of various actors and practices inv...

Bloomsbury History Theory and Method

E. P. Thompson was a Marxist, a radical as well as a pacifist, who had been very active, first in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and subsequently in the New Left and in the peace movement. He was one of the founding fathers of European Nuclear Disarmament (END) and widely acknowledged as intellectual leader of the British peace movement, bot...

Between them, the chancellorships of the “two Helmuts” span nearly a quarter-century of German history. Helmut Schmidt led the country from 1974 to 1982; his successor, Helmut Kohl, served until 1998. But the verdict on their respective tenures has been very different. Kohl was seen as a bumbling provincial when he came to office in 1982 but, by th...

This chapter examines the political controversies that surrounded the creation of national museums in Germany and Australia. Arguments about the content and raison d’être of these national museums played out within wider debates about the transcendence of nationalism and the future of the nation-state. Both museums became part of political projects...

The political thought of the British peace activist E.P. Thompson (1924–1993) is often regarded as being torn between Marxist transnationalism and English traditionalism, articulated by his public roles as a political activist on the one hand and author/historian on the other. By analysing the social networks that were fundamental for his political...

The industrial past has become an inescapable and fundamental component of the identity of the Ruhr region. Throughout the twentieth century the Ruhr acquired a diverse public self-perception-incorporating multiculturalism, football, nationalism, urbanity, and nature-that was strongly imbued by images of the industrial past. Over recent decades, re...

During his political career, Helmut Kohl used his own life story to promote a normalization of German nationalism and to overcome the stigma of the Nazi period. In the context of the cold war and the memory of the fascist past, he was able to exploit the combination of his religious, generational, regional, and educational (he has a PhD in History)...

Widely remembered for his European identity, Kohl’s (neo)conservative mission was to normalise (West) German nationalism by promoting a particular historical consciousness. Little is known about the origins of Kohl’s historism, which can be traced to his education at the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated with a PhD in History (1958). The...

A representação da identidade regional na região do Ruhr, na Alemanha, assenta-se predominantemente no patrimônio industrial. Desde a década de 1960, ao longo da transição em curso da indústria pesada para um cenário pós-industrial, o Ruhr conheceu um movimento para preservar os objetos históricos associados à sua indústria de carvão e aço. Vindo d...

This article analyzes the personal nationalism of Helmut Kohl, the so-called “Chancellor of Unity.” The German politician acted as a (neo)romantic nationalist, who articulated his concept of nation in cultural and ethnic terms and as primarily detached from the idea of the nation-state. This kind of nationalism has been portrayed as something typic...