Wer erzählt hier eigentlich Geschichte?

In the organizer's words:

The lecture explores these questions and takes the archives of city, local history and regional museums as a starting point. In a post-migrant and post-colonial society, it becomes clear that memory is never neutral. Using concrete projects in Berlin and East German cities as examples, it will be shown how archives can be opened up differently, new voices made visible and local memory democratized. The lecture will focus on the questions of how we can tell history in a more inclusive way. And what does it mean to understand archives and local museums as places of social negotiation?

Dr. Noa K. Ha investigates how migration, racism and memory shape the spatial and power politics of European cities. After completing her doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin, she worked at the TU Dresden, the TU Berlin and the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. Since 2022, she has been Scientific Director of the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM). She has published her research on colonial structures in urban space in specialist journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogs. She is co-editor of Decolonize the City (2017) and European Cities: Modernity, Race and Colonialism (2022) and author of Straßenhandel in Berlin (2016). Dr. Ha advises institutions on postcolonial memory culture and shapes the public discourse on migration history in East Germany. With her research and commitment, she advocates for an open, diverse urban society.

PD Dr. Maria Alexopoulou studied history and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, completed her doctorate at the Free University of Berlin and habilitated at the University of Mannheim. In the academic year 2022/23, she held the Chair of Contemporary History there. She is currently head of a project at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin as part of the Research Institute for Social Cohesion and a private lecturer at the Institute of History at the University of Mannheim. Her research focuses on the history of migration and racism, on which she has already published numerous articles. For a wider audience, she wrote the Reclam non-fiction book Deutschland und die Migration. Geschichte einer Einwanderungsgesellschaft wider Willen, 2020; her habilitation thesis "Rassistisches Wissen in der Transformation der Bundesrepublik in eine Einwanderungsgesellschaft, 1940-1990" was published by Wallstein-Verlag in August 2024. She is a long-standing member of the Mannheim migrant self-organization Die Unmündigen e.V., as well as the Council for Migration, where she is one of the spokespersons for the racism section.

This event is a cooperation between the Stadtarchiv Hannover and the ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage.