German Historical Institute London Podcast public_relations@ghil.ac.uk

In political theory and political debates, an implicit expectation looms large: a ‘good’ polity is durable, ideally even permanent. Federal polities are accordingly conceptualized as orders which can regulate heterogeneity and resolve conflict—for the sake of long-term stability. The lecture will question this expectation of permanence by pointing to exceptions in global intellectual history from early Soviet proponents of federalism and the founding fathers and mothers of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: when and to what normative end is the idea of permanent federation subverted?

Can federations be stable? Should political orders last forever and constitutions be permanent?

75 years ago, the German Basic Law came into force.

In this GHIL podcast interview, Research Fellow for Modern History Pascale Siegrist and PR Officer Kim König talk to Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Chair in Political Theory and History of Political Thought at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, about her research on historical debates surrounding the introduction of the German Basic Law and the durability of federal constitutions.

This podcast episode is a recording of the second Thyssen Lecture, given by Sebastian Conrad, and organized by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation in cooperation with the GHIL. Sebastian Conrad’s lecture explores how the construction of a particular, western notion of time and temporality, of modernity, was central to the constitution of western imperial hierarchies in Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples such as the alignment of calendars, the synchronisation of clocks and the writing of history, Conrad argues that, as producers of historical time narratives in the process of imperial ‘world-making’, historians became imperial agents and world-makers in their own right. But was this purely a colonial imposition, or a response to global conditions? What are the lasting effects of this reshaping of temporality, and how does it influence us today?

Money doesn’t stink – or so the famous phrase goes. So, what did peasants in the Middle Ages mean when they complained about bad coin? Can a focus on monetary issues shed new light on the Peasants' War?

In this GHIL Podcast interview, Research Fellow for Medieval History Marcus Meer and PR Officer Kim König are joined by Philipp Rössner, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, to talk about the research behind his lecture on ‘Peasants, Wars, and Evil Coins: Towards a “Monetary Turn” in Explaining the Revolution of 1525’.

The ‘Great German Peasant War’ of 1524–6 has quietly slipped off the historian’s agenda. Structural-materialist interpretations have waned since the fall of the Iron Curtain, giving rise to several ‘cultural’ and other ‘turns’, most of which have also passed. One phenomenon, however, has been missed completely, in older as well as more recent historiography: the monetary problem. Monetary issues—relating to currency and how different coins were used to pay fines, dues, and tithes—featured in most known medieval peasant grievances up to the Peasant War proper, significantly contributing to the peasants’ economic cause for revolt. This paper suggests how a ‘monetary turn’ may shed new light on Germany’s first modern revolution.

Why did people in Imperial Germany became increasingly interested in their personal performance? Was there a link between global entanglements of Imperial Germany on the one hand and a rise in personal achievement culture on the other?