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

Today, the state of emergency seems to be as permanent as it is omnipresent. The term became ubiquitous in the early twentieth century and continues to guide the self-description of contemporary societies. Yet, referring to ‘emergencies’ implies a large range of meanings, from actual states of war to moments of humanitarian crisis, from abstract realms of the law to concrete territories under siege. The lecture argues for a history of emergency experiences in the long twentieth century that reaches beyond ‘classical theories’ and focuses on the social dimensions of administrative agency instead. It treats the ‘state of emergency’ as an imaginary that informs technocratic practices and legal theory at the same time, and argues that historicizing it can help us to understand the critical role of the state apparatus in moments of transformation.

From living through wars to experiencing humanitarian crises, in this podcast episode, GHIL Research Fellow Clemens Villinger and PR officer Kim Koenig talk to Stephanie Middendorf about the research behind her GHIL Lecture on states of emergency and exception. What did they mean for societies in the 20th century and what can we take away for our own current moment?

Listen to Stefanie Middendorf's lecture on ‘Societies under Siege: Experiencing States of Emergency in the Long Twentieth Century’.

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.

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?

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’.