HY4C3      One Unit
Spaces of Democracy in 20th Century Germany

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Institutions and socially organized spaces are fundamental aspects of democracy. At best, both social participation and democratic thought and action are learned, experienced, and practised at these sites. Moreover, forces of social cohesion are created and actualized there. Based on this idea, the course will focus on specific spaces of democracy. In addition, we will discuss space as a dynamic, relational concept. In that sense, space will also be understood as a site that comes into being through practices and where actions are produced. Against this backdrop, the course will focus on forms of “doing democracy” as part of social and everyday life. Combining both understandings, we will examine state organs (from parliament to the voting booth), spaces of knowledge (from universities and archives to museums), private organizations (from sports clubs and volunteer services to activist organizations), and informal spaces (including streets, memories, and digital media).

These spaces of democracy have a long history which has been repeatedly challenged by global changes in society and the media. Supported by theoretical readings on the history of democracy and the history of spaces, the course explores the history of several sites of democracy and democratic practices in 20th-century Germany (including democratic efforts in oppositional spaces in the GDR).

In this way, the seminar will bring together political, cultural, and social history in a transnational perspective. We will explore how these spaces were (architecturally) created, (emotionally) attacked and defended, and how they (politically) changed. Beyond this, we will learn how these spaces affected people: in becoming democratic subjects, how did they live in, feel, sense, and experience these spaces?

The seminar will discuss a variety of source material, ranging from published and archival written sources to images, pamphlets, social media posts, radio, films, and television programmes. Further, the course participants will be introduced to archival/digital sources and platforms to enable further research. Finally, the seminar will involve two excursions to a relevant democratic site; one of these field trips will be chosen by the students.

20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

There will be a reading week in week 6 of the Autumn and the Winter Terms.

One formative essay of 3000 words, to be submitted in the Autumn Term.

• Barnett, Olive and Murray Low, eds. Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation. London: Sage, 2004.
• Bourdieu, Pierre, Social Space and Symbolic Power, in: Sociological Theory 7 (Spring 1989): 14–25.
• Diehl, Paula. Temporality and the Political Imaginary in the Dynamics of Political Representation, Social Epistemology 33(5), 2019, 410–421.
• Frevert, Ute, et. al., eds. Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions since 1789. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
• Großmann, Till and Philipp Nielsen, eds. Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling since 1945. London: Routledge, 2018.
• Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
• Savoy, Bénédicte, Africa’s Struggle for its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
• Schumann, Dirk. Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of Civil War. New York: Berghahn, 2009.
• Sennett, Richard, The Spaces of Democracy. Raoul Wallenberg lectures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. New York: Univ. of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning, 1998.
• van Rahden, Till, Families Beyond Patriarchy: Visions of Gender Equality and Child Rearing among German Catholics in an Age of Revolution, in: Nancy Christie et al. (eds.), The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization as History in North America and Western Europe, Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2013, 270–293.
• Weckel, Ulrike, Teaching Democracy on the Big Screen: Re-education of Postwar Germans in A Foreign Affair and The Big Lift, in: Sonya Michel/Karen Hagemann (Hg.), Gender and the Long Postwar: The United States and the Two Germanys, 1945–1989, Washington D.C./Baltimore 2014, 95–116.

Essay (50%, 3000 words)

Essay (50%, 3000 words)