Rethinking German History Prize 2025

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The GHS is proud to announce Arndt Emmerich as the winner of the Rethinking German History Prize 2025, for the article ‘Jewish-Muslim Friendship Networks: A Study of Intergenerational Boundary Work in Postwar Germany’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 67/1 (2025)!

On his win Dr. Emmerich said that:

I am deeply honoured to receive the Rethinking German History Prize. This recognition highlights the importance of examining histories from below, in the form of local, forgotten narratives of coexistence, in order to challenge dominant narratives of conflict and polarisation, and to avoid oversimplifying complex histories and social processes.
The article uses an oral history and ethnographic approach in Frankfurt’s Bahnhofsviertel to demonstrate that long-term Jewish–Muslim coexistence has consistently been built through mutual learning, innovative business and cultural endeavours, as well as shared structural discrimination and hardship. It shows that everyday inter-minority relations are far more nuanced and resilient than polarised macro debates suggest.

Dr. Emmerich’s winning article presents a little-known story of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in Germany after World War Two. Using an ethnographic case study of Frankfurt am Main’s train-station district (Bahnhofsviertel), the analysis investigates long-term and partially forgotten Jewish-Muslim narratives, relations, and neighbourhood encounters, paying particular attention to the changing political, spatial, and temporal dimensions that have blurred or closed symbolic boundaries between Jews and Muslims since the late 1960s. Bringing together the scholarship on symbolic boundaries and urban diversity, the theoretical discussion contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the variegated processes of Jewish-Muslim boundary-making and un-making over time, as well as the macro- and micro-level influences which shape these negotiations and outcomes. Studying Jewish-Muslim relations at the neighborhood level by adopting a boundary-related approach brings out more clearly the tensions over groupism and fluidity in theoretical debates and removes the current exceptionalism around Jewish-Muslim themes, making them more easily compared with other boundary processes within everyday life.

The GHS awarding panel commented that:

The judges were very impressed by Dr. Emmerich’s collection, contextualization and use of evidence. They commented on his convincing interpretation of interviews and other fieldwork to question the significance of assumed boundaries between Jewish and Muslim groups and communities in the Bahnhofsviertel of Frankfurt am Main.

Keep an eye out for the call for the 2026 Rethinking German History Prize soon!