Each year the GHS awards a handful of Postgraduate/ECR Bursaries to individuals studying German history at UK universities. The following blog contains reports from three of these individuals: Lucy McCormick, Ryan Hampton, Emma Paterson.
Lucy McCormick
I would like to express my gratitude to the German History Society for supporting my doctoral research on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. Their Postgraduate/ECR Bursary enabled me to spend one month in Berlin to undertake an intensive German language course at the Humboldt Universität. In previous months it had become apparent to me that an Anglo-German focus would enrich my research on the international suffrage movement, yet my foundational German skills precluded my full engagement with German-language sources. The HUWISU summer school offered an exciting opportunity to immerse myself in the language and culture in the capital city. I relished the fast pace of learning – a challenging but effective way to improve my German at pace. I enjoyed meeting a diverse international cohort and learning alongside these new friends. The cultural programme alongside the course was also stimulating; I enjoyed guided tours of the Bundestag and Federal Chancellery, for example.
I very much enjoyed living in Berlin for four weeks. I felt immersed in the language I was studying, only to be enriched by the museums, architecture, and culture of this dynamic and storied city. The duration of the stay allowed me to visit the locations where the organisation I research was founded – a poignant moment for any researcher. My language skills also progressed sufficiently to allow me to discuss my research with my peers in German. The course instilled in me a strong enthusiasm to progress my language skills, and I look forward to progressing through the intermediate and advanced levels in the future.
Besides my language course, I visited the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt to discuss my research with its scholars. I am grateful for their welcome and look forward to engaging with their rich programme of events in the future. I was also able to conduct very useful archival research for my PhD. I visited the Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden, the Alice-Salomon-Archiv, and the Gender-Bibliothek at the Humboldt. As I read newspaper articles and handwritten letters from a century ago, I felt encouraged as my improved German skills afforded me an understanding of my sources in their original language. As well as having the raw materials I need for my PhD, I have also profited from a richer understanding of their meaning. As I continue to analyse these sources, I am becoming more informed about the nature of relationships between British and German women in the IWSA around the First World War. Shifting my perspective beyond the Anglosphere is certainly helping me to understand how these suffragists negotiated their political ambitions with their national identities.
Lucy McCormick is a PhD student researching the international alliances between campaigners for women’s suffrage at the turn of the twentieth century. She is especially interested in how friendship sustained this network amidst global conflict and interpersonal tensions.
Ryan Hampton
The assistance of the German History Society’s Postgraduate Bursary (£2500) supported research in the Stadtarchiv Freiburg during the winter of 2024-25, specifically helping cover housing, transportation, and food. My research in Freiburg supported a key goal of my project: to gain a fuller picture of the materiality of early 16th century taverns. While much work has been done on tavern sociability, we know comparatively little about what taverns actually looked like. Knowing more would help us appreciate the size of tavern gatherings, whether guests sat or stood, whether exclusive rooms were reserved for wealthier guests, and more.
The Stadtarchiv Freiburg contains inventorial records of the belongings of (generally wealthy) deceased persons from about 1500. These include detailed records of the belongings of urban tavernkeepers, with complete lists of their movable and immovable goods. Having consulted these records, I can now recreate the interiors of several urban taverns in detail, which will allow me to situate tavern sociability in its material context.
Without the support of the German History Society, I would have had considerably less time and flexibility for this research. I would like to thank the Society and the selection committee for their consideration and support.
Ryan Hampton is a DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford supervised by Lyndal Roper and Giuseppe Marcocci. His current work focuses on spaces of resistance and unrest at the outset of the German Peasants’ War (1524-26).
Emma Paterson
Over the past year I have thoroughly enjoyed my MPhil in Modern European History, researching German-Jewish family history research and documentation between 1900-1945. The funding and support of the German History Society’s Postgraduate Bursary have enabled me to adapt my skills as a modern languages student and become a historian. The course and research costs were also kindly supported through a Syn Studentship from Gonville and Caius College and a grant from the Sir John Plumb Charitable Trust.
My interest in the sources that turned into my MPhil research project began during lockdown. At home I discovered copies of two family histories written in 1933-34 by an ancestor, Dr Ludwig Herz. They documented family trees and the biographies of family members going back to 1330. I began a rough translation of the sources so that the non-German speaking members of my family could read about their ancestors. I found that the histories were full of fascinating insights into the author’s family pride as a German Jew and fears about the political direction of Germany.
After translating extracts of Herz’s texts during my undergraduate year abroad in Germany, I wanted to explore their value as historical sources. For my MPhil project I gathered many more similar narrative family histories from this period. Many of these were available in the online archive of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Several fruitful trips to London uncovered others in the Wiener Holocaust Library and the LBI archive in London. The sources varied in length and scope, some reaching far back into family pasts with extensive research, while others sought to preserve oral histories passed down by more recent generations.
A particularly exciting find was the discovery of a history of an ennobled Jewish family in Bavaria, written by Karl von Hirsch in Theresienstadt in 1943. Hirsch’s determination to document and preserve the integration and success of his family in Bavarian society even in the worst of circumstances underlined the importance of these documents for their authors.
I began my analysis of the sources by looking at authors’ motivations for writing. Most writers set out to document and preserve their family histories for future generations. There was increasing and prescient concern into the 1930s about documenting sources which might be lost or destroyed. Many authors also set out to celebrate their ancestors’ lives, highlighting their contributions to German society and/or their standing and learnedness in the Jewish community.
These motivations informed the range of models and sources that authors used to put together family histories and the types of style, tone and narratives that they presented. There is a common theme of stories of family ascent or continued success over centuries. This is presented through the complicated relationship of German Jews with the emancipation era. Despite debate from the likes of Hannah Arendt about the dangers and drawbacks of so-called ‘assimilation’, most authors particularly celebrate their families’ integration into German society. Authors therefore emphasise their adaptation to German society by commemorating family legacies of economic and social contributions and involvement in formative moments in German history such as the 1848 revolutions and the First World War. However, I also came across a strong desire in many texts to remember Jewish cultural traditions. Several histories had a much heavier emphasis on the religious reputations and Jewish identities of their ancestors.
Part of the research also looked at the more hidden role of women in family research, an area which I would very much like to explore further. While collating the sources I found very few histories written by women, although there was evidence of the important roles women played behind the scenes in family research and preserving family memories. The early modern businesswoman and diarist Glückel von Hameln played a significant role as a model for many (male-authored) family histories in the twentieth century.
Looking at the intended readership of these sources and the public status that some have now gained through their miraculous survival and inclusion in public archives gave a strong sense of the importance of these texts for their authors. Today, although somewhat neglected by historians, these family histories and genealogies offer incredible insights into the social and economic histories of German Jews and trajectories of migration. The success of recent family memoirs such as Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad demonstrates the enduring power of family history as a medium for people to connect with histories of persecution and displacement as well as integration and family success.
Throughout the year I was delighted to hear from many other Modern European historians at workshops and seminars in Cambridge and, after giving a research talk, met an enthusiast who was able to show me a rare example of a family history written by a female relation of theirs in 1938. I am extremely grateful to Prof Christopher Clark for his expert guidance which made the project so interesting and for many unrelated but nevertheless excellent discussions of Dante, farming and late Beethoven quartets. It was thanks to the funding of the GHS that I was able to embark on this project and discover many fascinating avenues which I hope to continue to explore in the future.
Emma Paterson holds an MPhil in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge.