1949—1989—2009

The Path to German and European Unity

Organized by the Waterloo Centre for German Studies

The year 2009 sees the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of the border between East and West Germany, as well as the sixtieth anniversary of the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law). On 29 September 2009, we will mark this occasion with a German Studies Forum, which will comprise a number of lectures by professors and graduate students from the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, the University of Waterloo, and universities in South-West Ontario. All talks and the exhibition are open to undergraduate and graduate students, colleagues, and the broader community.

This Forum is organized in conjunction with the photography exhibition Icons of the Wall, which is hosted at the University of Waterloo in the gallery in the Modern Languages Building between 14 September and 2 October 2009. The photography exhibition is organized and sponsored by the Goethe Institute Toronto.

In the evening, the speaker will be Paul Heinbecker, who is a CIGI Distinguished Fellow and used to be the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minster Mulroney. During the day, we will have a number of presentations on different aspects of German society and culture by specialists from a variety of disciplines: Anthropology, History, German Studies, Geography, Economics, Political Science.

The first session in the morning will take place in Hagey Hall (HH 334), all sessions after 12.45 are in MacKirdy Hall in St. Paul's College. Campus maps can be found at http://www.uwaterloo.ca/map/index.php. 

 

Schedule

 

Light refreshments will be available during the coffee breaks. Participants are asked to make their own arrangements for lunch and supper. There are a number of food outlets on campus.

The evening keynote will be followed by a reception.

 

List of speakers

Paul Heinbecker (CIGI, Waterloo)

Foreign Policy of the Canadian Government at the Time of German Unification

Paul Heinbecker served as Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Chief Foreign Policy Advisor and speech writer twenty years ago at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He will talk about his recollection of his experience.

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Harald Bauder (Geography, Ryerson)

Immigration Country Germany? A Comparison of Immigration Debates in Canada and Germany

“Deutschand ist Zuwanderungsland” (Germany is immigration country) politicians proclaimed around the turn of the millennium and began working on Germany’s first immigration law that was supposed to implement a Canadian-style pointsystem. However, the law that actually took effect in 2005 had few similarities with the Canadian immigration system. It essentially blocks rather than enables immigration to Germany. In this presentation, I draw on an extensive analysis of newspaper coverage on immigration reform in both countries to examine differences and similarities in the manner in which Germany and Canada include or exclude immigrants into the imagination of their national communities.

 

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Gary Bruce (History, Waterloo)

The Stasi Legacy

As much as the Stasi has been a news item in Germany over the past twenty years and received added attention with the release of The Lives of Others, the public has heard little from those who made their career with the Stasi. Based on interviews with a dozen former Stasi officers, this presentation explores the views of those involved with the repression apparatus on the nature of their work, the revolution of 1989, and united Germany.

 

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Myriam Fleischer (German, Waterloo)

New German Citizenship, New German Literature

In the early 2000s, the Social Democratic-Green government of Gerhard Schröder reformed the German citizenship law to make it much easier for foreign nationals living in Germany to become German citizens. This presentation will look at how two recent novels illustrate and comment on this important change in German notions of national identity and Germany's place within Europe.

 

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Alexandra Hausstein (Anthropology/German/DAAD, Toronto)

Going global – Internationalization of German Higher Education and European Integration

The unified Germany plays a crucial role in the process of the European Integration. Besides the much discussed fields of Economy, Politics and Culture, Education is a growing field for activities aiming at the construction of a European identity. The so-called and highly debated “Bologna Process”, the program for building a European Higher Education Area, is seriously effecting not only the German System of Higher Education as a whole, but considerably influencing the internationalization strategies of German Universities. Whereas the percentage of students with international experience was at about 15% a few years ago, it is now at 35%, and the political goal for the next years is that 50% of students should gain international experience. The talk discusses the European strategies for building a European Education area, the Bologna-Process and its effects on the internationalization of German Higher Education.

 

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Veronika Kitchen (Political Science, Waterloo)

The Transformation of NATO and the Transformation of German Foreign Policy

In 1945, Germany was a defeated enemy state of the West. 10 years later, in 1955, it became a member of NATO, an important ally in the mutual defence agreement which protected Europe from Soviet attack in the Cold War, and had a constitution which forbade it from deploying troops outside its boundaries. In 2009, NATO has an operation far beyond its original mandate (and Europe’s borders) in Afghanistan, and German soldiers are a fundamental part of the mission. How did we get from there to here?

 

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Christina Kraenzle (German, York)

Shifting Topographies: Space, Place and Border-Crossings in Recent German-Language Cinema

Questions of space, territory and border crossings remain prominent in public discourses about globalization, migration, citizenship and the expanding EU – key elements in the identity crises facing Germany in particular and Europe more generally. The paper investigates how metaphors of space, mobility and border crossings have become central to the aesthetic projects of many recent German-language feature films that explore Germany’s relationship to globalization and its position within a changing international framework. The paper argues that these films not only document new social dimensions and shifting geopolitical realities, but also help theorize the effects of globalization on communities and localities.

 

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Stéphanie Lluis (Economics, Waterloo)

The Mobility of German Workers during the 1990s

This article measures the importance of job level assignment based on comparative advantage and learning about workers’ ability in explaining intrafirm wage and mobility dynamics using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The results reveal the importance of nonrandom selection of workers into the rungs of the firm’s job ladder. Measured and unmeasured ability play important roles in workers’ rank assignment, with unmeasured ability being more important at higher levels of the hierarchical job structure. There is some evidence of learning effects for workers below age 35 generating mobility between upper and executive levels.

 

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James M. Skidmore (German, Waterloo)

Avoiding Normality

Can Germany have a “normal” national identity?  That question has figured largely in German public discourse since the end of the Second World War, if not earlier. But surely by now, with the Third Reich and East Germany safely confined to history and Germany a stalwart member of a united Europe, the country is as normal as any other?  After reviewing the normality debate of the past 60 years, this presentation will consider what “normal” should mean in the German context.

 

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