Oliver Puckey, currently in the third year of a PhD in History, recently participated in the international "Democracy in Modern European History" workshop at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich alongside doctoral students from Cambridge, Bochum, Bayreuth, and Munich.
The workshop was a collaboration between the DAAD Cambridge Hub for German Studies and the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin in Munich, and encouraged participants to reflect on the role played by democracy in the practice of modern European history. Engaging in expert panels, participants were encouraged to explore how historians of modern Europe can productively engage with ideas and theories of democracy in their own work, as well as to discuss contemporary challenges faced by democracy in European perspective. All participants presented their own doctoral research from the perspective of the history of democracy.
The workshop participants were also given a tour by curators around the new exhibition on National Socialism at the Dokumenation Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps, where they engaged in discussions on democratic ways of dealing with the Nazi past and on German memorial culture more generally.