The Institute of Sociology cordially invites you to its upcoming event on March 7—an open lecture by Jasmin Söhner and Máté Zombory titled "The Globke Effect: The Political Conditions of Historical Documentation."

About the Lecture

In July 1963, the Supreme Court of East Germany convicted West German state secretary Hans Globke to life imprisonment for complicity to war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nazi rule in Germany. The verdict was returned in absentia in East Berlin. This public event, declared by the Federal Republic as a show trial of mere communist propaganda, was the end point of a longer history of various Cold War efforts aiming to compromise “Adenauer’s chief aide” by the historical record.

Hans Globke, born 1898 in Düsseldorf and working since 1929 in the Prussian, then Reich Ministry of Interior, co-wrote in 1936 the first commentary on the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws. Due to both the need for expertise in the new post-war public administration, positive testimonies and luck in the “de-nazification” process, Globke gradually returned to public service during the second half of the 1940s. From 1953 until his retirement in 1963, he served as Federal Secretary of State and Chief of Staff in the West German Chancellery.

The controversy about Globke’s past reached far beyond the domestic politics of the Federal Republic. Cold War tensions determined not simply the public debate but also the conditions of knowledge production about the Nazi past. By analyzing the various historical documentation efforts East and West, our study attempts to explore the relationship between politics and history.

We will present our research project focusing on the main theoretic and empirical questions, on the topics dealt with, and on the relevance of our findings to our present.