Between Choice and Command: Migration and Return Across and Beyond Colonial Empires, 1900-1960
University of Erfurt, December 1-2, 2025
Monday, December 1st, 9am-7pm, Senatssaal, University of Erfurt
9-9.30: Florian Wagner Welcome and Introduction
Section 1: Chair: Silvan Niedermeier (Erfurt)
9.30-10.30am: Anindita Bhattacharya (Maynooth): Imperial Anxieties, post-war provisions and growing discontent: A history of Indian veterans of the First World War
10.30-11.30am: Baijayanti Roy (Frankfurt): Return, repatriation or flight? Destinies of Indian anti-colonialists in Nazi Germany and thereafter
11.30-12.00am Coffee Break
12.00-1.00pm: Ronald Hirte (Weimar/Buchenwald): Entangled systems of coercion: Deportees from Colonial Contexts in Buchenwald
1.00-2.00pm : Lunch break
Section 1: Chair: Gifty Nyame Tabiri (Erfurt)
2.00-3.00pm: Elise Mazurié (Freiburg): Changing Categorisations Between the Interwar through National Socialism to the Post-War: the request for reparation case of a Moroccan soldier to the Federal Republic of Germany
3.00-4.00pm: Gisela Ewe (Hamburg): Black Anticolonialists in Germany Between Metropole and Colony
4.00-5.00pm: Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth): From Ethiopia to Italy and back: a family history of Italian colonialism
5.00-5.30pm: Coffee Break
5.30-7.00pm Public Keynote Lecture:
Dónal Hassett (Maynooth): The Great War of Movement: Thinking Critically about Mobility, Displacement, Coercion and Consent in the French Empire’s First World War
8.00pm Conference Dinner
Tuesday, December 2nd, 9 – 12.30, Room C19.00.02_3, Weltbeziehungen-Building, University of Erfurt
Section 3: Chair: Patrice Poutros (Berlin)
9.00-10.00am Lena Engel (Erfurt/Florence): Women’s Mobility in entangled systems of coercion: The trajectories of Taous Merouane between (post)colonial Algeria, France and Buchenwald concentration camp
10.00-11.00am Mathilde von Bülow (St. Andrews): Algerian Migration to West and East Germany during the War of Independence
11.00-12.00am: Jan Schubert (Florence): Labour Migrants’ Agency towards Return Migration and Their Dealing with Deportability in the GDR. Oral History of Algerian Labour Migration to Socialist Germany
12-12.15 Final Discussion