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Nico Putz

Affiliated Researcher

Research project:

Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War (CRAFTE); Individual Project: Student Networks and Trajectories

Research topic:

The project traces the lived realities of "Afro-Asian students" in Cold War Germany. It will show the networks and institutional and administrative frameworks these historical actors were enmeshed in, with the focus lying on the resources they in turn used to utilize these structures to their advantage - not as passive recipients of global bloc politics, but as translocal actors who transcended traditional readings of East-West, North-South or center-periphery. By giving space to these “outsider’s inside views” the project will contribute to the current process of unveiling a post-war history of the two Germanies that truly acknowledges the globality of the 1960’s and beyond.   Through a diverse pool of sources – from the minutes of Lok Sabha debates surrounding global student mobility in a slowly decolonizing world, via bright and colorful Indian student magazines from the 1950s’ to the 1980s’, to photo albums, letters, and several hours of personal accounts and sources from German archives  –  this project is following the steps a young student from India took to embark into a temporary life that often became permanent. While not aiming to write a history of racism in Cold War Germany, the complexity of human identity formation, the dialectical relationships of multi-layered ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomies, as well as the intricacies of structural violence and systemic inequality will be part of these histories.

Regional focus:

South Asia