LHI activities in 2023

LHI members are successful in attracting competitive funding provided by science funds. Machteld Venken leads a work package on the history of welfare within the Greater Region as part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant ‘Social politics in European Borderlands. A Comparative and Transnational Study, 1870s-1990s’ coordinated at the European University Institute of Florence (https://sociobord.eui.eu/). She was granted funding from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Polish Science Center for the trilateral project ‘Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War’ conducted in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Center of Urban History in Lviv.

Four PhD candidates conduct research funded by the FNR. Whereas Arnaud Sauer finished his study on migrant foreign laborers in the Minett during the interwar period, Nicolas Arendt continues to investigate the transformation of ARBED 1973-2001 through a transnational lens. Within the FNR funded project ‘Soldiers and their communities in WWII: The impact and legacy of war experiences in Luxembourg’, Sarah Maya Vercruysse continues to research the experiences of the families of Luxembourgish Wehrmacht soldiers. As part of the DFG-FNR funded Research Unit on the history of popular culture in the long 1960s, Véronique Faber unravels the past of the Luxembourg Funfair Schueberfouer, among others through interviewing and participant observation (https://popkult60.eu/).

In 2023, the LHI research group continued to carry out research on the request of Luxembourgish public and private stakeholders. The societal interest in the history of the Second World War is reflected in a significant number of projects: research on Soviet Forced Labourers in Luxembourg conducted by Inna Ganschow, as well as provenance research of Jewish property in the Villa Vauban, the National Library of Luxembourg and the National Museum of History and Art commissioned by the Luxembourgish state based on article 5 of its agreement with the Israeli Consistory in Luxembourg (under the supervision of Andreas Fickers). The digital Shoah memorial project gathers information about the individual trajectories of the about 5.000 people who were considered by Nazis as Jews based on the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935, lived in the Grand Duchy before the German invasion on May 10, 1940 and were persecuted. In 2023, more than 50 family biographies were written by around 20 different authors and added to www.memorialshoah.lu. Visitors may now contribute to the Memorial by adding a pebble to commemorate the biography of a person or a family on the new starting page designed as an endless landscape. 

Following the successful launch of a C²DH-created virtual exhibition on the First World War in Luxembourg, Christoph Brüll leads a project developing a virtual exhibition of the Second World War in Luxembourg. Through conducting research on the colonial and post-colonial history of Luxembourg and the role of actors in the colonisation of Africa, the LHI axis contributes to an ongoing debate in Luxembourgish society. Two postdoctoral researchers received access to the archives of respectively the Chambre of Employees (Estelle Berthereau) and the Luxembourg Inspectorate of Labour and Mines (Sam Klein) and prepare institutional histories. A collaboration with the City of Dudelange enabled us to scan 23 000 old residents’ cards. Two academics from the Luxembourg Ukrainian Researcher Network (LURN), Kateryna Zakharchuk and Inna Ganschow, received a C²DH Thinkering Grant to use artificial intelligence to create embroidery patterns for dance costumes of a dancing group raising money to support Ukrainians with temporary refugee status in Luxembourg.

Flagship publications are a monograph about the invention of the French-German border (1871-1914), about borderland schooling in interwar Europe, a peer-reviewed special issue on migration studies in the digital age, the sixth volume within the series ‘Grenzerfahrungen’ about the most recent past of the German-speaking part of Belgium, a peer reviewed international journal article assessing interculturalism and media integration in Luxembourg, a series of newspaper articles on colonial history in Letzebuerger Land based on archival sources of the foreign police and including both a fictional part and historical contextualization, and a contribution to the edited volume ‘Ons zerschloen Dierfer’ of the National Museum of Military History.  

Among the public events organised by LHI members were a Forum Z on the personal experiences of inhabitants of Luxembourg during the Second World War and a Forum Z discussing past experiences on the Schueberfouer in the 1960s. The LHI research group organised three international interdisciplinary workshops: on welfare for children in border regions, on digitising, georeferencing and modeling administrative historical data and on bordering practices along the French-Luxembourgish border from the 16^th Century until today. We visited the exhibition “All you can eat” in the Museum of the City of Luxembourg, and two doctorial researchers wrote chapters for the exhibition catalogue.

LHI hosted two Transnational Scholars in Residence: migration historian Marijke Von Faassen and digital historian Rik Hoekstra from the Huygens Institute.