Election battles were fought ferociously in pre-World War One Germany, when most middle-class Germans still opposed formal democracy. Anti-democrats deployed many exclusionary strategies that flew in the face of electoral fairness.
20th century
Learn how a city was pushed to the edge during the First World War - to the point of changing its name from Berlin to Kitchener through a controversial and high-tension referendum.
Beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the last century saw the rise of Italian fascism and Soviet communism, the world economic crisis, and the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, leading to the horrors of World War II.
Twenty-five years ago and after protests and peaceful demonstrations, the Berlin Wall opened, the East German government resigned, and German unification was on the horizon. The year 1989 was an eventful year for East Germans: protests during the local elections in spring; the flight of thousands via Hungary and Czechoslovakia in summer; anti-government protests in Leipzig and other cities and towns in fall, and the fall of the Wall in November.
Mat Schulze, prof in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies and director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, was a student in Leipzig in 1989. He will talk not only about the political developments that year but also give an eyewitness account of protests, civic rights actions, and demonstrations in Leipzig.
Revealing a total of 190 rare photographs, newspaper clippings and political cartoons from different European archives, the exhibition "Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes" tells Europe's dramatic story of the 20th century – a past between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship.
Bertha von Suttner, born in 1843, was in many ways ahead of her times. As an avid pacifist, this remarkable woman was the figurehead of a world-wide peace movement. She relentlessly fought nationalist fanaticism, aggressive militarism, anti-Semitism and recognized the dangers of hate breeding. As a writer and lecturer, she inspired her friend and benefactor Alfred Nobel to create a Peace Prize. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for her most famous novel “Lay Down your Arms”.
Book launch with documentary film (German with English subtitles), and reading (in English)
Icons of a Border Installation
Photographic search for traces in today's Berlin
Exhibition
Supported by the Goethe Institute Toronto
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Why It Happened, What It Changed
James M. Skidmore (University of Waterloo)
