history

WCGS invites one and all to a talk by Lynne Taylor, University of Waterloo professor of History. Dr. Taylor will discuss her latest book, In the Children's Best Interests: Unaccompanied Refugee Children in Germany, 1945-1952.

Women have far too often been forgotten, overlooked, and marginalised in Austria’s official historiography—a fact that lends all the more importance to this exhibition’s attempt to survey the past 200 years in light of the biographies of important Austrian women. Austrian women whose talents, willpower, and determined courage have helped shape and enrich their country.

CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS

Timothy Snyder, author of the widely successful book Black Earth, believes we have misunderstood the Holocaust and the essential lessons it should have taught us. If the Holocaust was indeed, as Snyder’s carefully constructed argument will demonstrate, a result of ecological panic and state destruction, then our misunderstanding of it has endangered our own future. The world of the early twenty-first century resembles the world of the early twentieth more than we realize—and some of our own sensibilities are closer to those of Europeans of the 1930s than we might like to think.

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.

Berlin’s name change to Kitchener was not just a simple vote. Tumultuous times divided the otherwise peaceful city into two groups, reflecting the Great War that had erupted in Europe two years prior and, in the end, made the name change in 1916 Berlin/Kitchener anything but simple.

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.

Canadian composer Andrew Ager’s new chamber opera “Führerbunker” is receiving its premiere at the Registry Theatre in Kitchener.

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.