Events

Poster for photo exhibition, Dictatorship and Democracy

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.

Graffiti on Berlin Wall: "The world's too small for walls"

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.

Scaffolding and men in shadow, in front of a very large EU flag

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.

Barracks in Kitchener, with men getting dressed into military uniforms, 1910s.

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.

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.

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Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes: Spotlights on the History of Europe in the Twentieth Century

The Dawn of Freedom—East Germany 1989

100 Years Since WWI: Dictatorship and Democracy in an Age of Extremes

Waterloo Region Museum: City on Edge

2016 Grimm Lecture: Democracy in Disappearing Ink: The Politics of Exclusion in Germany before Hitler