Collegium Carolinum,
the German Historical Institute Warsaw,
and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe
cordially invite you to the lecture
PROF. JANNIS PANAGIOTIDIS (VIENNA)
PD DR. HANS-CHRISTIAN PETERSEN (OLDENBURG)
Racism against East Europeans in Germany.
History and Present
Thursday, May 21 2026, 5 p.m.
Academic Conference Centre (AKC), Husova 4a, Praha 1
The lecture will be streamed as well, please register via code:
https://tinyurl.com/PV20260521
Racism against East Europeans constitutes a major gap in racism
research and anti-racism debates. Yet there is a long tradition
of treating the region and its inhabitants as inferior, with
devastating consequences throughout history. We present the
first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories
of Germany and Eastern Europe — a racism that is not
based on skin colour and affects people despite their mostly
phenotypical whiteness. Embedded in colonial imaginations
of Eastern Europe, anti-East European racism took its most
radical and brutal shape during Nazism. But racist knowledge
persisted across the rupture of 1945 and the Cold War and
took on new shapes after the fall of communism in 1989,
when East-West migration once again became an important
feature of European and German reality. We make the case
for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary
racism debate.
---
Jannis Panagiotidis is scientific director of the Research Center for
the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include his monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), and Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021).
Hans-Christian Petersen is a research associate at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Eastern Europe (BKGE) in Oldenburg, Germany. His publications include his monographs Bevölkerungsökonomie – Ostforschung – Politik. Eine biographische Studie zu Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902-1979) and An den Rändern der Stadt? Soziale Räume der Armen in St. Petersburg (1850-1914) (Böhlau, 2019).
Together, they have published the monograph Antiosteuropäischer
Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa, 2024).