Main Research Areas

The topical focus of this undertaking is the emergence and transformation of authority and trust in American politics, society, religion, and culture since the nineteenth century. Due to its early democratization, its egalitarian and libertarian political culture, its ethno-cultural heterogeneity, and its international predominance, the United States is a particularly interesting case study of authority and trust in the modern world. The thematic scope of the project encompasses state and private actors, social and economic structures, institutions and discourses as well as spatial dimensions and transnational interconnections. For the first time, the formidable expertise that the HCA has been able to gather from the fields of geography, history, linguistics, literature, political science, and religious studies is concentrating on a single issue in this project.

Professor Jan Stievermann and a team of young scholars from American Studies and theology are now working on volume ten (Hebrews to Revelation) in the ongoing edition of the Biblia Americana by Cotton Mather. Together with general editor Reiner Smolinski (Atlanta), Jan Stievermann also serves as executive editor of the entire ten-volume edition of the Biblia to be realized by a team of seven international scholars.

The original handwritten manuscript, never before transcribed or published, is a comprehensive English-speaking Bible commentary from colonial British North America, produced by the famed Puritan theologian Cotton Mather (1663-1728) between 1693 and 1728. Since 2010 this work—of great significance for both religious and intellectual history—is being made available for the first time by academic publishers Mohr Siebeck in what will ultimately be ten annotated volumes. In 2015 Stievermann and his team completed volume five that includes Mather's commentaries on the biblical books of the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Editing the Biblia Americana in its entirety is unquestionably one of the most important and promising interdisciplinary projects now underway in early North American Studies. Researchers examining the cultural, religious, or literary history of America as well as Europe can equally profit from this academic edition of the Biblia.

In addition, Jan Stievermann's new monograph Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity: Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures in Cotton Mather's Biblia Americana (2016) offers the first comprehensive study of Mather's Old Testament exegesis. The descendant of an important Puritan clergy family of New England, Cotton Mather was one of the most influential and productive theologians in Colonial North America. He published more than four hundred writings, including a series of extensive and well-known works in various academic fields. Yet, he always regarded the Biblia as his most important endeavor and the summation of his lifework but failed to find either a wealthy patron or sufficient subscribers for the publication of his magnum opus. Today the 4,561 handwritten folio pages of the Biblia reside in the archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). While the Biblia manuscript is in good overall condition, its contents have not generally been accessible. Challenges include the early modern handwriting used, which is difficult to decipher; frequent comments on loose pages of paper inserted into the manuscript; the extensive number of citations in classical languages; or a lack of identification for the innumerable literary references. Over the past few years leading Mather expert Reiner Smolinski has brought together a seven-person team of scholars from the fields of American Studies, American history, church history, and religious studies who will now finally realize this mammoth undertaking. The target for completion of the entire edition is 2020.

Since 2020, the HCA has been part of a local initiative that commemorates the fate of the a Jewish family from Walldorf/Baden. The three siblings Irmgard, Kurt and Max Klein managed to emigrate to the United States in the early years of the Nazi regime. They tried desperately, but unsuccessfully, to organize the emigration of their parents. Alice and Ludwig Klein were deported to Gurs (France) in 1940 and murdered two years later in Auschwitz. Kurt Klein (1920-2002) returned to Europe in the final months of the Second World War as a “Ritchie Boy” in the US Army. At the end of the war, he met his wife Gerda Weissmann (1924-2022), a Jewish survivor of the labor camps and death marches. The couple moved to the United States and dedicated their lives to advocating Holocaust education and human rights. Gerda Weissmann-Klein’s memoir All but My Life (1957) was adapted into the 1995 short film “One Survivor Remembers,” which won an Academy Award and an Emmy Award. She was a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents her story in its permanent exhibition. In 2006, she addressed the United Nations on the occasion of the first International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On February 15, 2011, President Barack Obama presented Gerda Weissmann-Klein with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

A local initiative in Walldorf planned a program of readings, films, and lectures to mark Kurt Klein’s one hundredth birthday on 2 July 2020. After a small event due to the pandemic, the Kurt Klein Days took place in 2022, including a panel discussion at the HCA. The HCA’s project has accompanied this initiative from the outset. In 2023, a new German edition of Gerda’s memoir Nichts als das nackte Leben was published by Metropolverlag Berlin. In 2024, in collaboration with the Heidelberg University Library, we completed a digital edition of Ludwig and Alice Klein’s letters to their children in the USA (1936-1942). We are delighted that the Klein family supports these projects and has made the original sources available.

Im Jahr 2022 sind die Gesellschaften des Westens zerrissen wie nie. Polarisierung ist das Buzzword der Stunde. Politische Debatten werden dabei zunehmend entlang moralischer Gräben ausgetragen. Auf dem Spiel stehen Lebensentwürfe, Weltbilder und gesellschaftliche Ideen darüber, was das Gemeinwesen ausmacht und auf welchem kulturellen Erbe sich dieses gründet. Seien es Fragen gesellschaftlicher Identität und Vielfalt, der wirtschaftspolitischen Ausrichtung, der Gesundheits- oder Klimapolitik: Sogenannte Culture Wars bestimmen die öffentliche Debatte und werden zum Katalysator von kultureller Transformation und Umbruch. Wie jedoch kommt es zu solchen Transformationsprozessen? Welche gesellschaftlichen Faktoren und Bedingungen begünstigen deren Entstehen und Erfolg? Und wie verändern sich gesellschaftliche Kulturen und die Wahrnehmung kulturellen Erbes? Diesen und weiteren Fragen widmet sich das Forschungsteam um Ekkehard Felder, Sebastian Harnisch und Günter Leypoldt.

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg galten die USA als Modell einer konsensorientierten „Civic Culture“, doch spätestens seit der Präsidentschaftswahl 2016 sehen zahlreiche Beobachter im In-und Ausland Amerika als Krisenfall der Demokratie. Konsens herrscht unter Amerikanern heute nur noch darüber, dass das Land heillos zerstritten ist. Mit diesem Buchprojekt richtet sich Manfred Berg an die interessierte deutschsprachige Öffentlichkeit und wird die politisch-ideologischen, sozialen, wirtschaftlichen, ethnischen und kulturellen Konflikte und Triebkräfte in den Blick nehmen, die Amerika seit den 1960er Jahren zu einem „gespaltenen Haus" gemacht haben, um ein berühmtes Wort Abraham Lincolns zu bemühen.

Sebastian Harnisch ist Mitglied dieses unabhängigen Forschungskonsortiums, das sich der evidenzbasierten wissenschaftlichen Analyse widmet und zu einem besseren Verständnis der Bedrohungslage durch Cyber-Vorfälle beitragen soll. Die öffentliche Bereitstellung von anwenderspezifischen, zuverlässigen Daten durch dieses interdisziplinäre Forschungsnetzwerk macht es zur Anlaufstelle für aktuelle Information zu Cyber-Vorfällen und relevanten Trends.

The HCA's research focus on African American history unites several endeavors. In 2008, the HCA joined a research initiative with the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. and Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) on "The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany." Initiated by Professors Maria Höhn (Vassar) and Martin Klimke (New York University/Abu Dhabi), this research project and digital archive explores the connection between the establishment of American military bases abroad and the advancement of civil rights in the United States. It investigates the role African American GIs played in carrying the demands of the civil rights movement abroad beginning with World War II.

In July 2009, the project was awarded the Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award by the prestigious civil rights organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at its Centennial Convention in New York City. As the NAACP explained, "By giving voice to their experience and to that of the people who interacted with them over civil rights demands and racial discrimination on both sides of the Atlantic, Höhn and Klimke are preserving and expanding the history of the African American civil rights movement beyond the boundaries of the U.S." As part of this research initiative, an exhibition on "The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany," including more than fifty black and white photographs as well as other exhibition samples, was shown in numerous cities across both Germany and the United States, including Augsburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Mainz, Munich, Ramstein, and Tübingen, as well as in Washington, D.C., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Berkeley, Calif., Oxford, Miss., San Francisco, Athens, Ga., Chapel Hill, N.C., as well as London, England. By illustrating the untold story of African American GIs and the transnational implications of the civil rights movement, the exhibit aims at advancing a more nuanced and multilayered sense of how America's struggle for democracy reverberated across the globe. The accompanying book A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany by Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke was published by Palgrave Macmillan in October 2010 (www.breathoffreedom.org). The documentary "Breath of Freedom: Black Soldiers and the Struggle for Civil Rights," directed by Dag Freyer and originating from the project, premiered February 17, 2014, on the Smithsonian Channel in the U.S. and was broadcast on Arte on December 16, 2014. A German edition of the book was published by transcript Verlag in 2016. 

Two projects at the Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History explored the history of slavery, race, abolitionism, black political integration, and the civil rights movements from a perspective that encompasses intersections with social, political, and cultural developments outside the United States. They seek to contribute to a deeper understanding not only of the enduring relevance of African-American history at a national level but also to place questions of ethnicity, race, and racism in a larger global and transnational framework. Publications from these projects include Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective and Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaption (both eds. Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, 2011).

In 2009, Martin Klimke and then-HCA research fellow Mischa Honeck co-convened a conference on Germany and the black diaspora at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. The conference volume Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1250-1914, edited by Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke and Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov, came out in 2013.

HCA research associate Anja Schüler has started work on a biography of the African-American biographer Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955), the preeminent figure of the African-American women's movement in the first third of the twentieth century. Utilizing one of the few roads for African American women to gain professional status, Bethune established and presided over what would in 1941 become the first fully accredited four-year college for African Americans in Florida; advised four presidents on child welfare, education, and civil rights; served two terms as president of the National Association of Colored Women; founded the National Council of Colored Women; and became a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" and arguably the most influential African American woman in the New Deal administration.