What is the meaning and purpose of studying German and European history of the 19th and 20th centuries? What similarities and interactions linked German history with the history of other European societies and what distinguished the 200 years from the eras before?

Firstly, contemporaries throughout Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries shared the experience of living in an increasingly industrialised society - with serious consequences for the rhythm of their lives, their values and their horizons of perception.

Secondly, the pace at which this society grew increased enormously. People lived in a society in constant and rapid motion. The social tensions arising from this were forcing new social concepts and social ties.

Thirdly, from the late 19th century at the latest, these societies throughout Europe were national in character. National traditions were invented and established and at the same time boundaries were drawn between them and the "others". It was not least the potential for danger and violence that this harboured that led to the devastating wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Fourthly, contemporaries across Europe took up and dealt with the challenges and tensions of their time in civil society forums. An ideal-drunk civil society hammered in its first stakes. Their ideas of independence and self-determination, of recognising individual differences, of the will to achieve and the euphoria of progress, of the desire to communicate and the hunger for education radiated far beyond the narrow "bourgeois" circle, inspiring the formerly excluded, some of whom took them at their word for longer and more seriously.

One of the key concerns of the Chair of German and European History is to shed light on these phenomena in their various national facets, to explore international similarities and differences and at the same time to consider relationships and influences, perceptions and experiences in a European context. The aim is to combine historiographical approaches from social, political, economic, cultural and gender history on a theoretically sound basis.