Historic side streets: Oldenburg postcolonial?

Project seminar at the Institute of History at the University of Oldenburg, winter semester 2011/12

Oldenburg is not generally regarded as a city in which we would be confronted with the German colonial past on a daily basis. However, it is particularly important - in the spirit of postcolonial studies - to uncover these not immediately obvious remnants of that time and the colonial gaze, some of which continues to be effective. the idea of the project seminar is to produce a soundtrack on the topic that functions as a virtual (audio) tour of the city and includes, for example, interview voices, read sources, sound recordings and music. Michaela Melián calls such soundtracks "memory loops" in her Memory Loops project in Munich.

The participants work together to familiarise themselves with the overall topic, develop sub-topics, research them, collect the available sources and materials, create a manuscript for their soundtrack (in the sense of a radio feature broadcast manuscript) and implement this idea themselves under technical guidance (accompanied by the radio station O1). The individual audio tracks are harmonised to such an extent that they are combined to form a kind of virtual city tour on the topic and are made publicly accessible on the web.

The aim is not only to deal with colonial history in Oldenburg, but also to thematise the (general and personal) handling of colonial traces. Ideally, when colonial history and the history of remembrance are contrasted with each other in one place, colonial and post-colonial perspectives on the city of Oldenburg come to light in equal measure.

In co-operation with Maik Nolte (O1) and www.geschichte-mitmachen.de/