Center for German and European Studies

“Island of the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ – Tourism, Antisemitism, and National Socialism on Langeoog”

About the Event

To what extent did National Socialism play a role at the very edge of Germany, on an island in the North Sea? What did antisemitism have to do with tourism? How did insular space change under the totalitarian regime? Decentralizing the history of nazism, Jörg Echternkamp (Potsdam/Germany) takes the East Frisian island of Langeoog as a case study on the pervasiveness of Nazi ideology and practical experiences in everyday life. Drawing on extensive source material including oral history he uses the concept of “Volksgemeinschaft” to analyze inclusion and exclusion of islanders and tourists alike. On the one hand the political community mobilized its “German” members and their spa guests through parades, festivities, and public lectures, while underlining the loyalty to the new regime symbolically by renaming streets and erecting monuments. On the other hand those who did not belong to the German Volksgemeinschaft, Jewish tourists as well as Jewish boarding house owners were discriminated against and persecuted. At the same time, the Nazi regime chose the island as a favorite place for leisure and recreation of the national youth organization “Hitlerjugend”. During WWII prisoners of war were used as forced laborers to turn the island into a garrison. Today, a war cemetery serves the memory of the more than 110 Soviet soldiers who lost their lives on Langeoog. Echternkamp’s microhistory of a German island, the first of its kind, offers new insight into the enforcement and interplay of nazism, antisemitism, and tourism in Germany at a time when authoritarian nationalism is on the rise again.

About the Speaker

Jörg Echternkamp, Dr. phil. habil., is Research Director at the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr, Potsdam, head of the research department “Military History after 1945”, and Adjunct professor of modern history at Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. PhD University of Bielefeld 1996, Habilitation Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg 2012; co-editor of Germany's journal of military history (Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift) 2000-23; coordinator of the German Studies Association’s interdisciplinary network “War and Violence” 2012-17. He held the chair Alfred Grosser at the Institute of Political Studies (Sciencs Po), Paris, in 2012/13, was visiting professor at the University of Calgary/Canada 2004; visiting fellow at the Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), the University College London, the German Historical Institutes in Paris and London, as well as the Hebrew University Jerusalem in May 2019. He was awarded the Geisteswissenschaften International translation grant for his Habilitation in 2017 and was committee member of the DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in History or Social Sciences published in 2020. Research fields: military history of the 19 th to 21 st centuries, history of Nazism and the Second World War, history of memory in Europe. Recent publications: Langeoog – Biographie einer deutschen Insel, 2 vols (2024); (ed.), Beyond National Borders: Reimagining European Military History, 19th-21st Century (2024). Echternkamp is co-editor of the book series “De Gruyter Studies in Military History”.