The 2024 election is shaping up to be one of the most consequential in history. With two vastly different candidates and visions, the stakes couldn't be higher. What’s particularly concerning this year is the apparent disregard for democratic institutions and values.⁠

Join us as we explore the historical context of this pivotal moment, starting from George Washington’s presidency. To mark 225 years since Washington's passing, Gottfried Haufe and Thomas Zimmer discuss how Washington's precedent of stepping down after two terms has shaped our democracy.⁠

This event is part of our virtual Road To Election Series. The event series is running from January 2024 to January 2025, and will host in-depth discussions and foster a vibrant exchange of ideas in the lead-up to the pivotal 2024 U.S. election. As a collaboration of over 25 transatlantic organizations and political foundations, the series aims to inform, to engage in dynamic dialogues, and to champion democratic values by presenting diverse perspectives. The Road to Election series aims to offer comprehensive insights for audiences both in the United States and Germany. For more information visit www.roadtoelection.de.

Gottfried Haufe works as a freelance event and radio presenter, cultural manager and author. As a trained historian, English scholar and educationalist, many of his interests lie in the field of educational and mediation projects of all kinds. However, topics relating to art and culture, social co-operation, innovation and future prospects also play an important role for him.

Thomas Zimmer is a historian and has been a DAAD Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., since 2021. He was previously an Academic Counsellor at the University of Freiburg. Zimmer is interested in the history of American democracy and its opponents - especially anti-democratic tendencies in modern conservatism since the 1930s. He is currently working on a book project entitled "Trumpism: An American History", in which he locates the current radicalization of the American right in the longer lines of U.S. history. He also writes "Democracy Americana", a weekly newsletter on American politics, and hosts the "Is This Democracy" podcast.

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City Partnership.

No industry shaped Chicago more decisively than the meatpacking industry, and no book exposed the rapacious, exploitative and vicious character of the meatpacking industry more than Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906).

In this episode, we explore the origins and explosive growth of the meatpacking industry, the brutal working conditions on the bloody killing floors, the emergence of literature about Chicago in the early 1900s, the importance of Lithuanians in Chicago history, the life of Upton Sinclair, his urban realist and naturalist writing style, and his political ideas as seen in The Jungle.

Our expert guests are historian Dr. Dominic Pacyga, co-founder of Chicago's Packingtown Museum, and novelist Dr. Douglas Cowie, creator of the Literature of Chicago Course at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Visit the Packingtown Museum, voted the best small museum in Chicago. More information is available here: https://www.packingtownmuseum.org/

Many of the EU's 370 million eligible voters from 27 countries went to the voting booths between 6 and 9 June 2024 in order to cast their votes for the European Parliament.

In this episode, Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Günter Danner discuss the EU Parliament, its powers, its role in the constellation of EU institutions, and its inner workings. Furthermore, they discuss the results of the election and their significance for France, Germany, and Europe as a whole.

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City Partnership.

Happy Pride Month!

We celebrate with an episode about Queer Chicago featuring two historians of Queer History, Owen Keehnen and Timothy Stewart-Winter.

Topics include the following:
-The difficulties of accessing Queer history since it was repressed and marginalized for so long
-The recovery and reclamation of Queer history
-Early Gay cultures in the Levy District
-The Society for Human Rights, which was the first Gay rights organization in the US, founded in Chicago by Henry Gerber in 1924
-The influence of the German writer and thinker Magnus Hirschfeld on Gay culture in Chicago
-The special historical role of Chicago as the Midwestern Queer city, which differentiates it from the more well-known Gay cities of New York and San Francisco
-The repeal of anti-sodomy laws by the Illinois in 1961, the first state to do so
-Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance of 1988, which formally protected the Queer community from discrimination
-Black Queer Chicago
-Lesbian Chicago
-The AIDS crisis
-The Belmont Rocks and the AIDS Garden

Check out Owen's Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/owenkeehnen/

This episode is part of the Amerikazentrum's ChicagoHamburg30 series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! In this episode, we explore the rich and complex history of Jewish Chicago, from the 1850s to the present.

Topics include the following:

-the first Jewish settlers and politicians in Chicago
-the influence of German high-culture and Enlightenment philosophy on German Jews in Chicago
-the formation of Jewish regimental companies in the Civil War
-the second wave of Jewish immigrants and the tensions between establishment Jews and the new arrivals
-World War I and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-Prohibition and the rise of the Jewish gangster
-the role of Word War II and the Holocaust in unifying the disparate Jewish communities
-protests against the German American Bund
-the transformation of the suburb of Lawndale into German Jewish "Deutschland"
-further immigration trends from the post-Soviet nations as well as Israel

Throughout, you will learn about famous Jewish Chicagoans, such as Henry Greenebaum, Dankmar Adler, Edward Solomon, Hannah Shapiro, Joseph Schaffner, and Julius Rosenwald.

Our expert guests are Dr. Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State University) and Dr. Joe Kraus (University of Scranton).

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

In this episode, Dominic Pacyga (Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago) and Tobias Brinkmann (Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Penn State) discuss the immigration of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and Lithuanians to Chicago via the Hamburg-America Line.

Topics include the following:
-the first Eastern European immigrants in the 1850s
-the self-definition of these groups through language, religion, and ethnicity
-the concept of spatial integration and social segregation in Chicago
-the role of railroads in opening up Eastern Europe to the port of Hamburg
-the turmoil in Europe that caused different waves of immigration
-the importance of foreign-language, ethnic newspapers in Chicago
-the new roles available to immigrant women in Chicago
-the inter-ethnic conflict in Chicago caused by World War I
-the effect of immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans due to the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-the inter-ethnic conflict between German Chicagoans (the German-American Bund) and other groups before and during World War II
-the softening of immigration restrictions after WWII with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948
-the differences among Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian experiences during the Cold War

If you are interested in learning more about Polish Chicago, check out Back Home: Polish Chicago at the Chicago History Museum through June 8, 2024. https://www.chicagohistory.org/

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

Learn more about the history and culture of Black Chicago with award-winning scholar Dr. Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Northwestern University.

Topics include the difficulties in defining Black Chicago, which is neither a static nor homogenous concept; the two waves of the Great Migration of Black people from the rural South to the cities of the North in the early 1900s; the important differences between the concepts of the Black Ghetto and the Black Metropolis; and the history of important Black political figures in Chicago from Ida B. Wells and President Barack Obama to Mayors Harold Washington, Lori Lightfoot, and Brandon Johnson. Throughout, Pattillo highlights the resilience and complexity of Black Chicago.

In the final episode of 2023, Sola and Danner look ahead to 2024. They discuss three issues that will influence a number of elections in 2024: the immigration crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the macroeconomic situation.

They then use these issues as a lens to analyze five upcoming elections: the Russian presidential elections in March; the EU parliamentary elections in June; the east German state elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony in September; the expected parliamentary elections in the UK; and the mother of all presidential elections in the USA in November.

In our wrap-up of political developments in the EU in 2023, Sola and Danner discuss the results of the five big European elections this year in Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Are we seeing the entrenchment of the far-right across Europe? Or are centrist politicians regaining the advantage? The second topic is the European Council Summit that took place last week and that yielded some mixed results for Ukraine, due to the obstinance of Viktor Orban, PM of Hungary. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of the German coalition government, which had a rough and tumble 2023.