Junior researchers at the annual conference of the German History Society 2024

In their paper Lost in the Crowd: Sex Work, Sex Trafficking and the Lost Individual in Newspaper Coverage of 'Mädchenhandel' ,Lilú Kruspe will focus on aspects of reporting on sex work and human trafficking in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic within a Europe-wide campaign to ban prostitution. The paper aims to highlight reasons for the consistent lack of empirical data on individual actors and the permanent obscurity of their circumstances in a debate that, according to its own staging, stands for the individual well-being of those affected. In particular, it deals with the connections between gender, morality and nationalism, 'white slavery' as a moral panic and the influence of sensationalist journalism on public discourse.

In his paper 'Die Wacht am Rhein: Making the Franco-German Border in German Patriotic Song during the Reichsgründungszeit ', Sascha Harnisch examines the connections between the Rhine crisis of 1840/41 and possible ideological shifts within the German nationalist movement of the 19th century. At the centre of his observations are the so-called Rhine songs - poems and folk songs that were published as a direct reaction to the French demand for the Rhine border and met with broad public approval. The Rhine songs are both an expression of the geographicalisation of a hitherto linguistic-cultural nationalism, important for the establishment of nationalism as a mass movement, and a broadly effective popularisation of the imagination of a "German Rhine", which ultimately shaped the peace terms of Versailles in 1871.

Both speakers are Master's students of transcultural history and research assistants at the Chair of History of Science.

Further information on the conference can be found here

_{Picture: "Business School and All Saints Campus Skyline" by FOBImmu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.}