Research on the contemporary history of Luxembourg investigates the political, economic, cultural and social histories of Luxembourg in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The group’s research profile reflects the mission entrusted to the University of Luxembourg to produce new knowledge about the contemporary history of Luxembourg by studying phenomena and processes that have profoundly affected the country and whose transnational and comparative value goes beyond the national perspective.
Current research projects are focused on the history of the Second World War, colonial history and social history (welfare, inequality and labour history). The Contemporary History of Luxembourg (LHI) research group, currently composed of 28 researchers – mostly PhD students and postdoctoral researchers –, gathers regularly by means of team meetings, an annual retreat and a research seminar. LHI researchers are also actively involved in efforts to improve research conditions, especially through their support for a revision of 2018 Luxembourg Archives Act.
Publicly funded research projects
LHI members are successful in attracting competitive research funding. Machteld Venken is leading a work package on the history of welfare within the Greater Region as part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project “Social politics in European Borderlands. A Comparative and Transnational Study, 1870s-1990s”, coordinated at the European University Institute in Florence (https://sociobord.eui.eu/). She was granted funding from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Polish National Science Centre for the trilateral project “Researching the Collecting, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of the War”, conducted in cooperation with the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Lviv Center for Urban History.
Four PhD candidates are conducting research funded by the FNR. Arnaud Sauer has now finished his study on migrant labourers in the Minett during the interwar period, while Nicolas Arendt continues to investigate the transformation of ARBED over the period 1973-2001 through a transnational lens. Within the FNR-funded project “Soldiers and their communities in WWII: The impact and legacy of war experiences in Luxembourg”, Sarah Maya Vercruysse continues to research the experiences of the families of Luxembourgish Wehrmacht soldiers. As part of the DFG-FNR funded research project on the history of popular culture in the long 1960s, Véronique Faber is unravelling the past of the Schueberfouer, the emblematic Luxembourg funfair, partly through interviews and participant observation (https://popkult60.eu/).
Research commissioned by public and private stakeholders in Luxembourg
In 2023, the LHI research group continued to carry out research commissioned by public and private stakeholders in Luxembourg. The considerable societal interest in the history of the Second World War is reflected in a significant number of projects: research on Soviet forced labourers in Luxembourg conducted by Inna Ganschow, as well as provenance research of Jewish property in the Villa Vauban, the National Library of Luxembourg and the National Museum of History and Art commissioned by the Luxembourg government based on article 5 of its agreement with the Jewish Consistory in Luxembourg (under the supervision of Andreas Fickers). The Digital Shoah Memorial project gathers information about the individual trajectories of the roughly 5,000 people who were considered by the Nazis as Jews based on the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935, lived in Luxembourg before the German invasion on 10 May 1940 and were persecuted. In 2023, more than 50 family biographies were written by around 20 different authors and added to www.memorialshoah.lu. Visitors may now contribute to the Memorial by adding a pebble to commemorate the biography of a person or a family on the new home page, designed to represent an endless landscape.
Following the successful launch of a C²DH-created virtual exhibition on the First World War in Luxembourg, Christoph Brüll is leading a project to develop a virtual exhibition about the Second World War in Luxembourg. With its research on the colonial and post-colonial history of Luxembourg and the role of various actors in the colonisation of Africa, the LHI research area is contributing to an ongoing debate in Luxembourg society. Two postdoctoral researchers have been granted access to archives, respectively the Chamber of Employees (Estelle Berthereau) and the Luxembourg Inspectorate of Labour and Mines (Sam Klein), and are preparing institutional histories. In collaboration with Dudelange town council, we were able to scan 23,000 former residence permits. Two academics from the Luxembourg Ukrainian Researcher Network (LURN), Kateryna Zakharchuk and Inna Ganschow, received a C²DH Thinkering Grant to use artificial intelligence to create embroidery patterns for the costumes of a dance group raising money to support Ukrainians with temporary refugee status in Luxembourg.
Events and outputs
The year’s main publications include monographs about the invention of the French-German border (1871-1914: https://www.cnrseditions.fr/catalogue/histoire/l-invention-d-une-frontiere/) and borderland schooling in interwar Europe (https://www.herder-institut.de/event/neuerscheinung-in-unserem-verlag-die-peripherie-im-zentrum/), a peer-reviewed special issue on migration studies in the digital age (https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/25892/migration-studies-and-the-digital-datafication-implications-and-methodological-approaches), the sixth volume in the “Grenzerfahrungen” series about the recent history of the German-speaking part of Belgium (https://gev.be/von-a-bis-z/grenzerfahrungen-band-5-saeuberung-wiederaufbau-autonomiediskussionen-1945-1974?highlight=WyJncmVuemVyZmFocnVuZ2VuIl0=), a peer-reviewed international journal article assessing interculturalism and media integration in Luxembourg (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/11/589), a series of newspaper articles in d’Lëtzebuerger Land on colonial history based on archival sources from the “foreign police”, including both a fictional part and historical contextualisation (https://www.land.lu/page/article/335/340335/FRE/index.html), and a contribution to the edited volume Ons zerschloen Dierfer published by the National Museum of Military History (https://onszerschloendierfer.net/).
Among the public events organised by LHI members were a Forum Z on the personal experiences of inhabitants of Luxembourg during the Second World War (https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/forum-z/local-history-close) and a Forum Z discussing past experiences of the Schueberfouer in the 1960s (Report of the Forum Z Fo’er an de Sixties: Vu Boxeren a Fritten | C2DH | Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (uni.lu)). The LHI research group organised three international interdisciplinary workshops: on welfare for children in border regions (https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/children-welfare-borders); digitising, georeferencing and modelling administrative historical data (https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/digitising-georeferencing-and-modeling-administrative-historical-data); and bordering practices along the French-Luxembourgish border from the 16th century to the present day (link to blog written and published by Christoph Brüll). We visited the “All you can eat” exhibition at the Lëtzebuerg City Museum (https://citymuseum.lu/en/exhibition/all-you-can-eat/?csrt=2713043015757353881) and two doctoral researchers wrote chapters for the exhibition catalogue.
LHI hosted two visiting scholars in 2023: migration historian Marijke van Faassen and digital historian Rik Hoekstra from the Huygens Institute (https://www.huygens.knaw.nl/en/)