Modern history: conservatism, colonialism, and the Nazi period in focus

Professor Johannes Großmann’s research interests include conservative networks in the post-World War Two period, Franco-German history at the start of the war, and the colonial history of universities and knowledge production. Since March of this year, he has been Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at LMU’s Historical Seminar.

First mass migration of Second World War

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Großmann’s postdoctoral thesis was published in 2022. Titled Zwischen Fronten [“Between Fronts”], it looked at the “first mass migration of the Second World War.” Within the span of just a few days at the beginning of the war, hundreds of thousands of people were moved from both sides of the Franco-German border region into the interior of their respective countries.

In Großmann’s study, he sought to elucidate not only how war affects people through battles and combat operations, but also its massive influence on societies and their communal life at the regional level. “I was also interested in how different systems – in this case, a democracy and a dictatorship – implement such measures,” explains the historian.

The subject of the evacuations of 1939/40 and their regional and supraregional effects have received scant attention from historians, says Großmann. In the case of Germany, this might be owing to the dearth of source materials: “As the evacuations in Germany were secret measures, there was little communication about them,” explains the researcher. “In France, as befits a democratic state, things were handled differently – people were informed about the measures more or less openly.”

Depopulated cities

In his research for his thesis, Großmann found church sources particularly useful with regard to the situation in Germany. Among the evacuees, there were numerous clerics, who sent regular reports to their bishops. “These documents provide tremendous insights into everyday life,” he says. We see how the word “home”, he observes, loomed large in the minds of the evacuees – along with the attendant cares: What is happening to our houses and farms? What is happening to our livestock? Are they being plundered?

In France, according to Großmann, the evacuations were more successful, especially as the authorities gave more advance notice of the measures and more consideration to the needs of the evacuees. On the flip side, people were freer in democratic France to voice their dissatisfaction with the measures and there were vigorous debates. “In Germany, this was drowned out by the propaganda,” notes the historian.

Although relegated to something of a footnote in the history books, the evacuations were in fact the first mass migration of the war. “Big cities like Strasbourg and Saarbrücken were virtually depopulated,” says Großmann. In the ways in which politicians and the people affected dealt with the evacuations, moreover, we can recognize many patterns that characterize our current handling of migration and flight.

The Conservative International

Johannes Großmann studied history at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. He was a junior professor and locum professor at the University of Tübingen, locum professor at HU Berlin, and visiting professor at Heidelberg University; while various residencies took him, among other places, to Sorbonne University and ENS in Paris.

For his dissertation Die Internationale der Konservativen [“The Conservative International”] at the University of Tübingen, Großmann studied conservative networks in Europe, with a special focus on the immediate postwar period and thereafter up to the 1980s and ’90s.

As a sort of counterpart to the Socialist International, these networks operated informally and largely in secret in order to influence the political and economic decision-making of their time. “Its members included notables from the Franco regime in Spain as well as conservative intellectuals from England and Scandinavia and Christian Democrats from Germany,” says the researcher about the composition of these circles, which had an institutional basis in the so-called European Documentation and Information Centre (CEDI) and elsewhere.

Initially conceived as a work of organizational history, Großmann was able to reveal in the course of his investigations how, from the 1950s onward, these networks acted as catalysts for the transformation of conservative ideologies – for example, by integrating free-market ideas into traditionally skeptical and conservative economic views.

In this context, he was particularly interested in the role of Otto von Habsburg, the crown prince and son of the last emperor of Austria, Charles I. “In his exile in the United States, Otto von Habsburg gradually embraced liberal and democratic ideas, even if he continued to see himself as a conservative,” says Großmann.

In addition to the partial liberalization of conservative thought, however, we can also observe an enduring fascination with antiliberal and radical ideas, which make this history a prehistory of our present time.

Colonial history of universities

During his time at the University of Tübingen, where he also wrote his habilitation thesis about the evacuations, Großmann was involved in a research group about the university’s colonial past. “We studied the role of universities and their collections in the context of colonialism,” he recalls. A particularly important aspect for him was provenance research – especially with regard to the university’s paleontological collection.

He will continue to explore colonial history at LMU, especially in his teaching. He places a particular emphasis on actively integrating his students into research processes and conveying to them the pertinence of historical questions to the present. Consequently, he has initiated a student project together with the University Archive, whereby students will search and evaluate archives related to colonial history. “On this basis, we want not only to demonstrate how the university treated colonialism, but also to illuminate whether and how this treatment manifested itself among the general public in the city and the region,” explains Großmann.

While conducting this research, he emphasizes, one repeatedly comes across racist language and assumptions, which continued to influence scientific research and staffing decisions beyond the formal existence of a German colonial empire and into the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. To this day, he observes, the difficult legacy of colonialism has not been fully surmounted.

Munich in the Nazi period and the Cold War

Another project with master’s students concerns the Cold War in Munich. “The Cold War is frequently viewed in connection with cities like Berlin, which took center stage.” Even though Munich was home to an important broadcast medium of the time in the form of Radio Free Europe, the Bavarian metropolis was always overshadowed by the “front-line city” Berlin in the “master narrative” of the Cold War. “In the literature, there’s almost nothing about the local history of the Cold War in Munich.” The goal of the project is to close this gap.

The specific history of Munich and LMU during National Socialism will be another focus of Großmann’s work. He intends to make extensive use of existing structures and forge collaborations with organizations such as the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History and the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism. On the agenda will be investigations into victims of National Socialism, resistance to the Nazis, and especially Munich’s role as the so-called “Capital of the Movement”.