Joint Lecture

Nina Verheyen

Global Connections and Personal Achievements:

(De)centring the Self in Fin de Siècle Germany

4 March 2024

(0:47 h)

Joint Lecture

Nina Verheyen

Global Connections and Personal Achievements:
(De)centring the Self in Fin de Siècle Germany

GHIL Joint Lecture, in co-operation with the Modern German History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research (IHR), given 28 March 2023

Within a few decades, people in Imperial Germany witnessed a dramatic rise in global exchange, as well as an increased public interest in personal achievement. Work performance, intelligence, sporting achievements, and so on were measured, standardized, optimized and—above all—cherished. This lecture scrutinizes the link between both of these trends. It highlights two aspects: on the one hand, global exchange allowed and helped certain people in Germany to achieve new and sometimes outstanding things, but on the other, the idea of a purely personal achievement made the global factors behind such achievements invisible. In other words, the fin de siècle cult of personal achievement relied on global interactions and at the same time concealed them.

PD Dr Nina Verheyen is currently a guest professor at the Free University of Berlin. She is a historian of cultural anthropology and of modern Europe in a transnational and global perspective. She has published on oral communication, emotions, masculinities, materialities, the theory and history of historiography, and the social construction of personal achievement.

Don't miss the accompanying interview: GHIL Fellow for Colonial and Global History Mirjam Brusius and PR Officer Kim König talk to Nina Verheyen, who teaches Modern History at the University of Cologne, about the research behind her GHIL Joint Lecture on ‘Global Connections and Personal Achievements. (De)centring the Self in Fin de Siècle Germany’.