Thomas Mergel

Thomas Mergel (* 1960 in Regensburg ) is a German historian . He is professor for 20th century European history at the Humboldt University in Berlin .

Mergel studied history, sociology and education in Regensburg and Bielefeld . In 1992/93 he received his doctorate in Bielefeld. From 1992 to 2000 he was a research assistant to Lucian Hölscher at the Ruhr University in Bochum . After a research stay at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (1994–1995), he accepted a visiting professorship for Modern European History at the University of Chicago in 2000 and completed his habilitation in Bochum in the same year.

Between 2001 and 2005 he was head of the research project on the cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic of 1949–1983 in Bochum. In 2003 he was visiting professor for social history at Humboldt University Berlin and from 2003 to 2004 DAAD visiting professor for German history at Charles University in Prague . In 2006 he became head of the project division at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam and, in 2007, he was professor of modern general history at the University of Basel . Since February 2008 he has been Professor of European History of the 20th Century at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Mergel received his doctorate from Josef Mooser and Hans-Ulrich Wehler at Bielefeld University as part of the local bourgeoisie research project . Despite (or perhaps because of) this influence from the Bielefeld School of Social History , Mergel took part in the debate about a new cultural history in the 1990s , which he has prominently represented ever since. His contributions to this were in particular in the area of the - theoretical and empirical - transfer of cultural-historical methods and approaches to the area of political history in an innovative cultural history of politics . For this purpose, Mergel used media-historical approaches on the one hand by depicting politics in modern times as fundamentally shaped by the mass media . On the other hand, he applied more recent approaches in microsociology , especially praxeology , with which he described politics as a field characterized by symbolic action and communication. He also contributed to the critical discussion of the modernization theory applied to history by historical social science and thus also the thesis of the German Sonderweg derived from it . In addition, he has contributed to the establishment of approaches to transnational history , in particular the history of migration . Another area of research and interest is the connection between social and religious history , which he pursued in his dissertation on the Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland in the 19th century.

Last worked marl, which has long been for phenomena of town - interested and Urbanitätsgeschichte, on a history of the city of Cologne in the German Empire. It was published in 2018 as part of the series on the history of Cologne since antiquity published by the Historical Society of Cologne .

Fonts

Between class and denomination. Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland 1794–1914 (= bourgeoisie. Volume 9). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-525-35674-9 (also: phil. Dissertation, Bielefeld University 1992/1993).
Parliamentary culture in the Weimar Republic. Political communication, symbolic politics and the public in the Reichstag (= contributions to the history of parliamentarism and political parties. Volume 135). Droste, Düsseldorf 2002, ISBN 3-7700-5249-8 (also: habilitation paper, Ruhr-Universität Bochum 2000; 2nd, unchanged edition. Ibid 2005, ISBN 3-7700-5266-8 ; 3rd, revised edition. ibid 2012, ISBN 978-3-7700-5315-5 ).
Great Britain since 1945 (= UTB. 2656 History, Contemporary History. = European Contemporary History. Volume 1). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3-8252-2656-5 .
Propaganda after Hitler. A cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic. 1949-1990. Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0779-7 .
Cologne in the Empire 1871–1918 (= History of the City of Cologne , Volume 10). Greven, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-7743-0454-3 .

as editor

with Thomas Welskopp : History between culture and society. Contributions to the theoretical debate (= Beck series. 1211). Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-42011-7 .
with Christian Jansen : The revolutions of 1848/49. Experience - processing - interpretation. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1998, ISBN 3-525-01364-7 .
with Benjamin Ziemann : European Political History 1870–1913 (= The International Library of Essays on Political History ). Ashgate, Aldershot et al. 2007, ISBN 978-0-7546-2630-5 .
with Pascal Maeder and Barbara Lüthi: Why still social history? A discipline in transition. Festschrift for Josef Mooser on his 65th birthday. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-30034-3 .
with Christiane Reinecke: Organize the social. Social sciences and social inequality in the 20th century (= own and strange worlds. Volume 27). Campus, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39787-0 .
Understand crises. Historical and cultural studies approaches (= own and strange worlds. Volume 21). Campus, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39787-0 .

Web links

Literature by and about Thomas Mergel in the catalog of the German National Library
Contributions by Thomas Mergel in contemporary historical research
Website by Thomas Mergel at the Humboldt University in Berlin

Remarks

↑ Thomas Mergel: Thoughts on a cultural history of politics. In: History and Society . Volume 28, 2002, pp. 574-606; Thomas Mergel: Cultural History of Politics . Version: 2.0. In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , October 22, 2012. Empirical results especially in Thomas Mergel: Parliamentary Culture in the Weimar Republic. Political communication, symbolic politics and the public in the Reichstag. Düsseldorf 2002; Thomas Mergel: Propaganda after Hitler. A cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic of 1949–1990. Göttingen 2010.
^ See above all Thomas Mergel: Propaganda after Hitler. A cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic of 1949–1990. Göttingen 2010. In theory, too: Thomas Mergel: Politicized media and medialized politics. Structural links between two social systems. In: Klaus Arnold, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock, Edgar Lersch, Hans-Ulrich Wagner (eds.): From the politicization of the media to the medialization of the political? On the relationship between the media, the public and politics in the 20th century. Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-86583-497-3 , pp. 29-50.
↑ Explained especially in Thomas Mergel: Parliamentary Culture in the Weimar Republic. Political communication, symbolic politics and the public in the Reichstag. Düsseldorf 2002, pp. 17-26.
↑ Thomas Mergel: Is there still progress? The modernization theory on the way to a theory of modernity. In: Thomas Mergel, Thomas Welskopp (Ed.): History between culture and society. Contributions to the theoretical debate. Munich 1997, pp. 203-232; Thomas Mergel: Modernization . In: European History Online . (EGO). Published by the Institute for European History (IEG), Mainz, April 27, 2011.
^ Thomas Mergel: Democracy and Dictatorship 1918–1939. In: Helmut Walser Smith (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-923739-5 , pp. 423–452, (the volume as a whole strives for transnational approaches to German history); Thomas Mergel: The Empire as a migration society. In: Sven Oliver Müller , Cornelius Torp (ed.): The Empire in the Controversy. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-36752-0 , pp. 374-391; Thomas Mergel: Transnational Mobility, Integration and Awareness of Origin: Migration and European Self-Image in the 19th and 20th Century. In: Hartmut Kaelble , Martin Kirsch (Ed.): Self-understanding and society of Europeans. Aspects of the social and cultural Europeanization in the late 19th and 20th centuries (= comparative library. 16). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-56008-2 , pp. 251-297.
^ Thomas Mergel: Between class and denomination. Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland 1794–1914 . Göttingen 1994; see. also Thomas Mergel: history of religion as social history. A difficult relationship . In: Thomas Mergel, Pascal Maeder, Barbara Lüthi (eds.): Why still social history? A discipline in transition . Göttingen 2012, pp. 211-239.

personal data
SURNAME	Mergel, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German historian
DATE OF BIRTH	1960
PLACE OF BIRTH	regensburg

[1] Thomas Mergel: Thoughts on a cultural history of politics. In: History and Society . Volume 28, 2002, pp. 574-606; Thomas Mergel: Cultural History of Politics . Version: 2.0. In: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte , October 22, 2012. Empirical results especially in Thomas Mergel: Parliamentary Culture in the Weimar Republic. Political communication, symbolic politics and the public in the Reichstag. Düsseldorf 2002; Thomas Mergel: Propaganda after Hitler. A cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic of 1949–1990. Göttingen 2010.

[2] See above all Thomas Mergel: Propaganda after Hitler. A cultural history of the election campaign in the Federal Republic of 1949–1990. Göttingen 2010. In theory, too: Thomas Mergel: Politicized media and medialized politics. Structural links between two social systems. In: Klaus Arnold, Christoph Classen, Susanne Kinnebrock, Edgar Lersch, Hans-Ulrich Wagner (eds.): From the politicization of the media to the medialization of the political? On the relationship between the media, the public and politics in the 20th century. Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2010, ISBN 978-3-86583-497-3 , pp. 29-50.

[3] Explained especially in Thomas Mergel: Parliamentary Culture in the Weimar Republic. Political communication, symbolic politics and the public in the Reichstag. Düsseldorf 2002, pp. 17-26.

[4] Thomas Mergel: Is there still progress? The modernization theory on the way to a theory of modernity. In: Thomas Mergel, Thomas Welskopp (Ed.): History between culture and society. Contributions to the theoretical debate. Munich 1997, pp. 203-232; Thomas Mergel: Modernization . In: European History Online . (EGO). Published by the Institute for European History (IEG), Mainz, April 27, 2011.

[5] Thomas Mergel: Democracy and Dictatorship 1918–1939. In: Helmut Walser Smith (Ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2011, ISBN 978-0-19-923739-5 , pp. 423–452, (the volume as a whole strives for transnational approaches to German history); Thomas Mergel: The Empire as a migration society. In: Sven Oliver Müller , Cornelius Torp (ed.): The Empire in the Controversy. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-525-36752-0 , pp. 374-391; Thomas Mergel: Transnational Mobility, Integration and Awareness of Origin: Migration and European Self-Image in the 19th and 20th Century. In: Hartmut Kaelble , Martin Kirsch (Ed.): Self-understanding and society of Europeans. Aspects of the social and cultural Europeanization in the late 19th and 20th centuries (= comparative library. 16). Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-56008-2 , pp. 251-297.

[6] Thomas Mergel: Between class and denomination. Catholic bourgeoisie in the Rhineland 1794–1914 . Göttingen 1994; see. also Thomas Mergel: history of religion as social history. A difficult relationship . In: Thomas Mergel, Pascal Maeder, Barbara Lüthi (eds.): Why still social history? A discipline in transition . Göttingen 2012, pp. 211-239.