Shifts between Center and Periphery in Western Societies: The Loose Ends of the World
The Humboldt-Forum in Berlin will one day be understood as a paradigm for the way Western societies are designing a new image of themselves at the beginning of the 21st century. This new image re-centers relations by transforming the margins of societies into brilliant mirrors. What was once marginalized at the societal periphery now has become the center of political reflection. It seems that center and periphery have traded places––but only in political reflections as a kind of auto-immunization process in view of an increasingly complex world with shifting centers and twists of common sense.
Restitution, e.g., is a key word in present discussions about restorative justice for formerly colonized people. However, could this restitution also be a rejection, leaving peoples and states with the remains of their past, which represent a doubtful inspiration for present and future, showing a common horizon neither for Western societies nor for the former colonies themselves? The empty space of universalism is filled by the idea of the particular. As ethnology has become an important reference in this process, we will take a closer look at the Weltmuseum in Vienna and examine both its self-representation as well as its reception.
Michael Jeismann is an historian, journalist, and author. He studied at the Universities of Münster and Bielefeld and received his Ph.D. under Reinhart Koselleck in 1991 on the origins of enmity between modern nation-states, using the examples of France and Germany from 1792 until 1918. He then joined the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as an editor, where his articles focused, e.g., on debates in reunified Germany about the memory and remembrance of the Holocaust and its representation in public spaces. In 2002 he completed his Habilitation at the University of Basel. Before leaving the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to join the Goethe-Institut as the head of communication, he held a scholarship, granted by Berthold Beitz and the Krupp Foundation, which allowed him to write a world history of intercultural couples from antiquity to the present. From 2012 until 2017 he was the director of the Goethe-Institut Senegal in Dakar. Today he is an independent scholar.
