Sep 25, 2024
"At the limits of history. A workshop report" - HAIT bids farewell to long-time director Prof. Thomas Lindenberger with a festive event
The fall of the Berlin Wall, Glienicker Brücke - November 1989
Prof. Thomas Lindenberger
The modern historian Prof. Thomas Lindenberger, who was appointed to the Chair of Totalitarianism Studies at the Institute of History at TU Dresden in 2017 and simultaneously appointed Director of the Hannah Arendt Institute of Research in Totalitarianism (HAIT), was officially bid farewell at a ceremony today (25.09.2024).
After words of welcome from the Deputy Director of the HAIT, Prof. Uwe Backes, the Rector of TU Dresden, Prof. Ursula Staudinger, the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at TU Dresden, Prof. Dagmar Ellerbrock, and the State Secretary of the Saxon Ministry of Science, Culture and Tourism (SMWK), Dr. Andreas Handschuh, Prof. Lindenberger gave his farewell lecture with a workshop report on the topic of "At the Limits of History".
Lindenberger spent his childhood and youth in West Berlin, where he later studied history, philosophy and economics at the Free University and the Technical University. He was one of the co-founders of the Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt e. V. and the nationwide association of Geschichtswerkstatt e. V. in 1981. Lindenberger received his doctorate in 1992 with a thesis supervised by Reinhard Rürup on the social history of public order in the late German Empire at the TU Berlin.
He then turned his attention to the history of the GDR and habilitated in 2002 with a study on the practice of rule and public order in the GDR at the University of Potsdam, where he was also appointed Extraordinary Professor in 2008. Between 1996 and 2017, Lindenberger worked as a project and department head at the Center for Contemporary History Potsdam (ZZF). From 2009 to 2012, he headed the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of History and Public Spheres of the Ludwig Boltzmann Society in Vienna. On October 1, 2017, Lindenberger was appointed Director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research at the TUD Dresden University of Technology.
Lindenberger is co-founder and co-editor of the journal WerkstattGeschichte, which has been published since 1992; he is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Contemporary European History. (Source: Wikipedia)