Philipp Nielsen
My primary interest is the formation of German national identity during the 20th century and more specifically the place German-Jewish identity occupied in this process. My dissertation is concerned with the relations betwee German Jews and non-Jews in the politically conservative milieu. Looking at this field, so concerned about national identity and starting with the experience of World War One, I hope to provide an insight in German socio-polictical and cultural history without applying the a priori or rather a posteriori judgement of the Third Reich and the Holocaust.
During my previous degrees at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I have been concerned with other aspects of German identity. My BSc thesis focused on competing German identities during the Cold War and how this competition played out in the television coverage of the Olympic Games between 1964 and 1976. My MSc thesis dealt with the re-establishment of the Jewish community of Berlin after 1945 and the role of Siegmund Weltlinger as a Holocaust survivor and bureaucrat of the Berlin magistrate in this process.
My wider interests include European intellectual history, questions of political morality and European political history.
