Month: December 2025

In the early 19th century, Switzerland was traumatised by the French invasion of 1798 and there were fears that France would attack again. In Switzerland’s defence planning, Aarberg was a strategic military location as French armies could potentially cross the River Aare there. An obstacle was therefore needed. Dr. phil., Curator of the Information and…

The setting in which Jesus actually came into the world remains a mystery – but the way it has been imagined has shaped Christian Christmas culture for centuries. In art and crib building, the nativity scene has been depicted in various locations, including a stable, a cave, a ruin, and a house, in each case…

Medievalist Marcel Beck kept a diary throughout his military service. It reveals a different, rarely seen side of active service during the Second World War.

Between 1974 and 1976, Marcel Beck published several short extracts in the Badener Tagblatt newspaper from a diary he had kept during the Second World War, and which was subsequently believed to have gone missing. It was acquired from a private owner by Jakob Tanner a few years ago. The diary consists of a total…

Born in 1885 into a modest Romanian-speaking family in Transylvania, Liviu Rebreanu needed to learn both Hungarian and German to acquire a basic education in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After getting higher education, he also learned the “foreign languages” taught through the imperial school system. To…

“Nepal is a closed country.” These were the first lines penned by Byodo Tsushō, a Japanese Buddhist monk who published an account of his travels in Nepal in the 1935 issue of the Pan-Asianist journal, Dai Ajiashugi.[1] Three years earlier, Byodo Tsushō was sponsored by the Hongan-ji sect of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism to study in…

This special issue on Nordic transimperial careers and experiences investigates Nordic people operating in the world of empires ranging from Southeast Asia to Africa, and from Europe to the Caribbean and North America.[1] It focuses on border-crossing individuals, addressing inter-imperial questions of race, otherness, and the civilizing mission, and tying into existing networks, while seeking…

At the end of the Second World War, a new international order was to be defined, requiring reconfigurations in and around colonial societies. Empires becoming obsolete as a form of power were to be dismantled and colonial societies were longing for a fundamental change. As the socio-political order was being redefined, how was the new…

I. Wissenschaftsgeschichte transimperial In den letzten Jahren wurde vermehrt eingefordert, Wissenschaftsgeschichte aus transimperialer Perspektive zu untersuchen. National-imperiale Container müssten aufgebrochen werden, denn sie verdeckten oft mehr Entwicklungen als sie erklärten. Somit reiche die klassische Forderung Ann Laura Stolers und Frederick Coopers, Kolonie und Metropole in einem analytischen Raum zu betrachten,[1] nicht mehr aus. Sie sei…

In Weimar era Berlin, Indian students and anticolonialists networked with other exiled communities from subject and colonial nations through the Hindusthan Association of Central Europe (HACE), officially known in German as the Verein der Inder in Zentraleuropa, forging a form of cosmopolitan anticolonialism.[1] Already during the First World War, Germany had attracted anticolonial revolutionaries from…