With the Imperial Settlement Act of 11 August 1919, the many demands for the settlement of estates for the benefit of land-poor farmers and agricultural workers became law. So-called internal colonisation was now a task for the individual federal states. Using the example of the two Free States of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the lecture first looks at the practical colonisation activities in the 1920s and 1930s and presents the quantitative results. The changes in the villages brought about by the settlement are then described. Finally, it looks at the settlers themselves: Their geographical mobility, acclimatisation to the new conditions, economic problems and social interaction with the native population are discussed.

https://uni-greifswald-de.zoom.us/j/9896944339?pwd=TXUxMnJ5aHREZkdTWk5GaFNNSVhUZz09

Since the end of the 19th century, explorers and colonial officials such as Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg have repeatedly brought people from Africa back to Germany on their return. Between 1905 and 1925, Africans therefore repeatedly stayed in Mecklenburg. Some only stayed for a few days, others for many years. The lecture describes how the local population reacted to these foreign visitors and how their lives then continued.

https://uni-rostock-de.zoom-x.de/j/63076449055?pwd=SW47ktE9DX4Vq9aAOaZEM49RtMsKWu.1

Meeting-ID: 630 7644 9055

Kenncode: 898880

There is hardly a family in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in which one or more people did not immigrate after 1945 as refugees or displaced persons from Pomerania, Silesia, Slovakia or the Bohemian countries. This massive immigration led to an extremely complex mixture of dialects and colloquial languages of different origins in the villages of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. How did the population groups cope with this great linguistic diversity and how did the language of the region develop in the post-war decades? The lecture explores this question on the basis of numerous interviews with contemporary witnesses from Rostock and the surrounding area.  One surprising result of this research is that the members of the displaced families today often speak more "Mecklenburg" in their everyday language than the long-established Mecklenburgers of the same age group. For many immigrants, adapting to the regional linguistic usage was a form of "arriving" in their new living environment.

https://uni-greifswald-de.zoom.us/j/9896944339?pwd=TXUxMnJ5aHREZkdTWk5GaFNNSVhUZz09

The flight and expulsion of many millions of people from the original German eastern territories presented German post-war society with enormous challenges. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was particularly affected, as no other state took in so many people in relation to its former population. The lecture shows the difficulties involved in taking in almost one million displaced persons and the far-reaching changes that were set in motion by their integration in Mecklenburg. The differences in the integration processes in the cities and rural areas as well as the relationship between displaced persons and Mecklenburgers will be focussed on.

https://uni-rostock-de.zoom-x.de/j/63076449055?pwd=SW47ktE9DX4Vq9aAOaZEM49RtMsKWu.1

Meeting-ID: 630 7644 9055

Kenncode: 898880

From the end of the Second World War until the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of citizens from East Germany attempted to flee across the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia. Danish author and journalist Jesper Clemmensen tells this piece of Cold War and world history through fascinating, moving and surprising escape stories. A story that interweaves Denmark, Sweden and Germany in a special way.

https://uni-greifswald-de.zoom.us/j/9896944339?pwd=TXUxMnJ5aHREZkdTWk5GaFNNSVhUZz09

The deeply religious people of the Middle Ages strived throughout their lives to attain salvation. When the idea of purgatory was established in the 13th century, indulgences as a remission of the punishment for sins became the focus of efforts to achieve salvation in the afterlife.

In addition to many other pious works, pilgrimages to more or less distant holy sites served this purpose. Pilgrimages were often specified in wills as a last will and testament, carried out by friends and acquaintances, but sometimes also by professional pilgrims, in order to pray on behalf of the deceased's salvation. However, pilgrimages were also imposed as penance for secular and ecclesiastical punishments or arranged as atonement between the perpetrators and the relatives harmed by a death.

In addition to written documents, evidence of pilgrimages were pilgrimage signs, mostly flat or grid castings made of lead/tin alloys, which were sold as inexpensive souvenirs at the place of pilgrimage from the 12th century onwards. They often show an image of the saint or saints venerated there and their attributes, the relics or the legend of the miracle.

Acquired by the hundreds of thousands, pilgrimage signs with their pictorial and textual information were one of the oldest mass media to spread their message in Christian Europe.

At the place of pilgrimage, they were often used as contact relics in order to come into contact with the venerated object. Until the Reformation, the end of the medieval pilgrimage tradition, pilgrims wore the signs on their hats or pilgrimage bags as proof of their pious endeavours and evidence of their journey. Back home, they were proof of a successful pilgrimage and were probably treasured as personal devotional objects.

From the 11th century onwards, the most distant and at the same time most important pilgrimage destinations for Christians were Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (north-west Spain). The cost-intensive journeys on the unsafe country roads not only took weeks and months, but people's lives were in constant danger from disease, highwaymen and robbers. Travelling by ship was no less dangerous. Outside the Hanseatic region, the language was difficult or impossible for the Low Germans to understand, and they became homo peregrinus, strangers in this world. Despite all these adversities, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims travelled every year, especially to the public pilgrimages that took place every seven years in the Rhineland.

As early as the 14th century, in addition to the important pilgrimage sites in the Rhineland, pilgrimage sites with supra-regional appeal were also established in Mecklenburg and Pomerania, where pilgrimage signs were issued. While the pilgrimage to the Holy Blood, which goes back to an alleged desecration of the host by Sternberg Jews in 1492 and was propagated by the emerging printing press, is firmly anchored in the history of the region, a similar event that took place in Güstrow in 1332 was largely forgotten until a few years ago, when it was recently brought back to mind by archaeological finds of pilgrimage signs.

Most of the finds recovered during archaeological investigations in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern come from organically rich layers or wetland sediments, where the conditions for preservation are exceptionally favourable. Pilgrim signs have been found in particularly large numbers in the Hanseatic cities of Rostock, Wismar, Greifswald and Stralsund. In addition to these finds on the ground, pilgrim marks have also survived as casts on church bells and bronze baptismal fonts.

They provide information about long-gone places of pilgrimage and are sometimes the only material evidence of their history, thus contributing to research into the history of the region and attesting to the remarkable mobility of medieval people, including those from the lower classes.

https://uni-rostock-de.zoom-x.de/j/63076449055?pwd=SW47ktE9DX4Vq9aAOaZEM49RtMsKWu.1

Meeting-ID: 630 7644 9055

Kenncode: 898880

In public perception, the Middle Ages often have the reputation of being an immobile age: Travelling was dangerous and arduous and most people spent their entire lives close to where they were born. In recent years, however, the mobility of the pre-modern era has increasingly come under scrutiny, and groups of people such as travelling princes, merchants, pilgrims, messengers and mercenaries have been researched. This lecture focuses on the mobility of "normal" inhabitants of towns in the Hanseatic region around 1500, using urban letter books and a digital mapping of the historical route network in an attempt to reconstruct the temporal and spatial extent of their lives.

https://uni-greifswald-de.zoom.us/j/9896944339?pwd=TXUxMnJ5aHREZkdTWk5GaFNNSVhUZz09

Under this heading, a medieval cultural transfer will be presented - a case of complex but entirely peaceful mobility. Specifically, it is about transfer actions from the second half of the 13th century, about their actors and their intentions, about a gift of relics and - in connection with this - about some significant architectural forms that were transferred directly from Paris to Schwerin. There they were used in a new cathedral building, whereby they were adapted to the local needs and conditions (brick as a building material). 

These now Schwerin building forms became the model for large buildings that today significantly characterise the image of Brick Gothic, such as the cathedrals of Schwerin and Lübeck, the Doberan monastery church and some dominant city parish churches in Lübeck, Rostock, Stralsund, Wismar, Riga and Malmö. Archival finds from Schwerin and the inclusion of Western European sources formed the basis for the book "Der Schweriner Dom und König Ludwig IX. von Frankreich. On the transfer of High Gothic to the Baltic region". From this, a number of geographically wide-ranging political, pious-historical and architectural networks will be discussed, which formed the preconditions for the aforementioned Paris-Schwerin transfer.
 

https://uni-rostock-de.zoom-x.de/j/63076449055?pwd=SW47ktE9DX4Vq9aAOaZEM49RtMsKWu.1

Meeting-ID: 630 7644 9055

Kenncode: 898880