Dr Katharina Friege
I am a historian of modern Europe with a research focus on media, gender, and identity in the 20th century. I currently hold an Early Career Research Fellowship at Merton College.
Research Interests
It is people and the stories people told – about themselves, their societies, and their era – that interest me most in the study of history. I am particularly fascinated by the complexities that emerge in the interplay between an individual’s real, lived experiences on the one hand and the wider social and cultural frameworks they encounter through popular media on the other.
My doctoral dissertation is about a small group of heterogenous German women in the Weimar and Nazi period. These women wanted to go out and see the world and then widely share what it was they had seen. To do so, they built independent careers as writers, journalists, or photographers in the interwar years and during World War II. As they set out beyond German borders, cameras and notebooks in hand, their personal political perspectives conditioned their experiences; much as they themselves felt globally oriented, they ultimately dedicated their attention towards negotiating ‘Germanness’ and German identity from afar. That identity was far from uniform. The women at the centre of this work – who were Nazis, Communists, career opportunists, carefree adventurers, or Jewish refugees – all belonged to a ‘new generation’ of modern women and yet defended very different political and cultural ideals.
My current research project is dedicated to humour about World War II in its far-reaching aftermath. I am especially interested in the perceived moral ambiguities of humorous storytelling as well as in its accompanying social commentary, be this through sharing jokes and laughter as individuals and small groups, or through engaging with comedy in a range of genres, e.g., political cartoons, television shows, or live performances. I seek to shed light on the parallel, intersecting, and contradictory ways in which people experienced humour and laughter in relation to cultural memories and national narratives of wartime. More often than not, laughter arises from unresolved tension, and it is this very instability that makes it so compelling. How did humour serve people – creators and audiences alike – as a means through which to question, criticise, and reshape their understanding of collective identities after World War II?
I am also interested in the cultural imagination and lived experience of place and space, in the history of emotions and subjectivity, and in the relationship between literary and historical narratives.
