Marcus Colla

Position

Associate Professor, Modern European Political History

Affiliation

Research

After completing my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2019 I worked as Departmental Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Oxford and was the Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. I joined UiB in February 2024. 

My work focusses principally on twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. My first book, "Communists and Kings", was released with Oxford University Press in 2022. An edited volume (with Paul Betts) entitled "Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century" appeared in 2024. My principal current project concerns the history of Esperanto in Cold War Europe.

In addition, I have published articles on themes concerning architecture, heritage, time and memory in communist Eastern Europe. Other research interests of mine include the history of 'National Bolshevism' before 1945, the Revolutions of 1989, language politics, and "chronopolitics" in Central Europe. I also comment on contemporary politics at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/contributors/articles/marcus-colla

 

Some of my more recent articles and chapters include:

 

I am an editor of the De Gruyter book series 'Time and Periodization in History' and would be very happy to hear from prospective authors.

Teaching

HIS102 - Oversyn over nyare historie frå 1750

EUR103 - Europa etter 1945: Ressursar, demografi, økonomi

HIS115 - Time and Temporality in Modern History (Fordjuping i nyare historie)

HIS203 - Teoriar, metodar og historiske kjelder

HIS250 - Bacheloroppgåve i historie

MA - Historie (Politikk og historiebruk)

Publications

BOOKS

  • (With Anna Gutgarts and Oded Steinberg) Zeitenwenden: Perspectives on Periodization and Time from Germany, Europe, and the Middle East (De Gruyter, Forthcoming)
  • (With Paul Betts) Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
  • Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic: Communists and Kings (Oxford University Press, 2022)

 

ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS  

  • (With Adéla Gjuričová), '1989: The Chronopolitics of Revolution', History and Theory 62, 4 (2023), pp. 45-65 
  • ‘Whither Prussia? Berlin’s Humboldt Forum and the Afterlife of a Vanished State’, Central European History 56, 1 (2023), pp. 2-17
  • ‘Rebuilding the Past: East German Preservationists as “Time Activists”’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 28, 4 (2021), pp. 584-606
  • ‘The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History’, Contemporary European History 30, 1 (2021), pp. 124-135
  • ‘Memory, Heritage and the Demolition of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche, 1968’, German History 38, 2 (2020), pp. 290-310  
  • ‘The Politics of Time and State Identity in the German Democratic Republic’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 29 (2019), pp. 223-251 
  • ‘Constructing the Prussia-Myth in East Germany, 1945-61’, Journal of Contemporary History 54, 3 (2019), pp. 527-550  
  • ‘Prussian Palimpsests: Historic Architecture and Urban Spaces in East Germany, 1945-1961’, Central European History 50, 2 (2017), pp. 184-217  

 

BOOK CHAPTERS  

  • "Von Honecker zur Hyperrealität. Erinnerung und Bedeutungslosigkeit in Berlin" in Böick, Goschler and Jessen (eds), Jahrbuch Deutsche Einheit (2024), pp. 169-190
  • ‘“A Monument to Friendship”: Socialist Modernity and the Reconstruction of Tashkent, 1966-1975’, in Colla and Betts, Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century, pp. 251-282
  • (With Paul Betts), 'What, Where, and When was Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century?' in Colla and Betts, Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century, pp. 1-20

 

PUBLIC BOOK REVIEWS 

  • Frank Trentmann, ‘Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942–2022’, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (30 April 2024)
  • Tobias Becker, ‘Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia’, Times Literary Supplement (2 February 2024)
  • Joachim C. Häberlen, Beauty is in the Street: Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe’, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (6 December 2023)
  • Robert Gellately, Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (13 April 2021)
  • Brendan Simms, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (11 September 2019)
  • Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The Fourth Reich: The Spectre of Nazism from World War II to the Present, Times Literary Supplement (10 May 2019)

 

ACADEMIC BOOK REVIEWS 

  • Alexey Tikhomirov, The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 1945–1961 (Lanham, 2022), German History 42, 1 (2024), pp. 138-140
  • Enrico Heitzer, Martin Jander, Anetta Kahane and Patrice G. Poutrus (eds), After Auschwitz: The Difficult Legacies of the GDR (New York and Oxford, 2021), Central European History 56, 2 (2023), pp. 353-355
  • Franziska Klemstein, Denkmalpflege zwischen System und Gesellschaft (Bielefeld, 2021), German History 40, 4 (2022) pp. 616-618
  • Florian Urban, Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland: Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity (London, 2021), Journal of Architecture 27, 2-3 (2022), pp. 468-471
  • Clare Copley, Nazi Buildings: Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin (London, 2020), German Politics and Society 40, 1 (2022), pp. 109-112
  • Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, 2020), German History 39, 4 (2021), pp. 651-652
  • Andrew Demshuk, Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Ithaca, 2020), German History 39, 1 (2021), pp. 141-143
  • Edward Saunders, Kaliningrad and Cultural Memory: Cold War and Post-Soviet Representations of a Resettled City (London, 2019), Urban History 47, 4 (2020), pp. 698-699
  • Vladimir Kulic (ed.), Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture and Society under Late Socialism (London, 2019), Journal of Contemporary History 55, 4 (2020), pp. 938-940
  • Roman Krakovsky, State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia: Transforming the Everyday from WWII to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (London, 2018), Cultural and Social History 16, 4 (2019), pp. 535-536
  • Stephan Ehrig, Marcel Thomas and David Zell (eds), The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (London, 2018), German Studies Review 42, 3 (2019), pp. 645-648
  • Albert Earle Gurganus, Kurt Eisner: A Modern Life (Rochester, 2018), German Politics and Society 37, 2 (2019), pp. 132-135
  • Cornelia Wilhelm (ed.), Migration, Memory, and Diversity: Germany from 1945 to the Present (New York and Oxford, 2017), Journal of Contemporary History 54, 1 (2019), pp. 225-227
  • Paul Stangl, Risen from Ruins: The Cultural Politics of Rebuilding East Berlin (Stanford, 2018), Reviews in History (October 2018), https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/2282
  • Andrew Demshuk, Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968 (Oxford, 2017), H-Soz-Kult(May 2018), http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-28852
  • Matthias Grünzig, Für Deutschtum und Vaterland. Die Potsdamer Garnisonkirche im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin 2017), H-Soz-Kult(October 2017); http://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-28064
  • Simon Ward, Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin: Framing the Asynchronous City, 1957-2012 (Amsterdam, 2016), German Politics and Society 35 (2017), pp. 96-99

 

REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTARIES

  • The Claustrophobia of German Politics, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (12 November 2024)
  • The God in the Rubble. Review of Frank Trentmann, Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942–2022, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (30. april 2024)
  • The Powerlessness of the Powerful, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (29 January 2024)
  • Left Behind: Sahra Wagenknecht’s New Populism, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (30 October 2023)
  • Friedrich Merz and the Fall of the “Berlin Firewall”, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (1 August 2023)
  • A New Solidarity? Olaf Scholz on the Future of Europe, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (2 September 2022)
  • Mikhail Gorbachev: The Last Revolutionary, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (31 August 2022)
  • Six Months of War in Ukraine: Europe’s Life and Fate, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (23 August 2022)
  • Turkey plays the Dance of the Go-Betweens in the Ukraine War, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (7 April, 2022)
  • The Revenge of the Scholzomat, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (23 November, 2021)
  • Germany and Europe: “Ampel” Time for Reform, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (8 October 2021)
  • German Elections: Any Colour You Like, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (16 August 2021)
  • Germany’s Ordinary New World, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (5 February 2021)
  • What is History?, contribution to ‘Head to Head’ section, History Today (August 2020)
  • The Vanishing Hegemon, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (20 April 2020)
  • A Thuringian Eruption in Germany, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (11 March 2020)
  • What 1989 Unleashed, and What it Didn't, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (4 November 2019)
  • Germany’s Enigmatic East and the Fate of European Populism, Lowy Institute‘Interpreter’ (3 September 2019)
  • The Burden of Friendship: Germany, Trump and NATO, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (5 July 2019)
  • Condemned to Become: The Future of the Past in Berlin, Royal Historical Society (8 March 2019)
  • A Certain Boredom: Taking Stock of Democracy in 2019, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (4 March 2019)
  • The Merkel Legacy – A Study in Shades, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (2 November 2018)
  • Germany – A Tale of Two Conservatisms, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (2 October 2018)
  • The Ever-Widening Atlantic, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (15 June 2018)
  • The AfD and the Politics of German Identity, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (14 May 2018)
  • Germany gets a Government, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (5 March 2018)
  • The Unending Nightmare for Germany’s SPD, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (30 January 2018)
  • Favourites of 2017: Pankaj Mishra’s “Age of Anger”, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (18 December 2017)
  • Breakdown in Berlin, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (27 November 2017)
  • German Elections: The Collapse of Consensus, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (26 September 2017)
  • Turkey’s EU Accession: A Useful Fiction, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (12 September 2017)
  • The Russian ‘Taboo’ and the German Election, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (22 August 2017)
  • The G20 Hamburg Riots and the German Election, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (17 July 2017)
  • The Merkel-Trump Meeting: NATO, Jobs and Trade, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (20 March 2017)
  • Merkel's Faustian Bargain with Erdogan, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (6 February 2017)
  • Trump: Not the Ideal Poster-boy for Euro-Populists, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (28 November 2016)
  • Trump, Germany and the New European Order, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (15 November 2016)
  • The Future of Angela Merkel's Chancellorship, Lowy Institute ‘Interpreter’ (16 September 2016)