Guest Seminar Lecture at the Institute for the Study of Greek-German Relations

On 21 December 2022, historian Dr. Stefan Goebel, from the University of Kent, delivered a seminar lecture under the title ‘War Propaganda and Cultural Memory (and the Cultural Memory of War Propaganda): Germany and the First World War’, at the Institute for the Study of Greek-German Relations, of the department of Political Science and Public Administration (12-2 p.m.).

Dr Goebel is the Director of the Centre for the History of War, Media and Society, at the University of Kent. works in the field of modern British and German cultural and comparative history. Dr Goebel’s research focuses on the experience and memory of the two world wars and on urban history. He is the author of the book The Great War and Medieval Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Stefan Goebel is the co-editor of Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Ashgate/Routledge, 2011) and of the volume Propaganda and Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2019).

In his lecture, Stefan Goebel described forms of ‘propaganda from below’ in World War I Germany and argued that cultural memory was mobilized in war propaganda, while also war propaganda had a decisive role in shaping the memory of the war in the years that followed. Stefan Goebel concluded by suggesting that the interaction between Propaganda Studies and Memory Studies can significantly enrich the research outputs in these fields.

The seminar lecture was organized in the context of the research project “Images of Germany in Greece during the First World War: Public Discourse, Mass Perceptions, and Propaganda, 1914-1918”, which is supervised by Dr. Zinovia Lialiouti, director of the Institute for the Study of Greek-German Relations.

The seminar lecture “Representations of Germany during the Great War: Greek and international Perspectives” was funded by the German Federal Foreign Office through the German-Greek Future Fund.