Academic Career
Josefine Honke has been a doctoral candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of Excellence in Konstanz since November of 2018 and has received PhD funding from the German Academic Scholarship Association (Studienstiftung) since June of 2020. In her dissertation project, she researches German victim narratives about the National Socialist era in contemporary video testimonies on YouTube, which she understands as media of municipal memory. For this project, she is advised by Associate Professor Dr. Anne-Berenike Rothstein and Prof. Dr. Isabel Otto.
She holds a double bachelor’s degree from the Bauhaus University in Weimar and the Université Lumière Lyon II (France) as well as a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Konstanz, during which she completed a semester abroad at the University of California-Berkeley.
Additionally, she worked as an academic staff member under the chair of Romance Literatures at the University of Konstanz and contributed towards the conception and realization of the web portal MEMOZE (www.memoze-portal.de), which offers, notably, 360° videos of the exterior of the Dachau concentration camp.
Contact: josefine.honke@uni.konstanz.de
Interests
- (Digital) Memory Studies
- Witnessing, oral history, and public history
- The uncanny in film representations of humanoid robots
Dissertation Project
The dissertation project “Film Where You Stand”: German Victim Narratives about the National Socialist Era in Contemporary Video Testimonies with a Municipal Focus on YouTube (working title) examines YouTube videos as contemporary media of memory and especially of municipal memories. In these videos, concepts of memory media, witnessing, victim narratives, and municipal memory are mobilized.
Josefine Honke’s project works out the cinematic-aesthetic and narratological construction of Germans as victims in YouTube videos. At the center of this project is the medial figure of the eyewitness (German: Zeitzeuge), who she sets in close context with the survivors of National Socialist persecution and extermination, the so-called “moral witnesses” (Margalit 2002, Assmann 2007). Additionally, the project draws on various narrative forms of German family memory (Welzer et al. 1997). Furthermore, in the video analyses, the project draws out the local placement in the sense of a “municipal memories” (German: “Das kommunale Gedächtnis”, Thießen 2009) by way of different cinematic means of representation, by which private and public memories can be brought together. In this sense, Josefine Honke’s dissertation represents a synthesis of private and public remembering on the Internet and, thus, of local and global memory communities. This project aims to identify the opportunities as well as the threats for non-institutionalized online memory cultures.
Courses and Talks
November 2020: Talk “The Ambivalence of ‘Glocal’ Memories Online: Holocaust Survivors as Archetypes for the Depiction of ‚German Victims’ in YouTube Videos” at the international online conference for the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS): “Genealogies of Memory 2020. The Holocaust between Global and Local Perspectives.” Live recording of conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw6x2BTs5hY.
October 2020: Talk “The Second World War on YouTube: New Media of Memory with Old Staging Devices” at the Media History Forum hosted by the Studienkreis Rundfunk und Geschichte e.V. (Academic Circle for Radio and History), the Division for Communication History of the German Communication Association (DGPuK), and the Early Career Scholars Forum for Communication History of the Division for Communication History of the German Communication Association (DGPuK), with support from the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies, 6-7 November, 2020. Took place online.
March 2020: Talk “’German Victims’ Online: YouTube Videos of Allied Air Raids on German Cities” at the conference “The Stage of War (2020): Academic and Popular Representations of Large-Scale Conflicts” at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (conference was canceled due to Covid-19 pandemic).
January 2020: Talk “99 Düsenflieger: Memories of Bomb Attacks on German Cities in Contemporary YouTube videos” at the Symposium “99 Luftballons – Air Force and Youth in Germany” hosted by the Bundeswehr Military History Museum – Berlin-Gatow Airfield for the special exhibition 2022/2023.
September 2019: Talk “’Film Where You Stand’: German Victim Narratives about the National Socialist Era in Contemporary Eyewitness Videos with a Communal Focus on YouTube” at the WIKA-Colloquium hosted for the Institute for Foreign Relations in Stuttgart.
May/June 2019: Tutor at the National University of St. Petersburg in context of the German Studies Institutes Partnership with the University of Konstanz, supported with funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Winter Semester 2018/2019: Tutor for lecture “Cultural Theory,” taught by Prof. Albrecht Koschorke, department of Literature, University of Konstanz.