Siegfried Weichlein

photo

 siegfried.weichlein@unifr.ch
 +41 26 300 7998
 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4005-273X

Professor
Department of Contemporary History

MIS 05 bu. 5111
Av. de l'Europe 20
1700 Fribourg
MIS 05, 5111
Hours of reception
+41 26 300 7998

Research and publications

  • Veröffentlichungen
    144 publications

    Transatlantische "Brokers of Ideas" des kooperativen Föderalismus , in Theorien des Föderalismus. Beiträge zu einer Ideengeschichte
    Siegfried Weichlein (2025) | Book chapter

  • Research projects

    The Global Pontificate of Pius XII Catholicism in a Divided World, 1945-1958: religion and decolonization
    Status: Ongoing

    Start 02.01.2022
    End 02.01.2026
    Funding Europe 

    Hygiene Abroad and at Home: The Basel Mission Doctors and Spaces of Knowledge 1885-1914
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.07.2015
    End 31.03.2019
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    This project uses sources by the Basel Mission doctors on hygiene at home and abroad to analyse how missionary, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge interacted between 1885 and 1914: Why hygiene? Hygiene held a special place in the imagination of Africa and was central to the reordering of religious, scientific and colonial knowledge at home. This project is interested in the networks, which facilitated the circulation and allowed for the transfer of hygienic knowledge in Europe. Firstly, the Protestant missionary movement had a background in European social history. It linked the mission of hygiene that targeted the immoral living conditions of the working class at home to the mission fields abroad. Secondly, hygiene dominated scientific debates about the prevention of tropical diseases and the elevation of health conditions in the colonies. Thirdly, the pursuit of hygiene was one significant way in which civilisation was imagined. The project of ‘civilising’ Africa became a question not only of intellectual or emotional co-option to European ideas and beliefs, but also one of hygiene and practice. The civilised mind was to be acquired through the clean and healthy body. Why the Basel Mission doctors? The focus of the study lies on the six Basel Mission doctors working on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon between 1885 and 1914 and thus contributes to a reorientation of mission history towards wider issues in cultural history. The Basel Mission played a pivotal role in the circulation and transfer of knowledge about the colonial world in Switzerland, a country without formal colonies. The Basel Mission doctors embodied the link between Protestant missionary activities overseas and the consolidation of scientific medicine in Europe. By shaping discourses and practices of hygiene, they were central actors in the missionary, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge. This project starts with the sending of the first Basel Mission doctor to the Gold Coast in 1885 and ends with the retreat of the Basel Mission from West Africa in 1914. The period of research opens up a unique historical configuration, which stimulated the networks, circulation and transfer of hygienic knowledge. The heyday of Protestant medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a distinct scientific discipline during what became known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Why missionary knowledge? Missionary knowledge was a particularly interactive form of knowledge due to its global scope, practical approach and material resources. Firstly, the Basel Mission doctors acquired local knowledge of faraway places, which made them valuable scientific observers. The relatively late institutionalisation of tropical medicine at the turn of the 20th century meant that it had to draw on existent missionary knowledge about the tropics. Secondly, the practical approach of the Basel Mission doctors ensured that missionary knowledge moulded ideas and practices of hygiene beyond the world of the Church or academia. Their accounts on tropical hygiene found wide recognition and formed an important basis for conceptions of cleanliness, purity and civilisation. Thirdly, objects, drawings and photographs held a special place in the Basel Mission serving as both teaching resources and propaganda material. The important body of material the Basel missionaries acquired between West Africa and Europe developed an own agency and inscribed missionary knowledge in multiple spaces of knowledge. What does this project show? In the process of professionalization of tropical medicine in the early 20th century, the Basel Mission doctors gradually lost their scientific credibility. At the same time, however, their knowledge on tropical hygiene captured the attention of colonial authorities and a general public concerned with the settlement of Europeans in the colonies. The project examines basic dimensions of European contemporary history by showing the religious fabric of both the scientific and colonial projects. Simultaneously, the integration of missionaries in the history of knowledge escapes the danger of implying that religion is an ahistorical field, to be characterised without reference to scientific, social and political developments. The altering importance attached to missionary knowledge enables us to see how Christian notions of purity, scientific discourses and colonial conceptions of civilisation interacted to constitute hygienic knowledge at home.

    The Cold War as Political Imagination
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.11.2013
    End 31.10.2017
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    The overall purpose of this project is to study Cold War culture from the perspective of the political imaginary. Conflicts not only use culture, they are themselves culturally constructed, framed and reframed. What are commonly referred to as the “Eastern and the Western blocs” did not just employ cultural means to political ends; they were themselves profoundly shaped by the repertoire of cultural forms which governed the antagonism of the Cold War. This project moves from the idea of a “cultural Cold War” to that of “Cold War culture”, which entails a move from a predominantly instrumental understanding of culture to an active one, focusing on culture as a sphere of production of meaning. Consequently, instead of accepting the Cold War as an explanans – mainly emphasizing the uses of culture through propaganda – this project understands the Cold War as an explanandum, that is, as a process and an object of cultural construction. In this project, Cold War culture is understood through the concept of the “political imaginary”. The political imaginary is a repository of images, metaphors, narratives, notions and ideas that inform and frame our perception and understanding of the political. Exploring the interdependence between forms of cultural expression and the political is an endeavor that has to move beyond the boundaries of established academic disciplines. On the one hand, the project aims at revealing the processes through which existing cultural figures have conditioned the content of political action. At the same time the project traces the redefinition of these figures which was triggered by their shaping of the political conflict. Combining the expertise of historical, literary and media studies, the project analyzes the interweaving threads of meaning production that constituted the political imaginary of the Cold War. “West” and “East” were essentially shortcuts for conflicting cold war modernities, spelled out by the political actors in the United States and the USSR. Methodologically at the core of this project is a change from representation to re-imagination of the Cold War antagonism. Cold War culture not only narrated or visualized political threats but eventually became a platform for criticism and re-imagination of the Cold War itself. Binary concepts of the Cold War, predominant in the 1950s – such as East/West, Good/Evil or Modern/Traditional – were replaced during what is referred to as the “long 1960s” by more hybrid and ambiguous imaginaries. These were characterized by self reflexivity and feedback mechanisms, effectively underpinning a reciprocal model of communication in Cold War culture. The guiding hypothesis of this project is that, in this crucial period, cultural constructions of an external threat were gradually translocated into a threat within society: “we vs. them” was culturally transformed into “we vs. us”. Accordingly, the long 1960s presented a number of new and different Cold War cultures. Cultural analysis of the political imaginaries of these cultures reveals that the 1960s constitute a major paradigm shift, since binary imaginations, once deconstructed, could not then be reemployed when politics decided to do so, in what is sometimes called the “second Cold War” after 1979. Carrying out cultural analysis of the Cold War entails tracing these processes of growing reflexivity, feedback mechanisms, ambiguity and internalization throughout Cold War cultures: in the patterns and plots of popular culture, and also in the cultural coding of diplomacy. The project enables junior scholars to develop an interdisciplinary perspective which corresponds to the contemporary standards of the international community of scholars.

    Politische Ikonographie des Föderalismus in der Schweiz und in Deutschland
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.06.2012
    End 30.09.2016
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    Political iconography of federalism in Switzerland and Germany

    Transnationale Geschichte des Föderalismus im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Transfers und Verflechtungen
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.04.2012
    End 30.09.2013
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet

    Workshop 'Transnationale Geschichte des Föderalismus im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Transfers und Verflechtungen'
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.09.2010
    End 30.09.2010
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    Workshop 'Transnational History of Federalism in the Long Nineteeth Century: Transfers and Networks'

    Transnationale Geschichte des Föderalismus im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Transfers und Verflechtungen
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.04.2010
    End 31.03.2012
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet
    Der Föderalismus hat eine transnationale Geschichte. Dieses Projekt will eine neue methodische Sicht auf den Föderalismus entwickeln, indem es den Raum der Nationalgeschichte verlässt. Die Texte des Bundesstaatsdiskurses der USA, die Federalist Papers, die Anti-federalists und die Theorie der “state rights” von John Calhoun wurden über die Schweiz und Deutschland hinaus gelesen und rezipiert. Rezipiert wurde aber auch die soziale Föderalismus-Konzeption Pierre-Joseph Proudhons. Der Diskurs um den Föderalismus war ein wesentlicher Teil der Selbstkonstituierung von zerklüfteten Gesellschaften zu Nationalgesellschaften. Ob Bayern zur deutschen Gesellschaft zählte oder Katalonien zur spanischen, wurde auch dadurch entschieden, ob und wie regionale, ethnische oder religiöse Konflikte bundesstaatlich beantwortet wurden. Transnational war der Föderalismus auch, weil er das staatliche Organisationsdenken transzendierte und Ordnungen favorisierte, die nicht an Staatengrenzen gebunden waren. Dieses Projekt wählt als Untersuchungsraum den Föderalismus in der Schweiz, Deutschland, Italien und in Spanien aus. Seitenblicke auf die Entwicklungen in anderen Staaten sind dabei nötig. Die transnationale Geschichte des Föderalismus wird mit der Methode der Transferanalyse untersucht. Um den Transfer von Bundesstaatsmodellen von einer Gesellschaft in eine andere erklären zu können, wird er mit dem für den Kulturtransfer erprobten Dreischritt von Selektion, Vermittlung und Rezeption analysiert. Der Kulturtransfer wurde bisher vor allem in Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften angewandt. Dieses Projekt überträgt die Methode des Kulturtransfers in die Erforschung des Föderalismus. Wir erwarten davon sowohl inhaltliche als auch methodische Erkenntnisgewinne bezüglich der Übertragung des Kulturtransfers in ein modernes Verständnis von Politikgeschichte. Dieses Projekt untersucht den transnationalen Föderalismus in zwei Subprojekten: Subprojekt A: Der Transfer des nordamerikanischen Föderalismusmodells in der Schweiz und in Deutschland Dieses Subprojekt untersucht den Transfer des nordamerikanischen Bundesstaatsmodells (Federalist papers, Antifederalists, „State rights“ von John Calhoun) zwischen den USA, Deutschland und der Schweiz. Subprojekt B: Der Transfer des sozialen Föderalismus Pierre-Joseph Proudhons in Spanien und Italien Dieses Subprojekt untersucht den Transfer des sozialen Föderalismus Pierre-Joseph Proudhons im spanischen Republikanismus und Anarchismus sowie im italienischen Anarchismus. Die Netzwerkbildung im anarchistischen Föderalismus wird schwerpunktmässig anhand der Westschweiz untersucht. Geplant ist eine Ausweitung des Gesamtprojekts um ein weiteres Teilprojekt zur politischen Ikonographie und den Geschichtsbildern des transnationalen Föderalismus.

    Politics of Europe in Poland 1976-1989. The case study of Polish opposition
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.11.2009
    End 31.10.2010
    Funding SCIEX  Open project sheet
    "Poles have always believed that they were culturally and geographically a part of the European civilization" said Krzysztof Skubiszewski, Polish foreign minister in 1991. Is this sentence also true if we apply it to the times when Western Europe left the Polish nation in the fight against the communist power? Why was the subject of Europe important to the anti communist opposition? Which political objectives did opposition groups intend to attain through using the concept of Europe? Which political benefits did they actually manage to gain through using this concept? This research covers the time period from 1976 to 1989. Four groups of subjects are put under examination. These are: the Social Self Defense Committee KOR, the Solidarity movement, the Polish Catholic Church, and other opposition organizations that ran their own politics of Europe. The project elaborates on the uses of the concept of Europe, as well as, the uses of the political term Europe. It examines what Europe stood for in the researched time period. Did the Polish opposition see Western Europe through the prism of beliefs such as freedom, or was it rather perceived as a group of immoral societies who could not be relied on? The study also analyzes how the Catholic Church influenced the shaping of ideas concerning Europe in the opposition circles. Moreover, it elaborates on the networks which particular opposition leaders established with the Western European actors. What were the purposes of these networks? How did these foreign politics impact the political situation in Poland? Theresearch is mostly based on the sources which can be found in the Solidarity`s Archive in Gdansk, the Opposition Archives of the Karta Center in Warsaw, Archive of the Metropolitan Curia in Cracow and National Archives in Gdansk, Warsaw and Cracow.

    Institutionalisation of scientific networks and scholarly activities for the promotion of cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary approaches on nationalism in the Europe of small nations
    Status: Completed

    Start 01.10.2005
    End 30.06.2009
    Funding SNSF  Open project sheet

Teaching and courses

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