The Afterlives of Church Bells in Postwar Germany

Between 1941 and 1943, the National Socialist government seized approximately 170,000 bells from across the German Empire to fuel the German war machine. This new research project focuses on the consequences of these events for Germans' understanding of the place of the church and spiritual life in postwar society, and the place of bells in constructing a postwar memory culture both of the immediate Nazi past, and of a deeper history of German craftsmanship and everyday life.

Biography

Alice Goff is Assistant Professor of German History and the College. Her research and writing focus on cultural and intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Goff recieved her PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2015. From 2015 to 2017 she was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows in the departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Before beginning graduate work in history, Goff completed a master's degree in archives and records management and a certificate in museum studies, and she maintains an active interest in contemporary archival and curatorial practice.