Lecture Series Lecture: 1945 – A Zero Hour?
Press Release No. 62/2025
12 June 2025
In the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series Martin Sabrow will speak on the formation of contemporary and historical judgments with regard to 8 May
Contemporary and historical judgments of 8 May and the question “1945: A Zero Hour?” are topics to be addressed by Prof. Dr Martin Sabrow, a researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam. His presentation is part of the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series “1945: Epoch Threshold and Experiential Space”, with which Heidelberg University wants to remember the end of the war in Europe 80 years ago. The event will take place on Monday 16 June 2025 in the Great Hall of the Old University, beginning at 6.15 p.m.
For the vast majority of contemporaries, the speaker claims, the end of the Second World War meant a “zero hour”: total defeat, the dissolution of all order and the extinction of the German state. However, with a gradual memory change in federal German commemorative culture, 8 May 1945 was increasingly understood less as capitulation and more as liberation. Talking about “zero hour” gradually became less convincing and, Prof. Sabrow underlines, anyone doing so was suspected of repressing the past. In his lecture, the scholar will trace this change in contemporary and historical judgment with respect to 8 May. Martin Sabrow is a Senior Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and spokesperson of the Leibniz Research Alliance “Value of the Past”. His main research interests are in the political-cultural history of the 20th century, dictatorship research and the history of historiography and remembrance culture.
The Ruperto Carola Lecture Series is part of an approach to focal themes. With it, Heidelberg University seeks to take socially relevant research questions to a broad public twice a year in differing formats. Under the heading “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space” the present series on the focal theme BACK & FORTH opens up two complementary perspectives – “a retrospective interpretation, which situates the Second World War in the fractures and continuities of 20th century history, and a reconstruction of direct human experience and suffering,” explains historian Prof. Dr Manfred Berg, who designed the current lecture series.
The lecture “1945: A Zero Hour?” will be followed by three more events in the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series, which will take place on Mondays in the Great Hall of the Old University; they begin at 6.15 pm. Recordings will subsequently be accessible on heiONLINE, the central portal of Heidelberg University with lectures, panels and events in digital formats.