Event series Lecture: Japan and the End of the War in Asia
Press Release No. 53/2025
22 May 2025
Ruperto Carola Lecture Series continues with Takuma Melber speaking on the end of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific
While the Second World War ended in Europe on 8 May 1945, the fighting continued in Asia and the Pacific until September. Under the heading “Bearing the Unbearable”, Dr Takuma Melber, historian and Asia scholar at Heidelberg University, will talk about “Japan and the End of the War in Asia in 1945”. His contribution is part of the Ruperto Carola Lecture Series “1945: Epochal Threshold and Experiential Space”, with which the university wants to remember that historical turning point 80 years ago. The event with Dr Melber will take place on Monday, 26 May 2025, this time in the Great Hall of the New University, starting at 6.15pm.
In the final year of World War II, the troops of the Tennō – the emperor of Japan – mounted a fierce battle and exacted a terrible toll from the US units in combat on the Mariana Islands, in the Philippines, and on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Although the Americans were coming closer and closer to the Japanese mainland, the empire did not yet seem ready to capitulate in May 1945. How was Japan to be persuaded to surrender? In his lecture, the speaker will deal with the end of the war in Asia and the Pacific, referring also to events going beyond the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Takuma Melber is a research assistant at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies of Heidelberg University where he is, inter alia, working on aspects of colonialism and imperialism in Asia, the history of Japanese occupation and, in particular, the world wars in Asia and the Pacific.
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 five remaining lectures in the series will take place every Monday 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.