Biographies do not simply depict a person’s life chronologically. Rather, they emerge as a construction of various actors: the person being biographed, the biographer, companions, the anticipated readers and the estate itself jointly negotiate what will be read in a biography. Biographies are only recognized as biographies if they meet certain genre expectations and adhere to the “biographical pact".

„Jud Süß“ (1940) is probably the most antisemitic feature film ever made. It was shown to SS guards in concentration camps and to Wehrmacht units during the Second World War to stoke up anti-Jewish feeling. But it not only played a part in the Holocaust. Banned in Germany after the war, it began a new life in the Middle East as anti-Israeli propaganda. It still circulates among far-right groups in Europe today. Bill Niven’s article focuses on the postwar history of this notorious film.

Maria Grollmuß (1896–1944) can be characterised as a well-known unknown. Posthumously, she achieved a mainly regional opularity. Without knowing much about her, her biography offered points of reference for the commemorative needs of various social groups in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR. The article contrasts Grollmuß’ life with her appropriation as a Sorbian patriot, Christian martyr and anti-fascist resistance fighter.

In societies under communist rule, it was not the individual who was in the foreground, but the party. In the German case, even biographies of Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker have to struggle with the problem that the life description threatens to become a biographically tinted institutional history, because the biographer does not have access to personal sources. The article discusses analytical approaches that avoid this dilemma. In order to explore Honecker’s political role and selfunderstanding as SED leader and head of state of the GDR, it asks in particular about the biographical baggage that accompanied Erich Honecker on his political path from 1945 to 1989.

The confrontation of governments with the risk of deadly epidemics is an essential part of the history of statehood. But since the emergence of “bio-politics” and “governmentality”, it has been accompanied by a fundamental contradiction: the freedom of the individual versus the well-being of society as a whole. This article examines the period between two influential outbreaks of infectious disease – the cholera of the 1830s and the Spanish flu of 1918 – to analyze the parallel development of the progress of democratization, mass politics, and the struggle against infectious bacteria and viruses.

The history of the coronavirus pandemic in Germany is also a history of protest. The debates about how to deal with Covid-19 in a purposeful way, about the necessary trade-offs between freedom negations and freedom rights in the face of an unprecedented challenge to society, have shaped the political climate like hardly any crisis situation before. Right-wing populist and right-wing extremist parties have attempted to instrumentalize this fragile discourse and harness it for their own agitation. Using Saxony as a case study, this article analyses the positioning of three parties from this spectrum within the coronavirus protest landscape, discusses their mobilization efforts and works out why they were able to benefit from the crisis to varying degrees.