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Christina Wirth, M. Ed.

Affiliated researcher, CRC subproject From "Displaced Persons" to "Refugee"

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Time at IEG: 2021-2025

Personal Details:

Christina Wirth is an affiliated researcher at Leibniz-Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz since July 2025. From 2021–2025 she was an academic staff member at IEG and the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1482 Human Differentiation within the project “From Displaced Persons to Refugee”. She studied history and German philology as well as educational studies at Georg-August-University Goettingen and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Christina was a student assistant for a German medieval dictionary, the Arolsen Archives and the chair of theory and methods of history in Goettingen. In 2021, she received her Master of Education with honors. Her thesis dealt with narratives about national socialist perpetrators. After graduation she worked as an academic staff member for the Federal Archive Sachsen-Anhalt where she created a teaching material on Jewish history of the state. Since 2021 she is writing her dissertation within the CRC 1482 "Human Categorisation" at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Leibniz Institute of European History about “Legal-Bureaucratic Human Categorization in the Postwar Period: From 'Displaced Persons' to 'Refugee'". During the academic year 2023 – 2024 she is the first USC Shoah Foundation’s Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies.

Research Interests:

Jewish History
Holocaust Studies
History of migration
Didactics
Theory and Methods of History

Selected Publications:

Christina Wirth (14 August 2024): Die Befreiung und Kategorisierung jüdischer Frauen in Kaunitz (Westfalen) ab 1945. Ein Fallbeispiel für Differenzierungsprozesse in der Nachkriegszeit. Westfalen/Lippe - historisch. retrieved on 14 August 2024 by https://hiko.hypotheses.org/3987
Christina Wirth: בבית בסקסוניה-אנהאלט. Zu Hause in Sachsen-Anhalt, Jüdinnen und Juden zwischen Verfolgung, Selbstbehauptung und Anerkennung, Heft 7 der Reihe QuellenNAH, Hg. von Landesarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Magdeburg 2022.
Christina Wirth/Riccarda Henkel: Die Familie Elbthal: Akteur:innen der Jüdischen Gemeinde Magdeburg im 19. Jahrhundert, in: Edith Schriefl, Anton Hieke (Hg.) Kleine Hefte zur Landesgeschichte Sachsen-Anhalt, Heft 1: Gute Orte – Jüdische Grabstätten in Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle (Saale) 2022, S. 50-60.
Christina Wirth/Esther Junghans/Corinna Link: „die letzte Lebensspur der verlorenen Liebsten“ – Erinnern an Einzelschicksale der Massenvernichtung, in: Geschichte Lernen, 206, 2022, S. 60 – 64.
Thure Alting/Benny Momper/Christina Wirth: Immanente Kritik als Chance und Voraussetzung historisch-politischer Bildung – Ein Problemaufriss, in: Philipp McLean und Jörg van Norden (Hg.) Geschichte als Kritik, 1. Aufl., Frankfurt a.M. 2025, S. 401-422.

Research projects:

Legal-Bureaucratic Categorization in the Postwar Period. From "Displaced Persons" to "Refugee"

This project reconstructs the significance that legal-bureaucratic practices of categorization had for the production and establishment of global categories of persons, using the history of the "refugee" as an example. Our hypothesis is that between 1944 and 1951, in conjunction with the flexible self-representations of people in transit, international organizations expanded upon, replaced, and ultimately left behind the situational category of "Displaced Person" (DP). The project combines a multi-perspective approach with an analysis of local, international, and state practices of distinguishing between humans beyond the nation state, and thus further develops a socio-cultural approach for researching the historical interplay of mobility and belonging.
Team: Anne Friedrichs (Principal Investigator), Christina Wirth (Research Associate); Jonathan Beil (Student assistant)