Transnational Connections between Germany and Afghanistan, 1919-1950
A presentation by Marjan Wardaki
Thursday, December 3, 201511:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Germany’s interaction with Afghanistan has been presented as a diplomatic history between two states. Certainly, the period of 1919-1950 is a period of heightened German-Afghan diplomatic connections, and my prospectus proposal makes extensive use of the familiar diplomatic and political correspondence, but places the role of two parallel expatriate communities, the Afghan students to Germany and the German educators and technicians to the “German colony” in Kabul at the center. The aim of this focus is trace the activities of these travelers at various institutions in Afghanistan and Germany. To that end, my research will look at commercial treaties and activities, educational material, Persian and diasporic journals and family memoirs. Focusing on institutions and networks, rather than solely on international diplomacy, I argue builds a foundation upon which we begin to reconstruct transnational relationships, practices and ideologies that everyday German and Afghan travelers carried with them as they moved between Afghanistan and Germany. The method I seek to employ in my research points towards the interplay between global and microhistorical study.
The first section of the paper is an overview of relevant historiographies. This is followed by a second section, in which I discuss my sources, method and eventual chapters.