A Museum Without Walls: Virtual Migration Museum

How does moving to another country change you? The digital German Migration Museum (DMM) offers a platform for migrants to reflect on this question, using video interviews to explore the diverse and complex ways in which migrants share in their new society. Suely Torres, who studied at Freie Universität Berlin, had the idea of setting up an online museum long before the coronavirus pandemic made virtual formats commonplace. Now, together with three students from the Institute for Latin American Studies (LAI) at Freie Universität Berlin, she has turned her idea into a reality. The museum went online in December 2020. Up to now, the team members have financed the project out of their own pockets, but they are currently fundraising for additional support. In the long term, they hope that the digital museum will become an online, multimedia database of the history of migration – a repository for sound recordings, podcasts, photographs, and written texts as well as videos.

In mid-June, poet Ann Cotten gave the fifth “Siegfried Unseld Lecture” at Freie Universität. The title: “No answer possible. Let’s practice that again?!” Due to the pandemic, the event took place online this year and included a subsequent live-streamed conversation between Cotten and literary scholar Wolfgang Hottner from Freie Universität. Cotton has won numerous awards, including the Klopstock Prize and the Hugo Ball Prize. Her most recent publication, the translation of the novel Pippins Tochters Taschentuch (Pippin’s Daughter’s Handkerchief) by Rosmarie Waldrop, was nominated for the 2021 Leipzig Book Fair Prize. The Siegfried Unseld Lecture, organized by the Dahlem Humanities Center and Suhrkamp Verlag, takes place every two years at Freie Universität. The lecture presents international writers and is primarily dedicated to exploring the relationship between literature and society. Polish writer Joanna Bator and writer Andreas Maier gave lectures in 2016 and 2018 respectively.

In mid-June, the Governing Mayor of Berlin and Senator for Science, Michael Müller, gave the starting signal for targeted vaccinations for students at Berlin’s universities and research institutes: “It is very important to me to offer students additional vaccination options and to support the work of the medical services at our universities,” he said during his visit. Berlin is the first German state to provide students with additional vaccination options. studierendenWERK BERLIN will also be involved in the campaign to specifically offer vaccinations to those living in student accommodation, many of whom are new to Berlin. All employees of Freie Universität have now been offered vaccinations.