Forschungsprojekt ::

Colonia Dignidad – a German-Chilean History from the Perspective of Science, Legal Processing and Public Staging

Projektbeschreibung

The Center for Latin American Studies (ZILAS) - in cooperation with the Elisabeth Käsemann Foundation - is working on "Colonia Dignidad" since 2019. The project’s focus is to draw attention to this hitherto academically rather neglected chapter in the history of German-Chilean relations in the 20th century. The aim is to reconstruct a more comprehensive, multifaceted picture of this "state within a state" by critically assessing and reflecting the source- and literature-based state of the art and by taking into account latest new evidence e.g. from archives or online data bases made available only recently. First, in 2019 and 2020, important primary sources in German and Chilean archives were indexed and analyzed. An international conference originally planned for 2020 had to be postponed to 2022 due to the pandemic and will take place in June 2022. The project's results and outcomes will be published later in the form of Conference Proceedings as a collective volume publication. Eventually, the conference seeks to promote further scholarly exchange that goes beyond the international event in June 2022 and to foster an ongoing dialogue between several different national and global research approaches and perspectives.