Nicole Götzelmann

Nicole Götzelmann studied History, Sociology, and Political Science in Dresden (2017–2021) and Munich (2021–2024). As a researcher (praedoc) at the Department for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, she is doing her PhD on the West German delegation to the VI World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957. Following the ‘micro-spatial’ perspectives of the participants on their journeys from ‘West’ to ‘East’ and back, she aims to uncover the (auto-)biographical impacts of the Cold War.
Her interest in the History of the Everyday and Historical Anthropology formed while doing her Master’s thesis on the West German journalist Eric A. Peschler, whose life narrative was heavily influenced by his involuntary involvement in the political and cultural implications of the Cold War. Nicole’s research is driven by the conviction that focusing on individual ‘Lebenswelten’ can expose the manners and consequences of the Cold War (and other globally impactful historical phenomena) that would remain hidden if its analysis was only confined to a structural macro level.
During her studies, she worked as an archival assistant at the Munich literary archive ‘Monacensia’. She gathered experiences in the fields of scientific and scholarly publishing and science communication as an intern at marketing agencies, publishing houses, and research institutes such as the German Historical Institute in Paris.

Research Interests: Entangled History of the East-West conflict, Biographical Research (in particular west-eastern life paths, Cultural- and Social History of the Cold War, Central- and Eastern European, and Soviet History (20^th century), Historical Anthropology, History of Archives

Current Research Project: ‘Kalte Krieger wider Willen? Die westdeutsche Delegation bei den VI. Weltfestspielen der Jugend und Studenten 1957 in Moskau’

In the summer of 1957, over a thousand West Germans traveled to Moscow to represent their home countries in the Soviet capital at the VI World Festival of Youth and Students. Only five years after Stalin’s death, the Iron Curtain seemed to have become permeable for travelers from the West.
The project is dedicated to these life paths to understand what (auto-)biographical traces the Cold War left behind and explore the spatial concepts of the travelers to Moscow against the backdrop of the conflict. The thematic focus on the festival, based on the cross-border mobility of the participants, understood in the geographical sense and as a breaking of taboos, offers the opportunity to trace spatial connections in a divided Europe and its impact on the participants’ ‘Lebenswelten’. The investigation period begins with the end of the Second World War and ends with the death and autobiographical retrospectives of the Moscow travelers. A collective biography is envisaged as the product of the source work, in which the history of the West German delegation to the festival and the Cold War unfolds. This approach makes it possible to question the periodization of the conflict based on the different biographies. Furthermore, examining individual persons' lives suggests a better understanding of the potential for conflict in interpersonal, everyday relationships and encounters in the context of the Cold War.
The spaces ‘East’ and ‘West’ played a prominent role in the decades following 1945 and have already been well-researched in the Cold War Studies regarding political, military, and ideological history. For the first time, the biographies of the festival participants will be the focus of a study to open up previously unknown perspectives on as well as subject-historical consequences of the Cold War: In which spatial context did the participants conceptualize the Cold War, and how did they, themselves, mold and configure the East-West-conflict?