Nicole Götzelmann
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, Austrian and Swiss 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 (auto-)biographical and alltagsgeschichtliche 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 historical actors 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 (20th century), Historical Anthropology.
Current Research Project: ‘Für Frieden und Freundschaft im Feindesland. Westdeutsche, österreichische und schweizerische Teilnehmer:innen bei den VI. Weltfestspielen der Jugend und Stu-denten 1957 in Moskau’.
In the summer of 1957, over two thousand West Germans, Austrians and Swiss travelled 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 young travellers from the West. The project is dedicated to these life paths to understand what (auto-)biographical traces the Cold War left behind and to explore the participants’ experiences and conceptu-alizations of the Cold War in their everyday lives and networks. The investigation period begins with the start of the planning and the preparations for the VI World Festival in 1955 and ends with the autobiographical retrospectives of the Moscow travellers. A network history of the involved organizations, delegation members, state and media actors and positions, interwoven with individual participants’ biog-raphies, is envisaged as the product of the source work. This approach makes it possible to question systemic definitions and periodizations of the Cold War based on the different experiences, evaluations and consequences of the participation. 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. For the first time, the biographies of the West German, Austrian and Swiss festival participants will be the focus of a study to open up previ-ously unknown perspectives on as well as subject-historical consequences of the Cold War: How did the participants modify and reproduce the conflict?