Drawing on Straschek’s unique collection of over 4.000 individual files, the project connects analogue archival data with open digital sources like IMDb, GND, and Wikidata, highlighting both the potential and challenges of combining heterogeneous data. The talk situates this work within the history of film exile research – from early studies by Straschek, Horak, and Loewy to more recent digital approaches – and discusses the epistemological implications of representing incomplete and uncertain historical data.
By visualising personal networks, migration routes, and film collaborations, the platform tells the scope and impact of film exile. It makes visible not only the loss and dispersion caused by persecution but also the transnational creativity and resilience of displaced film communities.
Dr. Imme Klages is a postdoctoral researcher and co-project leader of the DFG project Mapping German Film Exile at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her research focuses on the film exile of German-speaking filmmakers (1930–1950), remigration after 1945, and postwar German cinema. Other areas of focus include digital film historiography, cultural transfers, and transnational production networks. She has published on working with digital archives, for example in Doing Digital Film History (2025), and is co-editing the anthology Revisiting German-Speaking Film Exile. A Transnational Perspective (meson press, 2025). She is co-founder of the CIERA network Cinéma et ‘rémigration’ vers l'Allemagne et l'Europe après 1945 (2023–2025) and a member of the Society for Exile Research and the AFRHC.
Reclaiming Transnationalism: A Seminar Series on Cross-Border Solidarities, Conflicts, and Cultural Imaginaries
An online seminar series, focused on East/Central Europe within the international and transnational academic and cultural context.
In an age when walls are being rebuilt – physically, politically, and epistemically – transnationalism is no longer just a buzzword. It has re-emerged as one of the most pressing cultural and intellectual questions of our time. Brexit, Trump’s return, and the steady rise of nationalist and illiberal movements across Europe and beyond have shaken the very idea of cross-border solidarities. Yet these new nationalisms are themselves transnational phenomena: they feed on circulating narratives, shared symbols, and contagious affects that move across borders and media.
Our seminar series, Reclaiming Transnationalism, revisits the concept as both an analytical framework and a socio-cultural phenomenon. Rather than seeking a comprehensive account of neo-nationalisms, we focus on concrete lines of inquiry: transnational comparisons, cultural and literary production across genres and media, and the symbolic geographies of contested borderlands such as the Donbas or Upper Silesia. We explore how transnationalism emerges in video games, literature, film studies,memory practices, and intellectual life – as method, as critique, and as lived cultural reality.
By centering East-Central and Eastern Europe, we test the promise and limits of transnationalism in regions marked by shifting borders, imperial legacies, migration, and conflict. Together, our speakers will ask: not only what transnationalism is, but what it does.
Zoom link for the seminars (valid for all sessions): LINK
- 27 Nov — Imme Klages (Mainz): Transnational Film History: The Digital Platform Filmexil.de and the Günter Peter Straschek Archive
- 11 Dec — Víctor Navarro-Remesal (Mataró): Regionality, History, and Game Studies
- 15 Jan — Gisèle Sapiro (Paris): What Does Transnationalism Mean? Some Reflections through the Sociology of Intellectuals and of Culture
- 22 Jan — Jasmina Lukić (Vienna): Transnational Turn in Literary Studies
- 29 Jan — Eneken Laanes (Tallinn): Memory and Environment
This seminar series is jointly organised by Natalya Bekhta (Tampere), Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław), Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle), Denys Shatalov (Kryvyi Rih/Berlin) and Oleksandr Zabirko (Regensburg) within the framework of the research network “Young Network TransEurope ” based at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Contact: Natalya Bekhta