historian
born 1969, Germany
Habbo Knoch studied history, philosophy, political science and sociology in Göttingen, Bielefeld, Jerusalem and Oxford. From 2008 to 2014 he was managing director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation and headed the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. Since 2014 he has been teaching modern and contemporary history at the Historical Institute of the University of Cologne. His research and interests focus on German and European social and political history of the 20th century, the cultural and experiential history of modernity since 1880 and the transnational history of political orders and social systems in the 20th century.
„Blacklight makes it clear how an unstable world order has been characterized by closely intertwined violence for more than three decades, despite all international pacification. Wars between states, civil wars, terrorist violence, the suppression of regime opponents […] have buried the vision of a peaceful world after the end of the Cold War.“