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 David Motadel
David Motadel is a graduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge, working towards a PhD in history. He studied history and economics in Freiburg and Basel, before completing his MPhil in Historical Studies at Cambridge in 2006. He is currently a research visiting fellow at the history department at Harvard and holds a doctoral fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington. His studies were supported by the German National Merit Foundation, before becoming a Cambridge Gates Scholar in 2006. His PhD project is also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Apart from his studies, David works regularly as an advisor for Middle Eastern affairs and as a freelance writer for Der Spiegel.
David’s current PhD research concerns the Muslim community in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Muslim life in Europe is not a recent phenomenon, resulting from the post-colonial and worker migration of the 1950s and 1960s, but has been an integral part of Modern Western European history, although mostly to a lesser extent than today. In most Western European metropolises, Muslim life flourished and was institutionalised during the interwar period. In France, the Grande Mosquée de Paris was inaugurated in July 1926 and in 1928 London’s first major Mosque was founded. In the same year the first Mosque, built between 1924 and 1928, opened in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. Muslim communities in Europe organised themselves in many ways and set up institutions in the public sphere, varying from mosques and halâl butchers to schools, publications and cemeteries. The central focus of David’s inquiry will be the development of relations (interactions and perceptions) between the representatives and institutions of the German states and societies and those of the Muslim minority. Emphasis will rest on the creation (or invention), institutionalisation and acculturation (or cultural hybridisation) of the Muslim community in Germany in the 1920s, as well as ways of survival, collaboration after 1933 and instrumentalisation after 1941.
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