“Hi, my name is Stewart Anderson. I study modern German history. My current research project examines religious minority groups in West Germany between 1945 and 1980. Specifically, I’m interested in how the major churches in Germany (Catholic and Protestant) included some previously marginalized faiths in the nation’s reformulated religious landscape, for example Baptists, Methodists, Jews, and Muslims, and excluded others, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Latter-Day Saints. Between June and December 2023, I visited more than 20 archives, scattered across Germany.
I found myself reading documents in all sorts of unexpected spaces, for example in a converted monastery, at a retired archivist’s kitchen table, and in a town so remote the local taxi driver didn’t know where it was. I witnessed train workers’ strikes, endured a downpour with a broken umbrella, and spent weeks wondering how I would get any work done when my hearing aids stopped working. Most of all, I enjoyed precious, irreplaceable time with my family in one of the most beautiful countries in the world.”
