Sophia Merkel/KIT

Collecting, preserving, researching and exhibiting at the German Textile Museum in Krefeld was the topic of the research colloquium on January 19. Dr. Annette Schieck presented the variety of tasks involved in restoration and conservation and highlighted the challenges of preserving 30,000 objects from all over the world and their different compositions in a museum. The library is one of the largest reference libraries on textiles in Germany.

At the research colloquium on January 13, Erika Érsek, research associate at the Reutlingen Historical Museums, spoke about digital strategies for communicating industrial history. Among other things, she highlighted the work of the Reutlingen Industrial Museum, in which, in addition to the on-site exhibition of machines from Reutlingen's significant textile and mechanical engineering history, the operation of steam engines, looms and knitting machines is kept alive virtually and the work of the experts is preserved for posterity in videos and interviews.

ZDF

The car as an extended living room - a seatbelt might just get in the way... Who does not remember one's own experiences with the "inertial force" when braking the car - without a seatbelt? Seat belts have been compulsory for 50 years now. In an interview on ZDF's "hallo deutschland" program on January 5, Silke Zimmer-Merkle puts the state's life-saving intervention in the privacy of German drivers in the context of technological history.

Martin Ullmann/KIT

Anna Onufriienko (Karlsruhe) spoke at the research colloquium on December 2 on the topic of Prof. Dr. Rudolf Plank's Soviet Journeys: Refrigeration Technologies in the Context of the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine. Plank was Professor of Thermodynamics and Refrigeration Technology at the Technical University of Karlsruhe (later Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) from 1925-1954.

V&R

Dr. Anne Sudrow (Berlin) was a guest at the History Department's research colloquium on November 25. In her lecture, she discussed the research and production of herbal medicines carried out under inhumane conditions in the so-called "herb garden" of the Dachau concentration camp by the SS company "Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Ernährung und Verpflegung".