Alexandria N. Ruble is an assistant professor of European history at the University of Idaho. She earned her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017. Her first book, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany, was published by University of Toronto Press in 2023. Her work has been supported by the American Association of University Women, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fulbright US Student Program, and the German Academic Exchange Service, among others.
Her project at KWI is titled Perpetual Prisoners: The Politics and Memory of Persecution in Post-Fascist Germany. This project explores how former political prisoners, specifically the victims of National Socialism, were reintegrated into and remembered in the three post-war German states (West Germany, East Germany, and reunified Germany) between 1945 and 2010. It argues that former political prisoners faced difficult reintegration processes because of the changing political and social atmospheres in a divided Germany during the Cold War. Even after the Cold War ended, former political detainees struggled to carve out space in the memory landscape of post-reunified Germany. The contested history of National Socialism’s political prisoners reflects Germany’s ongoing difficulties with coming to terms with its past and the horrors of the Holocaust.