Hendrik Althoff M.A.

Affiliated scholar

hendrik.althoff[at]igdj-hh.de

About

Hendrik Althoff is an associate researcher at the IGdJ and a research assistant in the Department of History at the University of Hamburg. He studied history and African studies in Hamburg and Zurich. In his Master’s thesis, he researched the history of the administrative building of the Hamburg Jewish Community at Rothenbaumchaussee 38 between 1916 and 1960. He subsequently worked as a research assistant in the Department of History at the University of Hamburg, where he supported the LFF research group ‘Gewalt-Zeiten – Temporalitäten von Gewaltunternehmungen’. From 2019 to 2022, he coordinated the eyewitness interview project ‘Erinnerungswerk Hamburger Feuersturm’. At the IGdJ in 2022, he worked on the provenance research project ‘LIFTProv – Der Umgang mit Übersiedlungsgut jüdischer Emigranten in Hamburg nach 1939’ in collaboration with the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven. Hendrik Althoff has also worked as an expert and consultant for, amongst others, the Hamburg Science Authority and the Museum of Hamburg History. He is an editor of the Stormarn Lexikon Online and is active in the Tempel Poolstraße initiative.

Activity profile

Hendrik Althoff is undertaking his doctoral research under the supervision of Birthe Kundrus at the Department of History, University of Hamburg, as part of the DFG-funded project ‘Surviving Sites? Landed Property of Jewish Communities between Robbery and Restitution (1930–1960)’. The project examines the expropriation and restitution of selected plots of land formerly owned by Hamburg’s Jewish communities as comprehensive processes of transformation. In addition to the change in ownership, the research also examines changes in the architectural form, use and significance of the sites under investigation. A key focus is the question of the extent to which the Jewish community in Hamburg, after 1945, succeeded – both in theory and in practice – in linking up with the tradition of the pre-war communities in its handling of certain ‘surviving places’, thereby consolidating its provisional existence.