Mr. Ludwig Decke

Professional Background

Ludwig Decke is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also the George L. Mosse European Cultural History Fellow. Mr. Decke earned his master’s degree in history and political science from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Leipzig. He received additional training as a visiting graduate student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His areas of specialization include modern Jewish history, modern European history, and the history of human rights. 

Mr. Decke has been awarded fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Fulbright Commission, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the American Academy for Jewish Research, the Central European History Society, the Leo Baeck Institute, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Center for Jewish History, in cooperation with Fordham University. In 2024, he was a visiting research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture-Simon Dubnow. He also worked as a research assistant for the project “The Nature of German Jews: Environmental Identities in Transition, 1870-1945,” which was affiliated with the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Mr. Decke’s work has been published in Cold War History, the Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. He also volunteered in the research and education departments at the Nazi Forced Labor Memorial in Leipzig, Germany. 

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as a Manya Friedman Memorial Fellow, Ludwig Decke will conduct research on how Jewish functionaries, journalists, and activists connected their experiences as Holocaust survivors, members of a minority group, and targets of antisemitism to universalist campaigns against all forms of racial discrimination. These campaigns gained momentum in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during a period of increasing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity in Western Europe. Mr. Decke’s transnational and comparative project analyzes the ideas and the activism of thirteen Jewish organizations and groups in three countries: France, Britain, and West Germany. It also examines their activities at the supranational levels of the European Economic Community and the Council of Europe. 

His project investigates the changing conceptual meanings of “antisemitism” vis-à-vis “racism” after the Holocaust and the relationship between Jewish anti-antisemitism and other antiracist struggles. He also explores the impact of Jewish political engagement on Western Europe’s reckoning with its racist past and present. By exploring the dynamics between Jews, state authorities, and racialized “other ‘Others’” (Ari Joskowicz), Decke’s study seeks to reveal crucial roles played by Jewish communities and institutions in the emergence of “multiculturalism” as a powerful, if ambivalent, paradigm of Western European identity and politics.   

Among the USHMM archival collections he will utilize are materials from the European offices of the World Jewish Congress and its Institute of Jewish Affairs, the Union des juifs pour la résistance et l’entraide, and the papers of Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich and Serge Klarsfeld.

Residency Period: June 1, 2026–July 31, 2026