Dr. Svetlana Burmistr

Svetlana Burmistr has been working on the project "How the Past Counts. The History of the Federal Statistical Office (GeStat)" of the Research Area "Contemporary History and Archive" since 1 November 2024. She strengthens the project team as a post-doc in research and research communication. As part of the project, she is particularly concerned with the transition of the history during the Third Reich to the post-war history of the institution and is responsible for implementing integrative science communication for the GeStat project.

Svetlana Burmistr studied linguistics, modern German literature and political science at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2014, she completed her doctorate in modern history at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universität Berlin. In her dissertation, she examined the network, actors and discourses of the Nazi occupation press in occupied Belarus. From 2016 to 2023, she was a research associate at the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and participated in two interdisciplinary projects on the memory of the Holocaust and the genocide of Roma in Ukraine. The transformation of sites of violence and mass graves into memorial landscapes was one of the central aspects of the project work. At Amcha Deutschland e.V., she coordinated the project ‘What voice do we have?’ on the intergenerational consequences of the Shoah and other experiences of collective violence.

Her research interests include the history and aftermath of mass violence, digital history and mapping.