Reflecting on borders in the wake of the material and spatial turns and against the backdrop of climate change in the Anthropocene, the 2026 annual conference of the Max Weber Foundation (Bonn) brought together scholarship on the physical dimensions of contemporary and historical boundaries—between states, nations, cities, empires, and regions, but also between the sacred and the profane, the public and the private, the urban and the rural, and other spatially delimited zones.

During his keynote lecture on 4 May in Warsaw, Michal Frankl (Leibniz GWZO Prague) spoke about “Humanitarian Border Crossings: Aid in No Manʼs Landˮ. The historian argued that studying borders and border crossings provides new insights into humanitarianism in its various forms, locales, and scales.

The lecture followed the trajectories of humanitarians who helped refugees stranded in the no manʼs land that formed along the shifting borders in East Central Europe in the late 1930s. These refugees languished between boundary stones, fences, or barriers in a no manʼs land that could take the shape of barren, windy fields, cold, hostile forests, a rusty barge, or decrepit, abandoned factories. The material and other aid provided by aid workers was essential for the survival in no manʼs land, but it also expressed the hierarchies and tensions inherent in humanitarian activity. Drawing on the experience of no manʼs land in 1938–39 and on current research in humanitarianism and border studies, the lecture explored border crossings and border experience as integral to and constitutive of humanitarian activity generally.

Michal Frankl (Leibniz GWZO Prague)

“Humanitarian Border Crossings: Aid in No Manʼs Landˮ

Moderator: Jan Musekamp (GHI Warsaw)

Location: German Historical Institute Warsaw