Sina Sauer Successfully Defends Her PhD Dissertation

3 July 2023

Photo: CSMC

Sina Sauer has passed her viva voce examination, thus completing her PhD in Cultural Anthropology.

Congratulations to Sina Sauer, who defended her PhD dissertation on 30 June 2023! Her thesis on ‘Compensation Practice in the Making: Formatting, Usage and Agency of Forms in a Compensation Procedure in German Post-War Administration 1948–1959’ was supervised by Sabine Kientiz.

Employing the case of Elsa Saenger, the dissertation examines the creation, use, and efficacy of forms in compensation procedures in the post-war German tax administration in the period from 1948 to 1959. It draws on files containing correspondence between the tax authorities and the community of heirs as well as material evidence of the Nazi expropriation policy from the years 1939 to 1941. The dissertation shows that forms are not passive carriers of information but the result of discursive design processes that depict the values and norms of their creators.