On September 16 , the IES hosted a thought-provoking lecture by historian Alice Goff, titled “Church Bells and the Toll of Culture.” After a brief introduction by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Associate Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley, Goff delved into the entangled wartime and postwar histories of German church bells, examining their cultural, spiritual, and material significance during and after the Second World War. This lecture was attended by 28 people. This lecture was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley History department, and the German Historical Institute. 
Goff began by showing a photo of Hamburg’s harbor, where vast depots once stored tens of thousands of bronze church bells requisitioned between 1942 and 1944. These bells were not mere objects; they were melted down for tin, copper, and lead to feed the German war machine. The destruction was captured in powerful postwar ruin photography, where the enormous scale of the bells juxtaposed with the devastation around them. These depots, sometimes described as “bell cemeteries” or even the “Belsen of the bells,” reflected a profound anthropomorphism, bells seen not just as signal devices but as the voices of congregations, the fate of which mirrored that of communities in Nazi Germany.
Goff traced the postwar efforts to return and restore the bells, beginning with ceremonies in 1948. These rituals marked not only a cultural restitution but a spiritual one, as bells were invoked in memorials and viewed as survivors of war. Many had not been smelted and were eventually returned to their communities, representing Christian objects caught in the crossfire of war and ideology.
Goff noted how people across Europe, including in occupied territories, searched for and lobbied for the return of their bells. The bells also reignited questions about cultural priorities in times of crisis. Goff linked this to the broader German historiographical theme of the Sonderweg, a prioritization of culture over politics, and cited 19th-century Romantic nationalism and Schiller’s musings on the role of art during hardship. Bells, she argued, had become semi-obsolete before the war, their practical uses diminished, but they retained symbolic significance. The restitution of the bells was logistically very challenging and also often invoked criticism owing to the context of famine and infrastructural collapse in the postwar period. Notably, bells were also traded for food, pork, and fruit on the black market, highlighting the tension between cultural heritage and material survival. Yet the return of bells particularly from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Soviet-occupied zones, helped to reunite displaced congregations and restore a sense of home to silent, war-torn landscapes.The restitution efforts also yielded an important body of historical information, as part of the process of restoring the bells to their congregations included the cataloging and study of over 16,000 bells in a German bell archive. The effort to restore bells involved meticulous acoustic and material studies, as well as an emotional and political investment in the bells’ symbolic return.
During the Q&A, Goff discussed denominational differences in the symbolic place of the bells in christian communities (Catholic churches viewed bells as part of the building, while Protestants saw them as belonging to congregations) and the comparative restitution processes in East and West Germany. She closed by reflecting on the contemporary resonance of these debates, especially regarding the cost of cultural life in crisis. Church bells, Goff concluded, are not just historical artifacts, they are entry points into the deeper human costs of war, memory, and identity.