Dr. Martin Mainka

Research Associate, Chair on the History and Impact of the Holocaust

Martin Mainka studied history and political science in a joint bachelor's degree and then modern history in a master's degree at the TU Darmstadt. From 2018 to 2022, he was a research assistant at the Institute of History at TU Darmstadt, where he worked on the project HISTRANS (History of Transparency, founded by DFG and Agence Nationale de la Recherche). In his dissertation »›In Bonn, Transparency is the Order of the Day.‹ The Flick Affair as an Indicator and Catalyst of Change, 1975–1987«, he examined the historical genesis of the ideal of transparency in the late 1970s and early 1980s using the Flick Affair as a case study. Since January 2023, he is working as a research assistant at the Chair for Research on the History and Impact of the Holocaust at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main in a research project on the »History of the House of Burda in the 20th Century«.

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Research Interests

• Historical transparency and corruption research
• Political cultural history of the Bonn Republic
• Media and corporate history

Publications

• Transparencia, divulgación y narrativas conspirativas. Redefiniendo el discurso del caso Flick (Alemania Años 80), in: Arnau González-Vilalta; Frédéric Monier; Joan Pubill; Gemma Rubí (Eds.): Las sombras de la transparencia. Secreto, corrupción y »estado profundo« en la Europa contemporánea, Granada 2022.
• Mass Media as Transparency Actors. The Debate on Disclosure Practices of Der Spiegel during the Flick-affair (1980s), in: Engels, Jens Ivo; Monier, Frédéric (Eds.): History of Transparency in Politics and Society, Göttingen 2020, S. 155–172.