Fallen Man, Rising Hero

You aren’t born a hero – you’re made into one. The heroic image is a construction created for a specific purpose, such as when a government wants to convince men to join a war effort and possibly sacrifice their lives on the front. The Islamic scholar Dr. Olmo Gölz has dedicated himself to one case study. Under the aegis of the special research area “Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms” at the University of Freiburg, he will focus on the dynamics of the heroic in the Iran-Iraq War, the first Gulf War in the 1980s. Gölz seeks to determine the heroic discourses in the war and to show what role the heroic played in the mobilization of the population at that time.

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Audio podcast (in German) about the research project led by Dr. Olmo Gölz and Prof. Dr. Johanna Pink