Committees and Team

Born on 29.03.1957 in Lübeck, studied law and social sciences. Marlehn Thieme has been Chairwoman of the ZDF Television Board since 2016 and President of the Welthungerhilfe since 2018. From 1986 to 2013, she worked at Deutsche Bank AG in various roles, most recently as Director of Corporate Social Responsibility/Corporate Citizenship. She was a member of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany for 18 years and of the German Council for Sustainable Development for 15 years, which she chaired until 2019. In 2011, she was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S., becoming its Chairwoman on March 1, 2019.

Born in Rendsburg in 1966. Studied biology and philosophy in Würzburg, Buenos Aires and Hamburg; diploma thesis in biology in Würzburg; doctorate in philosophy at the University of Hamburg; habilitation and authorization to teach philosophy at the University of Bamberg. 2005-2011 research associate at the Collaborative Research Center “Transformations of Antiquity” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Since 2012 head of the research area “LebensWissen” at the Berlin Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL). Since April 2010 member and since March 1, 2019 Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S.

Alexander Bassen is Full Professor of Capital Markets and Corporate Governance at the University of Hamburg, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences. He teaches in the areas of Investment and Finance, as well as Sustainable Finance and Accounting. He is a member of the German Council for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Finance Advisory Board and the German Advisory Council on Global Change. He is also a member of the EFRAG Project Task Force EU Sustainability Reporting Standard (PTF ESRS) and the G7 Impact Task Force. He is also an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford (Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment) and a visiting professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and Henley Business School (Reading, UK). Furthermore he is a member of several advisory committees for sustainable finance.

Born in 1959, Mr. Böge gained his first professional experience in mergers & acquisitions and industrial plant construction after successfully completing a banking apprenticeship and a degree in business administration. In 1993, he then switched to the real estate industry and spent more than two decades dealing with all facets of large commercial properties, including many years in a management role. Mr. Böge has been self-employed since mid-2015 and holds supervisory and advisory mandates in various areas. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F.V.S. since April 2013. He is married and has two adult children.

Studied history, German studies and education at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she worked in the special research area “Knowledge and Society in the 19th Century” and received her doctorate in 1989 under Hans Mommsen. From 1988 to 1993, she worked at the Ruhr Museum in Essen. In 1993, she moved to the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg as deputy director and head of the collection, where she was appointed director and professor in 2004. She oversaw exhibitions and research projects in the fields of leisure and popular culture, photography, industrial and urban history. From 2008 to 2015, she took over the management of the Museum of Hamburg History. From 2008 to 2010, she was also Chairwoman of the Board of the Historical Museums Foundation, responsible for all of Hamburg's city and cultural history museums. From 2016 to 2021, she was Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU). She is currently leading an EU research project “Pleasurescapes” on pleasure quarters in European port cities. She is a member of the Monument Council of the City of Hamburg, the Board of Trustees of the Berlin City Museum Foundation and the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Museum. She has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Toepfer Foundation since 2010.

Born on 23.02.1973 in Karlsruhe. She has been Director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies since December 2020. From 2012 to 2020, she was Director of the Institute for the History of German Jews in Hamburg. Before taking up this post in 2012, she worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC and from 2006 to 2010 as a research assistant at the Department of Medieval and Modern History at the University of Göttingen. Her research focuses on the United Nations' handling of statelessness and ideas of universal belonging after the two world wars and the repercussions on nation-state politics in West Germany. In 2007, she published her dissertation on German-Jewish student fraternities ("Ehrensache. Jüdische Studentenverbindungen an deutschen Universitäten 1886-1937”, Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen). She studied history, sociology and European ethnology at the Universities of Göttingen, Tel Aviv and Berlin and worked at the “Topography of Terror” Foundation in Berlin, the Franz Rosenzweig Center in Jerusalem and the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig.

Born in 1962 in Melbourne, his parents left Australia when he was a child and he grew up in Japan and England. He studied at the University of Cambridge, taking his doctorate there in 1989 with a thesis which became his first book: The German Idea of Militarism. Radical and Socialist Critics, 1866-1914 (Cambridge, 1994). He was a Research Fellow at King’s College Cambridge (1990-93), then taught at Royal Holloway, University of London (1993-99), and since 1999 at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Modern European History. He pioneered how to write about children as actors and subjects, rather than objects, of history, publishing Witnesses of War. Children’s Lives under the Nazis (Cape/Knopf, 2005). More recently, he has written the first full-scale exploration of how ordinary Germans personally experienced and understood that war: The German War. A Nation under Arms 1939-45 (Bodley Head, 2015).

Born in Ankara in 1975. Graduated from high school in Bamberg, studied law in Würzburg and Fribourg, followed by a doctorate on the Cyprus conflict. Stays in New York, Ankara and Cyprus. From 2010-2016 head of europe direct Info-Point Europe, the information office of the European Commission in Hamburg. Subsequently worked for the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and since October 2021 Head of Unit at the Ministry of Labor, Health, Social Affairs, Family and Integration. Lea Tezcan-Götz is involved in several associations for European integration, international understanding, integration and equal opportunities for young people with a migrant background. From 2016 to 2020, she was spokesperson for Tönissteiner Kreis e. V. and is currently an assessor on the board of Europa Union Hamburg e. V. She is married and has two children.

Born in Freren/Emsland in 1956. After studying geology at the University of Münster, he focused on environmental sciences with a doctorate at the University of Essen and habilitation at the Gutenberg University in Mainz as well as longer research stays at the California State University in Long Beach, at the Australian Geological Survey in Perth and at the Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg. In addition, he worked in the geoscientific editorial offices of the VCH and Akademie publishing houses and the Ernst & Sohn publishing house, as well as longer guest stays at Harvard University in Boston and the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. After many years of teaching and research in Essen and Mainz and the position of Secretary General of the German Advisory Council on the Environment Environmental Council (SRU) from 1994 to 2001, he was appointed Professor of Geoecology at the University of Potsdam in 2001 and simultaneously took on the role of Scientific Director of the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Müncheberg until 2014. With his Land Sciences working group at the University of Potsdam and through various scientific and political advisory bodies, his main focus is currently on the development of new research structures, with questions about the agricultural systems of the future coming to the fore.