“You turn a page and then there is suddenly something on a turtle” An Interview with Jürgen Osterhammel BY ANDREAS WEBER AND JOS GOMMANS On 1 September 2011 Jürgen Osterhammel, professor of modern and contempo- rary history at the University of Konstanz, and his wife, the historian and sinolo- gist Sabine Dabringhaus (University of Freiburg), visited Leiden to participate in a conference on “Forms of Dynastic Power in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe.” The conference marked the start of a new comparative research program on “Eurasian Empires: Integration Processes and Identity Formation.” After discussing the aims and objectives of the new program in a highly stimulat- ing roundtable with the fresh researchers, Itinerario (Andreas Weber and Jos Gommans) used the opportunity to have a talk with Jürgen Osterhammel about his career and the making of his recent masterpiece Die Verwandlung der Welt (The Transformation of the World). This monograph is a painstaking and thought- provoking attempt to write a global history of the nineteenth century. In more than 1,500 pages, Osterhammel offers a kaleidoscopic view on topics such as cities, frontiers, empires and nation states, nomads, music, science, religion, work, revolutions and living standards. Reviewers have praised the book for its thoroughness and innovative methodology, and an English translation will appear in the course of 2013. Already dazzling in itself, it is “just” the latest addi- tion of an awe-inspiring œuvre of one of the leading historians in Europe. First things first: why and how you decided to become a historian? Was there some kind of “natural road” in your family that paved the way? No, there was no natural road, quite to the contrary. I was born in 1952 in a small town in the Bergisches Land (Rhineland) in the northwest of Germany, which is part of the country well known for people like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Habermas. Nothing prepared me for becoming a historian. My immediate family had a strong natural science emphasis. My father was a physicist; he did not prevent me from Itinerario volume XXXV, issue 3, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0165115312000034 7 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0165115312000034 Published online by Cambridge University Press