EFOI e. V.
Der Verein Ehemalige und Freunde des OIB e. V. gründete sich im Dezember 2024 mit ungefähr vierzig Mitgliedern. Der Vorstand hat sich seitdem darum bemüht, den Verein offiziell einzutragen, weitere Mitglieder zu werben und Aktivitäten selbst zu entfalten oder die von Mitgliedern zu unterstützen.
About OIB
The Orient Institute Beirut is a collective site of memory for generations of German—and later, increasingly international—scholars of Middle Eastern studies. Since its founding in 1961, an unverifiable number of research associates, scholarship holders, visiting scholars, interns, and stranded freelancers have, by their own account, spent one of the most important phases of their careers here. Whatever each one had hoped to find: for most, the institute became more than a research location in the Arab world or a source of access to an archive of Arab intellectual history that is unmatched by most European university libraries. It became a forum for discourse, a happy think tank, a place of respite after exhausting fieldwork, and above all a social hub and knot in a city to which one had, by the end of one’s stay, become helplessly attached.
It is our aim to support these attachments to OIB and among ourselves well beyond our time spent there.
