Research

Research interests:

• History of universities and science

• Historical transformation research
• History of unified Germany since 1990
• Contemporary history after 1945

PhD project: "Special status in the transformation? The TU Dresden in the 'University Reorganization East' after 1989/90"

The reorganization of the GDR university system in the 1990s is regarded as particularly conflict-ridden terrain in the history of East German transformation. The main reason for this is the extensive staff restructuring that took place at the universities at the time. As a result, myths of the 'colonization' of the East by the West, which led to the displacement of East German perspectives from the arenas of social interpretative sovereignty, are still frequently invoked today. The fact that such narratives tend to be abbreviated can be seen as a challenge for contemporary history to take a differentiated look at events and to contribute to empirically based knowledge processes with source-saturated research. This approach seems particularly appropriate in the field of universities, as the so-called "Hochschulumbau Ost" (Blecher/John) varied greatly depending on the federal state and institution. The doctoral project aims to contribute to this research and focuses on one institution in the transformation process that was subject to a special status in two senses: the TUD Dresden University of Technology.

On the one hand, due to their profile in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines, full-spectrum technical universities had different prerequisites for university restructuring than humanistic full-spectrum universities. On the other hand, Dresden, as the state capital of the "self-proclaimed model pupil" (Dierk Hoffmann) Saxony, enjoyed special attention under Minister President Kurt Biedenkopf and Science Minister Hans Joachim Meyer, which also extended to the local university. The project aims to work out the extent to which this double special status affected the epistemic, administrative and communicative transformations in Dresden. In addition, the Dresden university restructuring will be placed in the context of the recent research trend in the history of science to examine universities in the context of their increasing competitive orientation. Today's location of excellence seems particularly suitable for this endeavor; at the same time, this raises the research question of the extent to which the East German transformation has been intertwined with inter-university competition since the late 1980s.

Methodologically, the study is based on written sources from the Dresden University Archives as well as on documents from the state archives of Saxony, some of which have only recently become accessible due to the 30-year embargo. In addition, printed sources and memoir literature from the university environment will be consulted and guided interviews with experts will be conducted.