Research Profile
The Junior Professorship examines the states, inhabitants, and cultures of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. We focus on Germans and German-speaking inhabitants as well as the local and transregional exchange processes they were involved in. In particular, German-speaking Jewry and members of the German-speaking aristocracy are brought into focus to explore changes in the lifeworld in the age of empires and of nationalism.
The research projects are guided by cultural studies questions regarding the historical actors’ mental horizons and their options for action.
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German speaking social and economic networks in Eastern Europe
The research activities of the Junior Professorship focus on three areas.
In the research area of (post-)imperial change in Central and Eastern Europe, we investigate how people understood and participated in shaping the upheavals in and after the two world wars, how they coped with new structures of power, and how they tried to escape or oppose them.
In the research area of Jewish networks in German and Slavic speaking contact areas, we focus on the actions and the relationships of Jews who lived and worked in multilingual contexts or those of different languages, not least in order to identify the paradigmatic character of Jewish experience and presence for the multi-cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe.
The third research area, settlement projects and land ownership, aims to raise the awareness of the fundamental economic and social meaning of land ownership and the long history of state-controlled settlement and resettlement in rural areas within the historical sciences. This is a contribution to the understanding of the genesis of extreme violence and ethnic cleansing in 20th century Eastern Europe, complementing and expanding the explanation of radical nationalism.