Rooms for Maneuver in State Socialism: Between Adaptation and Experiment

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Claudia Kraft
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 277133236

The primary aim is to break with the prevailing tradition of looking at real socialism solely as an area of repression and resistance. Instead of reproducing this binarism, the project focuses on the agency and often-ambivalent experiences of historical subjects, understood in terms of re-appropriating alienated social relations (and expressed in the concept of Eigensinn). Based on a comparative study of rooms for maneuver in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and GDR, we will define the boundaries of the project of socialist modernization and dictatorship and its limitations due to economic, geographical, and historical factors. Another goal of the project is to reconstruct how societies adapt. One area of inquiry is preservation. What earlier practices were preserved prior to 1989 in the Polish highlands, the cities of Gdynia or Zlin, or the Czech-Polish-German borderlands thanks to alleged free spaces? What effects did this have in the period after 1989? Another line looks at authorities as initiators of solutions that paradoxically ran contrary to official ideology (e.g. market-oriented state farms). A third part of the project investigates social adaptation in marginal institutions. The issues here are autonomy and indifference: Esperantists, ham radio operators, and gardeners needed only for the state not to interfere; the state, for its part, was indifferent to and tolerated such hobbyists because their social activity took place beyond the sphere of ideology. Through close cooperation, the projects international research team will provide new insights into the social, economic, and cultural history of state socialism, focusing on rooms for maneuver, without idealistically postulating domination-free zones. Further, the project will contribute to ongoing methodological reflections about the historicization of the socialist period in European history. By discussing the concept of Eigensinn and applying it to different historical contexts, narrow national perspectives will be brought into conversation and new research tools developed. Inasmuch as Rooms for Maneuver focuses on long-term developments, cooperation with the partner project post bellum promises to advance comprehensive knowledge of the twentieth-century history of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Poland
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Jerzy Kochanowski