Leibniz-WissenschaftsCampus Eastern Europe - Global Area (EEGA)

The Science Campus EEGA is established to work for the years 2016 - 2020. It is committed to developing new research perspectives on Eastern Europe, engaging in knowledge exchange activities on the region with stakeholders, and promoting young researchers. It follows the idea that the multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted examination of processes of globalisation are a key for a better understanding of actual societal developments.

To achieve its main aims, the EEGA concentrates on four main areas of activity:

1. Communication with Public and Multiplicators
2. Formation of the Scientific Field
3. Teaching and Young Talents
4. PostDoc Support

Accordingly the EEGA's measures are conceptualized. They are focussing on the key aspects of exchange, expression, school, advise, infrastructure, perspectives, connections, enrichment, innovation, interaction, future and excellence.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie hier.

Ways of finding law in ethno-religiously mixed communities. Experiential resources in Poland-Lithuania and its successor states

Emmy Noether Group (DFG)

Responsible: Yvonne Kleinmann

How do ethno-religiously mixed societies translate the reality of cultural heterogeneity into specific forms of law, interaction and governance? The Emmy Noether Group is investigating this question using the example of Poland-Lithuania and its successor states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines the interrelations between religion and law under changing conditions of rule.
Using methods from legal anthropology, she analyses communication among the various religious communities in three diachronic case studies. Special attention is paid to the varieties of religious coexistence and the phenomenon of legal-administrative autonomy. Legal practice is understood as a process of situational negotiation regarding the validity of competing legal norms.

religion-and-law-in-east-central-europe.de

"Bombers, Murderers and Rebels" - The Romantic Phantasm of the Woman's Body and its Transgressions in Contemporary Polish Literature

PhD project, funded by the Foundation for German-Polish Cooperation

Iris Bauer

Defended in December 2022, publication in progress

The doctoral project with the working title "Bombers, Murderers and Rebels" - The Romantic Phantasm of the Woman's Body and its Transgressions in Polish Contemporary Literature reads contemporary literary texts as deconstructions of the imaginings of femininity created in the literature of Romanticism, which gave Polish culture its identity. It will be shown to what extent the figurations of the female body in the texts selected so far, such as Sylwia Chutnik's debut novel Kieszonkowy Atlas Kobiet (2008), Dominika Dymińska's poetry collection Danke (2016) and Jacek Dehnel's Matka Makryna (2014), break with the narratives of 'the Polish woman' handed down by the Polish national poets. For despite deconstructions of the system of values and signs of Polish Romanticism that were not only carried out in literature before 1989, as for example in Witold Gombrowicz, who sometimes resists the romantic-patriotic charge of the artist in his texts, as well as individual confrontations with female bodies and their romantic use - for example in Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński or Zofia Nałkowska - it is only after 1989 that one can speak of the beginning of a critical analysis consciously forced on the romantic phantasms. If the literature of the female authors who debuted in the early 1990s, such as Manuela Gretkowska or Izabela Filipiak, is primarily concerned with the differentiation of cultural imaginings of femininity and a demystification of motherhood idealised by Romanticism, it is only the texts of recent contemporary literature that represent targeted transgressions of the Romantic phantasm of the body of 'the Polish woman'. The PhD project pursues the thesis that only these most recent literary examples, in their reflection of the Romantic paradigm, blur gender boundaries and anchor roles liberated from biological gender in new occupations in the cultural imaginary, whereby female figures, contrary to their Romantic, mystified charge and their strongly circumscribed subjectivity, can ultimately also become "murderers, bombers and rebels" (cf. Chutnik, 2008, 100). By linking the romantic phantasm of the 'woman's body' as a literary phenomenon with historical, societal and social contexts, questions of knowledge transfer and power structures, conclusions can be drawn about how Polish society configures itself in its different spaces, in the Romantic period and today (after 1989 and now), or how (literary) identities are constructed with a focus on the field of tension between gender and nation.

Democratization as a parliamentary practice. The Polish Contract Sejm 1989-1991

Research Grant (DFG)

Dr. Paulina Gulinska-Jurgiel

The subject of the project is the history of the emergence and development of the Polish transition to democracy from 1989. The focus is on the so-called Contract Sejm (sejm kontraktowy). My central concern is to understand the Polish transformation from the context of its time. In doing so, I distance myself both from research tendencies that, in their analysis of 1989, try to explain retrospectively the failures of the solutions postulated during the transformation, as well as from political narrow-mindedness of this process. In my project, I use the Polish case study to deal with the general ambivalence of democratic bodies that establish order without acting on a clear legal basis. The question of legitimacy as the basis for action is central. It must be urgently addressed and dealt with, especially with regard to the first Polish parliamentary chamber, since, unlike the second chamber, this came about in the course of only partially free elections and consequently showed continuity with the political system of the People's Republic of Poland. I see the Polish parliament as a flexible instrument on the way to restructuring and stabilizing a democratic system of government. The focus is therefore not on the results of its legislative work, but on the process of interaction and communicative negotiations. They illustrate how democracy was performatively created, fought over and attacked after 1989. I approach this concern empirically by examining key debates aimed at establishing Polish democracy. Its core elements, which I place at the center of the empirical analysis, are concepts such as representation, participation, sovereignty and the rule of law. I examine their importance through debates about the new organization of the political structure, such as the legislation on political parties, the Constitutional Tribunal and the Public Prosecutor's Office. In addition, I analyse debates dealing with the real and symbolic level of the form of government, that is, with the change of the constitution, the state name, the national emblem and the anthem. In order to be able to present the Polish Parliament in its density and complexity, I analyse it on several levels: On the one hand, I deal with the documentation of the public plenary sessions, on the other hand with the documentation of the work of other bodies. These include the Legislative and Constitutional Commission and the Convention of Senior Citizens. On this basis, I will be able to trace how the respective concepts varied or gained structure and how different actors discursively negotiated their understanding of democracy. The results and insights from the case study on the Polish legislature of 1989 should enable an in-depth examination of a universal phenomenon, namely the change in the political system.

Agents of Cross-system Cooperation during the Cold War. Juridical Coming to Terms with NS-Crimes in Poland and the FRG (1958-1970)

Paulina Gulińska-Jurgiel

Habilitation submitted in December 2022, publication in progress

The project explores the cooperation between West German and Polish lawyers in the context of the judicial punishment of NS-crimes after WW II. The study concentrates on the years 1958-1970, during which no diplomatic relations between the FRG and the People's Republic of Poland existed. Therefore, the juridical cooperation between Polish and German lawyers, that was rooted in the common interest in the judicial persecution of NS-perpetrators, took place in a legal grey area. The empirical core of the study is an in-depth analysis of the cooperation between the leading institutions within this field: the Main Commission for the Investigation of German / Hitler Crimes (Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich/Hitlerowskich w Polsce) in Warsaw, and the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen) in Ludwigsburg. The analysis focuses on relations between the two institutions, the particular agents and different practices in the culture of law.

The project focuses on the concrete forms of cooperation between the two institutions: correspondence between the two institutions, mutual visits and individual business trips. I will investigate the varying roles of the involved lawyers, experts and lay people, and apart from this, the process of comparison between one’s own and others' legal understanding and the consequences drawn by the individual actors for their work. The linguistic, argumentative and nonverbal aspects of the bilateral relationship, e.g. translation, ways of speaking, search for consensus, and silence, are at the heart of the interpretation.

Such an approach enables to look at practices of legal culture as a dynamic process. In this way, a new narrative of the judicial review of NS-crimes will emerge, in which freedom of action and dynamics in the ideological environment of the Cold War come to the fore.

Urban politics at the time of the Saxon-Polish Union. The example of the Wschowa/Fraustadt and Leszno/Lissa in Greater Poland towns.

Karsten Holste

The history of Polish cities during the Saxon period (1697-1763) has long been written as a story of decline. The focus was on the strong economic and political position of the cities in the late Middle Ages and the development in the 19th century, which was perceived as deficient compared to Western Europe. In terms of economic and social history, urban history thus seemed to confirm the political-historical thesis of a failure of the Saxon-Polish personal union. However, research on urban history in recent decades has fundamentally questioned the narrative of continuity from the medieval to the modern city. Whereas early modern conditions were long regarded as deficient in comparison to the 19th century, today the focus is increasingly on innovative strategies for dealing with crisis phenomena.

The aim of the project is first of all to enable micro-historically supported statements about the perception of stagnation and change in urban societies in Wielkopolska during the period of the Saxon-Polish Union, using the examples of the royal town of Wschowa and the private town of Leszno. With regard to the historiography of the Saxon period, the project also aims to provide insights into the effects of the Union on forms of politics both towards and within the cities. Ultimately, the project will use the example of policies in and towards Greater Polish cities to ask about the interrelationship between rhetoric and socio-religious order. In a broader sense, the project is thus intended as a contribution to a better understanding of the strategies of different actors in dealing with crisis situations and development perspectives.

Expertise in Exile? Eastern European scholars in exile and their role within discourses over state formation processes in the 19th and early 20th century

Dr. Sven Jaros

In my book project, I’ll examine shifts of the transnational mind set concerning the relation between political/diplomatic practice and scholarly expertise within the 19th and early 20th century. My focus will rest on scholars from the Russian Empire in Exile, their networks, and publications. How did they navigate between different imperial orders? How did they position themselves within the spheres of Academia, politics, and different publics? On which epistemological basis did they try to shape public opinions concerning their respective political course, be it the national, federal, social or anarchic reconfiguration of Eastern Europe? To highlight the competition for international attention, I will focus on contested areas with a transnational and therefore ambiguous historical legacy, such as the Eastern territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (within nowadays Eastern Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine), that could be claimed by various political movements. The project will therefor combine methodological aspects of historical discourse analysis, network analysis, praxeology, and collective biographies. The project will contribute to an understanding of Eastern Europe as a highly entangled transnational laboratory of political discourses both in imperial and postimperial contexts.

Religious Heterogeneity in the Mirror of Law. Theory and Practice of an Urban Constitution in Early Modern Poland

Prof. Dr. Yvonne Kleinmann

Religious heterogeneity - whether in current political debates or in historical research - tends to be regarded as a problem constellation and examined in terms of its potential for conflict and violence. Attention is usually focused on ideological differences and incompatible value systems. The project outlined here is based on a different, pragmatic approach: it asks about the potential of law to secure the coexistence of different religious practices and to functionally shape social relations between members of different religious and confessional communities beyond ritual life. From this perspective, conflict is a temporary and reparable dysfunctionality of a social system. The study is based on a broad and plural understanding of law: unspectacular civil law communication as well as criminal law disputes, learned legal ideas as well as those of lay people, legal norms as well as legal practice and ritual. The focus is on the processuality and negotiation of law, the ways in which law is found.

The study area is the federally organised early modern Poland-Lithuania. The focus is on the question of the potential of a local legal system to politically integrate different religious affiliations - specifically Catholic, Jewish and Protestant. How were legal spheres demarcated from one another, subordinate rulers established, informal legal practices developed, selective or even permanently applicable legal instruments conceived? The study focuses on the Latifundium Rzeszów, in particular its administrative centre, the city of Rzeszów, located halfway between Kraków and Lviv in the transition zone from Polish- to Ruthenian-speaking areas in eastern Lesser Poland and western Ruthenia.

The relevance of the local perspective is derived from Poland-Lithuania's specific ruling structure. To a greater extent than the neighbouring states, the union of states was characterised by the appropriation of political power by estates, corporations and religious communities, which had partial legal systems and autonomies of varying degrees, but were nevertheless related to the crown and the state as a whole through offices and taxes. With the waning of royal influence on estates of the nobility from the 16th century onwards, the legal status of non-Catholics outside the nobility increasingly depended on regional and local authorities. The same applied to the regulation of legal, social and economic relations between members of different religious communities. Neither the coexistence regulations for the nobility nor the royal privileges for the Jewish population were relevant for latifundia like Rzeszów. Therefore, the noble landlordship, especially its urban centres, advanced to become a third arena in which various law-making persons and institutions negotiated basic rules of religious coexistence. The type of small and medium-sized town thus became an important source of impulses in religious politics.

The project pursues the questions raised in the form of a contextualised micro-study. It first gives an overview of the interrelations between law and religion in early modern Poland-Lithuania, and then turns to the latifundium of Rzeszów. Its history of origin, population structure, ruling and economic system are merely sketched. An analysis of the legal resources in religious politics leads to the core of the study, seven micro-studies on the central themes of trans- and interreligious communication in Rzeszów. Their subjects are: the establishment of commitment, security and solidarity, hierarchies and respect, socio-economic demarcation and interconnectedness, customs and morals, Christian and Jewish piety, and religious dissent. In summary, the potential of an urban constitution in integrating religious heterogeneity is weighed in a regional comparative perspective.

Polish prisoners of war in the First World War between propaganda and national self-assertion

Doctoral project, MLU Halle

Laura Krebs, M.A.

In her doctoral project, Laura Krebs focuses on the experience of war captivity of Polish soldiers in the years 1914 to 1918, mainly in the German Empire.

Prisoner of war was a mass phenomenon during the First World War. Due to the high numbers of prisoners, the warring states set up a distinct prisoner-of-war camp system within a very short time. The prisoners of Polish nationality from the armies of Poland's three partitioning powers were of great political interest to almost all the belligerent states. The Polish prisoners of war studied here were German prisoners of war in the service of the Imperial Russian Army and were officially registered as "Russians". However, the nationalities and Poland policy of the empire meant that some of them, who saw themselves as Poles and/or were perceived as such by the German side, were housed in so-called "Polish camps". In these special POW camps, the Poles were exposed to nationalist propaganda and attempts to instrumentalise them for German war aims. At the same time, they tried out national self-organisation there, which was to benefit the future Polish state after the desired re-establishment. The planned doctoral thesis will focus on the captivity of Polish soldiers in the First World War against the double background of the specific experience of captivity and the special war experience of Poland as a divided nation.

Defining "Unofficial Medicine" in the Russian Empire: Imperial and Regional Perspectives (mid-18th-early 19th centuries)

Promotionsprojekt, MLU Halle

Kateryna Pasichnyk, M.A.

My dissertation deals with the question of how people in the 18th-century Russian empire defined proper medical practice. Historiography has long concluded that state-supported medicine was only part of the more comprehensive medical pluralism of the early modern period, despite state support and sponsorship and contrary to the laws that provided normative definitions of legally recognized medical practice. The Russian empire was no exception. Through a systematic analysis of denunciations and investigations of "unlicensed healing" in Saint Petersburg and the Podolian province, this project places the normative ideal of what was "proper medical treatment" -- practice recognized by the Medical College -- into a wider range of alternative views of proper medical practice. I propose to investigate the definition of good medical practice as a complex process involving various actors, medical and civil administration, state-appointed and private physicians, and laymen as patients and clients involving the interplay of legal and social norms. Taking imperial and regional perspectives allows us to situate the Podolian lands within the larger imperial medical world and reflect upon the broader issues, like the introduction of the new imperial normativity in former Polish-Lithuanian lands, the formation of legitimacy beliefs amid new subjects, and the dynamics between imperial and local medical cultures.

Architecture and Rule. State conception and military presence in the Habsburg province of Galicia-Lodomeria, 1849-1859.

PhD project, MLU Halle

Frank Rochow, M.A.

Defended in December 2022, publication in progress

The revolution of 1848/49 posed an existential threat to the Habsburg monarchy. Only with the help of the military could the various territories be kept in the political federation under the crown of the House of Habsburg. As a reaction, from 1848 onwards, under the young Emperor Franz Joseph I, the modernisation course embarked upon shortly before, which was intended to turn this "composite state" into a modern state based on the Western European model, was continued under different auspices. Within this forced state-building process, the military functioned as a bracket that could only guarantee the cohesion and territorial integrity of the monarchy. The material expression of this function was the implementation of an ambitious project to create a monarchy-wide fortification system.

Through a close examination of the realisation of the sub-projects in Krakow (today: Kraków, Poland) and Lviv (today: L'viv, Ukraine), the role of the military vis-à-vis other actors, both state and non-state, is elaborated. Through the analysis of both internal administrative and external negotiation processes, which encompasses all phases of construction planning and implementation, general mechanisms of rule are brought out just as clearly as the limits of the "neo-absolutist" behaviour of the ruling elite. The result is a multifaceted micro-study of the administrative history of the Habsburg state at a critical moment in its development, in which approaches of recent military history, methods of historical spatial research and the spatial turn as well as perspectives critical of rule are combined.

Ringelblum's Estate. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Perception of the Holocaust 1947-1989.

Stephan Stach

The Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny - ŻIH) was the only Holocaust research and documentation centre in Poland that operated from the establishment of communist rule until its fall in 1989. It emerged from the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland in 1947 and still exists today. As the repository of the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto created by Emanuel Ringelblum - and numerous other important sources on the history of the Jews and the Holocaust - as well as a research institution that was resolutely dedicated to documenting and researching the murder of the Jews of Poland and Europe, primarily from the perspective of the victims, the ŻIH became the executor of Emanuel Ringelblum's estate in two respects.

Using the example of the Jewish Historical Institute, a scientific but equally decidedly Jewish institution, the research project will examine three thematic complexes: First, the study, which is broadly conceived in terms of institutional history, will analyse the development of Polish-Jewish relations in the People's Republic of Poland using the ŻIH as an example. On a second level, starting from the ŻIH, the emergence and development of Holocaust research in the People's Republic of Poland will be examined in its transnational relations. Finally, the third topic deals with the question of how the ŻIH, with its publications on the history of the Holocaust, its exhibitions in the in-house museum and elsewhere, as well as its involvement in state memorial work and the organisation of public commemorations, popularised the social debate on the Holocaust in Poland and beyond.

The Soviet Union, Ukrainian Nationalism and the Western Public during the Cold War - Propaganda, Politics, and the Memory of World War II

Research Grant (DFG)

Dr. Kai Struve

The project examines Soviet representations of Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet attempts to influence the image of Ukrainian nationalists in the countries of the West. The focus is on the Cold War period. Soviet representations during this period focused on the cooperation of Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. However, Soviet representations also picked up on older images of Ukrainian nationalists from the pre-war period. Overall, according to one of the initial theses of the project, they did not contribute to historical enlightenment, but constructed an image of the enemy that is still effective in parts of the former Soviet Union today. Even in 2014, its instrumentalisation in Russian media contributed to a war in eastern Ukraine that continues to this day. Using the examples of the Federal Republic of Germany, the USA and Canada, the project also analyses the discourse on Ukrainian nationalists in the public sphere of Western countries in order to determine whether and how Soviet representations were received. It also asks in what other ways and in what contexts Soviet activities influenced ideas about Ukrainian nationalism in relation to other factors in the Western public sphere. To this end, the project examines three major public debates in which significant aspects concerned Ukrainian nationalists and the Ukrainian diaspora. In all of these debates, the Second World War period was central. These include debates about the immigration of "displaced persons" in the USA and Canada in the late 1940s, the debate in 1959/60 about the then West German minister Theodor Oberländer and the Ukrainian battalion "Nachtigall" in 1941, and judicial investigations in the USA, Canada and other countries against post-war Eastern European immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s on suspicion of having participated in crimes under German rule during World War II. The project also asks to what extent the discussions in the Western public sphere in turn had an impact on the portrayal of Ukrainian nationalists in the Soviet Union. The project is thus conceived as a contribution to a history of Cold War interconnectedness and knowledge. It examines the Ukrainian case, but also takes into account connections with other, similar cases, especially that of the Baltic countries.

The First Jewish Museums in East Central Europe at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Doctoral project, MLU Halle

Dorothea Warneck

Jewish museums and exhibitions are not a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. Already at the end of the 19th century there were the first Judaica exhibitions in Europe and from the mid-1890s the first museums were founded (the world's first Jewish museum was opened in Vienna in 1895). Around ten Jewish museums were founded in East-Central Europe between 1906 and 1938 by Jewish private individuals, communities and associations from a wide variety of religious, political and social milieus. This disparity in the contexts of origin and the heterogeneity of the people involved in the projects can also be seen in the programmes of the various museums and their respective orientations towards museum models and concepts.
The dissertation project aims to examine the genesis of these first Jewish museums in East-Central Europe, the beginnings of the musealisation of the Jewish material heritage, which had previously been of exclusively sacral significance and was now also charged with cultural and art historical significance, as a phenomenon of modernity in its multi-layered inner-Jewish, national, transnational, scientific-disciplinary, museological, political and social relations, taking into account the respective specifics of the individual museums. On the one hand, the question will be addressed as to how ideas of Jewish, Polish-Jewish, Czech-Jewish or imperially shaped identity(ies) were to be negotiated, constructed and conveyed via which historical narratives and with which collection and exhibition concepts through the medium of the museum. What was the function and significance of these museums in the context of identity concepts and national histories to be renegotiated in the context of profound ruptures and caesurae at the beginning of the century?
On the other hand, this work aims to find answers to the scientific contexts in which these museum projects came into being, their disciplinary orientations and museological specifics, and to ask what forms of knowledge transfer and what (unofficial), (trans-)national networks and connections existed between the individual Jewish museums and their actors, as well as with other, non-Jewish museums, such as national museums, folklore museums or art history museums. Thus, these early East Central European Jewish museums could be placed in the pan-European context of the phenomenon of the emergence of Jewish museums around the turn of the century on the one hand, and on the other hand within general national and European museological developments and debates of the time. Within the framework of the study, six museum projects will be analysed as examples, which emerged between 1906 and 1934 in the territorial borders of the Second Polish Republic and Czechoslovakia, in urban as well as rural areas.

PhD project, FSU Jena

Johann Wiede, M.A.

The aim of this dissertation in literary history is to open up an object of research that has not been specifically (or only peripherally) studied by historians, namely the literature of DPs - especially concentration camp survivors, former forced labourers and prisoners of war - in post-war Polish literature. They can be found, for example, in some texts by better-known Polish authors such as Tadeusz Nowakowski, Jerzy Stempowski or Tadeusz Borowski, but also in many cases in texts that have not yet been published or translated - such as DP camp newspapers, travelogues, columns in exile journalism.

This text material, which is deliberately broadly defined in literary and journalistic terms, will be examined on the basis of structural features, narrative devices and formal and thematic motifs and narratives. In doing so, I will draw on the preliminary work on testimonial and camp literature done primarily in Polish literary studies and take a comparative look at other DP literatures, especially Yiddish and Latvian "DP literature". It also looks at the subject of the DPs from a journalistic and non-journalistic point of view. The leading question in the analysis of the texts, which builds on a literary-historical and -theoretical classification, is whether specific writing styles, narrative forms and motivic commonalities can be constituted within Polish post-war literature and thus an independent Polish DP literature.

In a comparison with canonised Polish literature (including Tadeusz Borowski, Tadeusz Nowakowski and the texts of the Parisian 'Kultura'), the position of individual texts and authors is reassessed and placed in relation to lesser-known authors such as Irma Zembrzuska or Kazimierz Zenon with DP history. With three larger analytical sections on fictional, documentary and journalistic texts by and about DPs, as well as a reference to autobiographical texts written in the DP camps, the dissertation aims to provide the basis for further specific analyses and work on Polish and transnational DP literature.

Emotions under Extreme Conditions. Emotional worlds in Poland under German occupation, 1939-1945

Research Grant (DFG)

Dr Katarzyna Woniak

Two major research strands converge in the project: Occupation History and Emotion History. Both form the background for the guiding question of the emotional worlds of the ethnically heterogeneous population of Poland under German occupation. The project aims to fathom under which political and social circumstances certain emotions dominated and which actions resulted from them. Using private contemporary first-person documents (letters, notes and diaries), I will attempt to capture the emotions of the "occupied" population in their various manifestations. Based on the concept of the medievalist Barbara H. Rosenwein, the inhabitants of Poland during this period can be understood as "emotional communities". I assume that there were different "emotional communities" because, on the one hand, the occupation experiences of the individual ethnic groups differed greatly from one another and, on the other hand, even members of one and the same group experienced and processed identical events emotionally in very different ways. Thus, an emotional-historical analysis makes it possible to gain new insights into the occupation period.

Completed projects of our staff and members can be found here.