Folgende Projekte wurden am DHI in früheren Jahren bearbeitet.

• Research Perspective Ukraine
• Miloš Řezník: Regional Differentiation, Ethnicity and Historical Culture: Kashubia in the 20th Century
• (De)Constructing Europe – EU-Scepticism in European Integration History
• Beata Jurkowicz: Europe's counter-movements. Eurosceptic interdependencies since the beginnings of European integration
• Olga Gontarska: Entangled History of the Eastern Enlargement. Change or Continuity of Euroscepticism
• Michael Zok: “No Sex Please, We are Catholic”. Reproduction and Partnership in the Area of Conflict between (De-)Secularisation and (De-)Privatisation of Religion in Ireland and Poland
• Łukasz Krzyżanowski: Rural communities in central Poland during the German occupation and the Holocaust
• Jaśmina Korczak-Siedlecka: Protestant farmers in early modern Poland – confessionalization of rural areas in Royal Prussia
• Research perspective Ukraine 2022-2023
• Zofia Wóycicka: Rescue of Jews during World War II in contemporary European museums
• Felix Ackermann: Laboratories of Modernity. Carceral statehood in Russian, Prussian, and Habsburg Prisons
• Ralf Meindl: In the Field of Tension between Ideology, Religion, Language and Regional Identity. The NSDAP in Warmia 1928-1945
• Joint research project “Dissolving Knowledge Boundaries”
• Dorota Woroniecka-Krzyżanowska: Geographies of Political Affinity and the Urban Space: Knowledge Relations between Polish People’s Republic and Iraq in Architecture and Planning'
• Mustafa Switat: Visualized Alliances and the Artworld – Knowledge Exchange between Polish People’s Republic and Arab Countries in the Field of Plastic Arts
• Dariusz Adamczyk: Moments of monetization, zones of commercialization, or fiscal currency landscapes? Silver distribution networks and societies in East Central Europe (800–1200)
• Sabine Stach: Original Ostblock? State Socialism in City Tourism in Eastern Central Europe
• Sabine Jagodzinski: Noble identities and cultures of representation in Royal Prussia in the 17th and 18th centuries
• Maciej Górny: Independences. The Reorganization of Eastern Central Europe in 1918: From Fact to Ritualization
• Maciej Górny: Space, People, and State. Geographical Concepts of the Redesign of East Central and Southeastern Europe 1914–1939
• Ruth Leiserowitz: Studying in 19th-century Europe. Interactions between transnational interdependence and national identity
• Karsten Holste: Urban politics in the Saxon-Polish Union. A microhistorical study of the Polish crown city of Fraustadt from a transnational perspective
• Jens Boysen: “Brothers in Arms” in the Soviet Glacis. The National People's Army of the GDR and the Polish People's Army of the People's Republic of Poland as national system carriers and allies in late real socialism (1968–1990)
• Urszula Zachara-Związek: The Habsburg Wives of Sigismund Augustus. Marrying Cultures – Clashing Cultures
• Iwona Dadej: Gender Order in Polish Scientific Structures 1890–1952. Changes, Continuities, and Discontinuities
• Katrin Stoll: Historiography and the public use of history in late modernity. Collective symbols and representations of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland
• Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska: The Reception of Historical Films in Germany and Poland
• Aleksandra Kmak-Pamirska: Podlasie and Lower Lusatia: Image and internalization in cultural and social discourse in the 19th and early 20th centuries
• Maria Cieśla: An East Central European economic region as a sphere of activity for Jewish entrepreneurs in the 18th century
• Almut Bues: Main project: Religion and Politics in Central Europe. Poland-Lithuania and the Roman Curia in the Early Modern Period
• Dariusz Adamczyk: Silver and Power. Long-distance trade, tributes, and the formation of Piast rule in a Northeast European perspective, ca. 800-1100 (2010-2014)

The Max Weber Foundation (MWS) supports Ukrainian scientists who have fled their country with scholarships. This initiative is being implemented by the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, one of the ten institutes of the MWS. The institute's research facilities, library, and office space are now available to enable Ukrainian historians and colleagues from related disciplines to continue their academic work under the current conditions. The program, which in its first phase will fund three-month research stays at the DHI in Warsaw, envisages further short- and long-term prospects. Some aspects of the research perspective on Ukraine were already developed at the DHIW three years ago.

Dr. Olena Bagro, independent scholar, Kyiv

Military Flexibility in the Borderlands. Transfer of knowledge, technologies, and practices during the Polish-Ottoman War in the second half of the 17th century

Military flexibility in the borderlands. Transfer of knowledge, technologies, and practices during the Polish-Ottoman War in the second half of the 17th century Ms. Bagro is dedicated to military history, using the example of Polish-Lithuanian fortifications. She is investigating castles in Podolia, which emerged at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries as a network of castles forming a unique defense system on the border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Later, this was also used by the Cossacks. However, it is not known how the earlier fortifications were improved at the same time, in the 17th century. Did their redesign meet the new challenges of the time? Were only selective repairs carried out to restore the old patterns? And were they still relevant in the second half of the 17th century? The aim of the research project is to reconstruct the use of the fortifications in Podolia during this period. On the one hand, the military potential of the old fortifications in the new reality of war in the second half of the 17th century is analyzed, and on the other hand, Ms. Bagro traces the adaptation of the fortresses for use by various armies, such as the Polish-Lithuanian, Ottoman, and Cossack armies. The main objective of the project is to explain why fortifications that had long proven their effectiveness in defending borders were quickly conquered during the Polish-Ottoman War of 1672–1676.

Dr. Olha Barvinok, Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University

The Tyszkiewicz family in the context of Polish-Ukrainian history in the 18th and 19th centuries

The Tyszkiewicz family is one of the few old families of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility that not only managed to maintain its social position for centuries, but also rose to become powerful. The entry of the Tyszkiewicz family into the community of magnates led to the formation of a clientele who were assigned certain tasks and duties and were responsible for property and legal transactions. In addition, members of the Tyszkiewicz family held important positions in central and local government and in the army, and played an important role in the development of the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian lands, often directly influencing the course of important historical events. In addition to their active social and political activities, members of the noble family were also prominently involved in the educational and cultural life of the regions in which they lived. Ms. Barvinok's research focuses, among other things, on documenting the most important stages of the political careers of members of the family and their socio-political significance. She is also interested in the composition and formation of the most important land complexes belonging to the Tyszkiewicz family, as well as the mechanisms for the emergence of magnate latifundia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Dr. Anastassia Bozhenko, Karazin University, Kharkiv

The anthropology of industrial heritage in the monobranch cities of Ukraine

The transition to the post-industrial age raises challenges for industrial heritage. The category of “uncomfortable heritage” (MacDonald) could be applied here in the sense of totalitarian regimes. In her project, Ms. Bozhenko focuses on the intangible aspects of industrial heritage, i.e., work practices, everyday life, ways of life, and memories of the industrial past. The districts of ChTZ (Kharkiv) and Nowa Huta (Krakow) serve as examples. First, the respective industrial topographies are examined. Also relevant are any connections between Soviet and Polish architects and the dissemination of ideas about the “socialist city.” Among other things, she asks to what extent the topography of socialist cities influenced everyday practices and whether industrial everyday practices differed in the Soviet Union and the socialist states. She also analyzes official propaganda on the ‘industrial way of life’ using visual sources. Ms. Bozhenko researches memories of the industrial past in museum exhibitions, popular culture, and contemporary art. In addition, she explores how intangible industrial heritage is understood today. Do nostalgia or rejection prevail, or are there also processes of rethinking?

Tetiana Kovalenko

The NKVD's “Polish operation” in 1937 and 1938

This research project is dedicated to questions that have been neglected in historiography in connection with the so-called “Polish operation” of the NKVD in 1937-1938, which was part of the policy of the Great Terror and the campaign of extermination against the Polish population in the territory of the USSR in connection with the introduction of repression based on ethnic principles.

Previous research has focused primarily on the general description and local course of the NKVD's “Polish operation.” The aim of the project is to answer the question of how the arrest of a person and their classification as an “enemy of the people” affected the fate of families. The Second Polish Republic's attitude toward information about the “Polish operation” will also be examined. In addition, the question of collective memory of these events in today's Ukraine will be addressed. The diversity of research questions requires the use of tools from various fields: political history, social history, and the history of everyday life, as well as collective memory research and discourse analysis. The research will be based on documents from Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, and Russian archives. These will help shed light on the social consequences of the terror, which may be important for discussions on memory politics and appropriate commemoration of the innocent victims.

Dr. Olena Sokalska, University of Economics and Law “KROK,” Kiev

Prison reforms in Poland (late 18th to 19th century): The Western penal tradition and the original national model

The aim of the project is to analyze the emergence of ideas for the penal system in European countries, from the emergence of the concept of penal justice to the emergence of the science of penal justice in the second half of the 19th century. The study will also examine the implementation of the American model of penal justice in different national contexts, such as Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, the Russian Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy and its provinces in the 19th century. The study is based on archival sources, legal texts, and works by penitentiary experts (theorists and practitioners) of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as existing histories of the penal system. This year, particular research interest has focused on the influence of Western ideas on the penal system and Western practices of penal enforcement on prison reform in Poland during the period of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, as well as in the Ukrainian lands as part of the Rzeczpospolita, the Russian Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy. These are considered part of imperial policy, but also in the context of a pan-European reform movement.

Dr. Larysa Zherebtsova, University of Dnipro

The customs system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: sources for study

The starting point for the research is the observation that the Lithuanian registers contain 17 different types of records that provide information about the customs system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This diversity of documents indicates the absence of specific documentation regulating the activities of the customs service in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They also prove that the customs service itself was still in the process of being established. The main objective of the project is to produce a monograph based on the previously submitted dissertation on “The emergence of customs in the Ukrainian territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: sources and methods.” The chronological scope of the study ranges from the end of the 15th century to the Union of Lublin in 1569. Further research in Polish archives and libraries will expand knowledge on individual aspects of the customs system. Among other things, it deals with the powers of the treasurer over customs officials and the customs service, the conditions for tax-free transport of goods and conditions for exemption from customs duties, the ethnic affiliation of customers, changes in customs rates under foreign policy influences, and other legal regulations.

Researcher: Miloš Řezník

In the research, through the pluralization and hybridization of the network of relations between
collective belonging and personal identity, increased attention is paid to the forms of identification that
appear as transitional or hybrid forms of traditional types. In this context, research on European movements
between territoriality (regionality) and ethnicity in various disciplines undergo a significant intensification:
Formerly marginal cases and side issues become central subjects around which new potentials, and
corresponding practices, for researching discourses of identity and territoriality can be developed.
The project links up with previous research on territorial discourses and ethnic-regional movement,
and develops it further. Its central subject is the “inner” regionalization and differentiation of the discourses
of home country and territory in the Kashubian-Pomeranian movement and culture of the 20th century.
Through these means, the research avoids concentrating on the Kashubian ethnic-linguistic movement in a
narrow sense; instead it deals with the movement’s strongly regionalist components that open out beyond the
borders of the ethnic group. It enquires into how individual parts and sites can be differentiated in the context
of diverse concepts of home country: What structural, geographical, cultural and historical aspects were used
to regionalize the homeland? With what symbols, values, functions, signs and other connotations were they
put into connection with each other and what identifying functions did they take on in the context of the
Kashubian-Pomeranian discourse? Where is their entitativity constituted? The interest here is more on the
longer-term tendencies.

The core objective of the project is combined with a historical culture perspective in its broader
sense. The researchers ask how the discursive regionalization processes are carried out and co-shaped by
historical reception, that is, how the “endogenous” Kashubian-Pomeranian regionalities are underpinned by
the historical discourse and in what identificatory or functional frame of reference they are located as
regionalities.

The chronological emphasis is on the period between the beginning of the 20th century (formation of
the Young Kashubian movement) and the 1960s (new institutionalization and transition to regionalist
Kashubian-Pomeranian formula), that is, beyond the caesuras of 1914/18 and 1939/45, with an outlook to the
later decades of the 20th and 21st centuries. Kashubia, Pomerelia/Pomerania and the Kashubians are treated
in the project as a concrete heuristic and empirical case, with reference to which questions of transregional
and comparative research can be researched.

This research project embeds the ideal of European Union cohesion in the history of skepticism toward Europe. On the one hand, this skepticism has conditioned and limited European unification from the outset; on the other hand, it has created its own forms of cohesion in Europe. While the field of research is currently dominated by political science analyses focusing on the recent past, this project combines historical, sociological, and political science approaches to create an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. The aim is to explain Euroscepticism in its various forms as the result of the clash between transnational, mutually reinforcing, and mutually obstructing ideas about Europe. The three-year research project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and began its work on April 1, 2021. It is being carried out as a joint project by the DHI London, DHI Rome, DHI Warsaw, and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

(De)Constructing Europe Blog: https://europeresist.hypotheses.org/

Regular research shows that the vast majority of Poles have a positive attitude toward the European Union. A survey conducted in November 2020 for the daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita showed that 81.8% of Poles would have voted in favor of Poland remaining in the European Union in a referendum. Eleven percent of those surveyed said they would vote to leave the EU (7.9% answered “I don't know/difficult to say”). Nevertheless, Eurosceptic voices are a constant feature of Polish political debate. The aim of this analysis is to explore the sources of Euroscepticism. For this reason, the environment of the democratic opposition in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1980s and the influence of various opposition groups on Polish foreign policy after 1989 are analyzed.

Politicians who had begun their political activity in the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarność” (NSZZ Solidarność) founded in 1980 and in the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) established after June 1976 played a fundamental role after the democratic change in the 1990s. It should be emphasized that the geopolitical situation influenced opposition activists, who focused on internal problems and did not prioritize foreign policy. Nevertheless, in order to diagnose the sources of Polish Euroscepticism among the post-Solidarity elites, the position of NSZZ Solidarność on issues of domestic and foreign policy is thoroughly analyzed.At this point, it should be noted that the opposition in the People's Republic of Poland was very diverse in terms of ideas. However, the contestation of the political and economic system and dependence on the Soviet Union was the common element and at the same time the unifying factor. Opposition activists acknowledged this in publications that appeared in the second circulation or in the émigré media.

There is no doubt that the opposition at that time was influenced by the Paris-based magazine Kultura, which was an independent international platform for debate for émigré intellectuals, opposition activists working in the People's Republic of Poland, and all those who valued freedom of expression, human rights, and democracy. It was in the magazine Kultura (No. 10/409, 1981) that Jan Józef Lipski's famous essay “Two Homelands – Two Patriotisms” (“Dwie ojczyzny – dwa patriotyzmy. Uwagi o megalomanii narodowej i ksenofobii Polaków”) appeared for the first time. In his essay, the author emphasized the need for reconciliation between Poles, Germans, and Ukrainians. The authors of the foreign policy of the Third Republic of Poland later referred to Jan Józef Lipski's concept, especially with regard to Poland's efforts to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures, which the reunified Federal Republic of Germany supported on an international scale. Undoubtedly, politicians who were committed to Poland's membership in the European Union were also advocates of cooperation with Germany, as they were aware that the path to the West required the support of the German government and the creation of permanent instruments of bilateral cooperation. On the contrary, politicians who opposed the consolidation of German-Polish relations also spoke out against integration with the European Union. An excellent example of this is the figure of Szczecin opposition activist Marian Jurczyk. He was a signatory of the August Agreements, participated in the First Provincial Assembly of Delegates of NSZZ “Solidarność” in Gdańsk, was a member of the Provincial Commission, and later a critic of Lech Wałęsa. For this reason, he founded a rival organization, “Solidarność 80.” While his fellow opposition activists in the 1990s were shaping the framework of Polish foreign policy and loudly articulating their Euro-Atlantic aspirations, Jurczyk disapproved of Poland's efforts to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures. He was opposed to deepening German-Polish cooperation and, at the end of his political career, he joined the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland, a Eurosceptic group that united farmers. The Self-Defense criticized the accession treaty negotiated by Leszek Miller's government, which did not include a ban on the sale of arable land to foreigners.

During the process of reconciliation with Germany, the role of the Catholic Church as a pioneer of German-Polish dialogue cannot be ignored. Initially, the episcopate was skeptical about Poland's membership in the European Union because it feared the secularization of society and the rejection of Christian values. Its attitude toward European integration only developed in the second half of the 1990s. Nevertheless, many Catholic clergy were still opposed to the EU and gathered around them anti-European politicians, both those who had begun their political activity in the People's Republic of Poland and the younger generations.

The symbol of division within the democratic opposition during the People's Republic of Poland is the Round Table, i.e., the platform for dialogue between the authorities, the opposition, and the Catholic Church at that time. During the debates, differences emerged regarding the shaping of Poland's domestic and foreign policy. However, the negative consequences of political and economic change sealed this division. The opponents of the Round Table agreements were mostly politicians who did not participate in the debates or tried to deny their role in the events of that time. They had a negative attitude toward Poland's membership in the European Union. However, politicians who consider the round table debates a success are also positive about Euro-Atlantic structures and emphasize the need for German-Polish cooperation within the EU and beyond.

Since the aim of the project is to explore Polish Euroscepticism, the project also analyzes the position of politicians from the democratic opposition in the People's Republic of Poland in the 1980s regarding Poland's role in international relations, as well as the development of their views under the influence of the decisions made at the Round Table and their position on the direction of the Republic of Poland's foreign policy. The statements made by politicians in the media, the program documents of the groups they represented, political declarations, and their impact on the public will be compared. The sources of division within the opposition itself, which were rooted in the Round Table agreements, will be subjected to in-depth analysis.

The main assumptions of the project are the historicization of Euroscepticism including a wide
range of "Eurosceptic" attitudes and the identification of ideas instrumentalized in the debate. The
aim is to mark actors (individual, collective and institutional) active in the debate and to
contextualize their statements (media, financial support, political networks). However, the key issue
will be identifying historical references (ideas, myths, and symbols), such as Polish messianism,
Polonia Antemurale Christianitatis, or "Betrayal of the West".

One of the research questions is how the various stages of the process of Poland's integration
with the European Union influenced the change of attitudes and to what extent this was connected
to the set of values promoted by the EU as an element of the European identity. The hypothesis
about the key role of the experience of foreign domination, which influenced the strengthening of
the attitude of reluctance towards any attempts to interfere in internal affairs, will be verified.
The important issue will be also the question of how the challenge of creating a narrative
about the shared European past has been an impetus for the development of Eurosceptic attitudes.
Therefore, the analysis of the debate on the House of European History (Brussels) and the Museum
of the Second World War in Poland permanent is considered.

The project's aim is to question current results in the field of Sociology of Religion that interpret
recent developments in Irish and Polish societies either as "secularisation" (the case of Ireland) or
"de-privatisation" (Poland). This is especially observable in the field of sexuality and sexual
politics. Comparing two societies with similarities in history and culture – the long dominance of
the Catholic Church, the agricultural character of society until the 1950s, processes of
modernisation in the second half of the 20th century –gives us a broader insight in the parameters
that led (or did not lead) to changes of values that are equated by Sociologists of Religion with the
above-mentioned theories. Therefore, the project is able to look at the relation between religion and
modernising societies from a new broader perspective and takes a look at long-term developments
focusing on discourses on reproduction and partnership. These two issues are not (as Ronald
Inglehart suggested) a “silent revolution,” but because of their controversial nature they can be
explicitly observed and therefore analysed. The developments in the Republic of Ireland are a good
example of how fast such a change of values can occur: It was only 35 years between the
referendum on the “unborn’s right to life” almost entirely banning abortion (1983) and the
legalisation of the procedure on a woman’s request (2018).

Using Foucauldian analysis of discourse, the project analyses constellations of power that
led to (the loss of) dominance in discourse of certain actors, e.g. the Catholic Church in Ireland and
Poland, in the second half of the 20th century. This is seen as one factor that allowed or hindered a
change of values. The project analyses a broad sample of source and its contents to identify
discursive rules and limits. This analysis of discourse has two aims: First, its aim is to analyse the
preconditions leading to a shift in power and hegemony between the different actors as participants
in this specific discourse. Second, closely connected to above-mentioned shift of power, the
analysis aims to detect factors that enabled to widen or narrow the discursive limits influencing the
change of values.

Furthermore, the project reconstructs the impact of these discourses on the society using
empirical materials (statistics on abortion, divorce, and birth rate). In general, it focuses on periods
of discursive condensation (e.g. social and legal debates on abortion, marriage, family,
contraception etc.) and on periods of “accelerated modernisation” after 1945 (e.g. the 1970s and
1990s). One further aspect in the analysis are the discussions on eve of the countries’ entry into the
EC/EU (1973/2004) that led to conflicts between “progressive (pro-EU)” and “traditionalist
(nationalist)” forces; the latter fearing the ousting of “traditional values” by a “godless”
supranational European entity.

The aim of the project is to conduct a study of everyday life and social relations in villages and small towns in Poland during the German occupation and the Holocaust (1939–1945, Radom District of the General Government). The main source material for the project is archival material that was created during investigations and trials conducted in Poland in the second half of the 1940s and in the 1950s.

From a bottom-up perspective, the project examines the strategies developed by local communities to cope with a life marked by constant uncertainty, fear, and a sense of threat from terror and violence—perpetrated by the occupiers, but often also by partisans and neighbors—to cope with reality, the rules of the occupying power, and the hierarchical structure. The project is a continuation of research conducted between 2018 and 2021 at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The researcher analyzes, among other things, copies of documents mainly from the archives of the branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish People in Kielce.

The First Polish Republic was a country with many languages, cultures, and confessions. Villages were also multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multi-confessional. Royal Prussia, especially Vistula Pomerania, was inhabited by German-speaking peasants who converted to the Evangelical Lutheran faith in the 16th and 17th centuries. The main focus of the project is the process of confessionalization in these areas. This is not understood as the establishment of an institutional system, but as a fundamental social process that goes beyond the purely religious sphere and shapes the ways of thinking and behaving, the cultural norms, and the everyday life of the faithful.

Previous research on the Reformation in Poland has focused primarily on religious changes in the cities, among the nobility, and the intellectual elite. The attitude of the peasants toward the Reformation has been neglected, but the ideas of Luther and other religious reformers also reached rural areas. A particularly interesting case is that of the peasants of Żuławy Malborskie, who adopted Lutheranism without any outside inspiration. They alone were responsible for the functioning of religious communities, appointed pastors, built churches, and sought religious privileges at the royal court. Protestantism became the foundation of their identity, social system, and cultural norms; they defended it despite constant persecution. The research project aims to investigate why the Żuławy peasants decided to change their religion, how Protestantism influenced their social life and culture, and what the characteristics of the rural Reformation are.

The situation was different in the villages under the rule of large Prussian cities: Gdańsk, Elbląg, and Toruń. With the introduction of the Reformation, the magistrates took over the tasks of the ecclesiastical authorities, which enabled them to introduce Protestantism in the rural communities as well. The ambitions of the urban authorities went beyond theological and institutional reforms—they sought to “educate” the peasants to become devout Lutherans and to reform morals, customs, forms of communication, and interpersonal relationships in the countryside in the spirit of a renewed Protestant religiosity (“Christianization” of folk culture). Historiography tends to portray the peasantry as passive victims of the feudal lords' confessional politics. The project attempts to challenge this approach by analyzing situations of cooperation with the authorities and the clergy or of active resistance to confessionalization.

Dr. Olena Bagro, independent researcher, Kyiv

Military flexibility in borderlands. Transfer of knowledge, technologies, and practices during the Polish-Ottoman War in the second half of the 17th century

Military flexibility in borderlands. Transfer of knowledge, technologies, and practices during the Polish-Ottoman War in the second half of the 17th century Ms. Bagro focuses on military history using the example of Polish-Lithuanian fortifications. She is investigating castles in Podolia, which emerged at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries as a network of castles forming a unique defense system on the border of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Later, this was also used by the Cossacks. However, it is not known how the earlier fortifications were improved at the same time, in the 17th century. Did their redesign meet the new challenges of the time? Were only selective repairs carried out to restore the old patterns? And were they still relevant in the second half of the 17th century? The aim of the research project is to reconstruct the use of the fortifications in Podolia during this period. On the one hand, the military potential of the old fortifications in the new reality of war in the second half of the 17th century is analyzed, and on the other hand, Ms. Bagro traces the adaptation of the fortresses for use by various armies, such as the Polish-Lithuanian, Ottoman, and Cossack armies. The main objective of the project is to explain why fortifications that had long proven their effectiveness in defending borders were quickly conquered during the Polish-Ottoman War of 1672–1676.

Dr. Olha Barvinok, Pavlo Tychyna Uman State Pedagogical University

The Tyszkiewicz family in the context of Polish-Ukrainian history in the 18th and 19th centuries

The Tyszkiewicz family is one of the few old families of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility that not only managed to maintain its social position for centuries, but also rose to become powerful. The entry of the Tyszkiewicz family into the community of magnates led to the formation of a clientele who were assigned certain tasks and duties and were responsible for property and legal transactions. In addition, members of the Tyszkiewicz family held important positions in central and local government and in the army, and played an important role in the development of the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian lands, often directly influencing the course of important historical events. In addition to their active social and political activities, members of the noble family were also prominently involved in the educational and cultural life of the regions in which they lived. Ms. Barvinok's research focuses, among other things, on documenting the most important stages of the political careers of members of the family and their socio-political significance. She is also interested in the composition and formation of the most important land complexes belonging to the Tyszkiewicz family, as well as the mechanisms for the emergence of magnate latifundia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Dr. Anastassia Bozhenko, Karazin University Kharkiv

The anthropology of industrial heritage in the monobranch cities of Ukraine

The transition to the post-industrial age means that we must address the challenges posed by industrial heritage. The category of “uncomfortable heritage” (MacDonald) could be applied here in the sense of the totalitarian regime. In her project, Ms. Bozhenko focuses on the intangible aspects of industrial heritage, i.e., work practices, everyday life, ways of life, and memories of the industrial past. The districts of ChTZ (Kharkiv) and Nowa Huta (Krakow) serve as examples. First, the respective industrial topographies are examined. Also relevant are any connections between Soviet and Polish architects and the dissemination of ideas about the “socialist city.” Among other things, she asks to what extent the topography of socialist cities influenced everyday practices and whether industrial everyday practices differed in the Soviet Union and the socialist states. She also analyzes official propaganda on the ‘industrial way of life’ using visual sources. Ms. Bozhenko researches memories of the industrial past in museum exhibitions, popular culture, and contemporary art. In addition, she explores how the intangible industrial heritage is understood today. Do nostalgia or rejection prevail, or are there also processes of rethinking?

Tetiana Kovalenko

The NKVD's “Polish operation” in 1937 and 1938

This research project is dedicated to questions that have been neglected in historiography in connection with the so-called “Polish operation” of the NKVD in 1937-1938, which was part of the policy of the Great Terror and the campaign of extermination against the Polish population in the territory of the USSR in connection with the introduction of repression based on ethnic principles.

Previous research has focused primarily on the general description and local course of the NKVD's “Polish operation.” The aim of the project is to answer the question of how the arrest of a person and their classification as an “enemy of the people” affected the fate of families. The Second Polish Republic's attitude toward information about the “Polish operation” will also be examined. In addition, the question of collective memory of these events in today's Ukraine will be addressed. The diversity of research questions requires the use of tools from various fields: political history, social history, and the history of everyday life, as well as collective memory research and discourse analysis. The research will be based on documents from Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian, and Russian archives. These will help shed light on the social consequences of the terror, which may be important for discussions on memory politics and appropriate commemoration of the innocent victims.

Dr. Olena Sokalska, University of Economics and Law “KROK,” Kiev

Prison reforms in Poland (late 18th to 19th century): The Western penal tradition and the original national model

The aim of the project is to analyze the emergence of ideas for the penal system in European countries, from the emergence of the concept of penal justice to the emergence of the science of penal justice in the second half of the 19th century. The study will also examine the implementation of the American model of penal justice in different national contexts, such as Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, the Russian Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy and its provinces in the 19th century. The study is based on archival sources, legal texts, and works by penitentiary experts (theorists and practitioners) of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as existing histories of the penal system. This year, particular research interest has focused on the influence of Western ideas on the penal system and Western practices of penal enforcement on prison reform in Poland during the period of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Poland, as well as in the Ukrainian lands as part of the Rzeczpospolita, the Russian Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy. These are considered part of imperial policy, but also in the context of a pan-European reform movement.

Dr. Larysa Zherebtsova, University of Dnipro

The customs system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: sources for study

The starting point for the research is the observation that the Lithuanian registers contain 17 different types of records that provide information about the customs system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This diversity of documents indicates the absence of specific documentation regulating the activities of the customs service in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. They also prove that the customs service itself was still in the process of being established. The main objective of the project is to produce a monograph based on the previously submitted dissertation on “The emergence of customs in the Ukrainian territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: sources and methods.” The chronological scope of the study ranges from the end of the 15th century to the Union of Lublin in 1569. Further research in Polish archives and libraries will expand knowledge on individual aspects of the customs system. Among other things, it deals with the powers of the treasurer vis-à-vis customs officials and the customs service, the conditions for tax-free transport of goods and conditions for exemption from customs duties, the ethnic affiliation of customers, changes in customs rates under foreign policy influences, and other legal regulations.

Over the last two decades, a remarkable number of museums dedicated specifically to people who
saved Jews during World War II have been established all over Europe. Further such museums are
currently under construction in Italy and the Czech Republic. These museums are an expression of
the growing international interest in this aspect of the history of the Holocaust. On European level,
an increasing emphasis is being put on commemorating people who rescued Jews. For example,
member-states of the Council of Europe signed a Solemn tribute to the “Righteous” of Europe in
2007, and the European Parliament established the European Day of the Righteous in 2012.
Increasing interest in the topic can also be seen on national level. During the last few years, a
number of European states, including Belgium, France, and Switzerland, have introduced legal
regulations, established holidays, and organized official ceremonies honoring their Righteous.
The topic of Jewish rescue is not only of historical relevance, but also of high educational
value. It can help to convey knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust but also to promote
tolerance, human solidarity and civil courage. At the same time however, the “Righteous” can easily
be misused for political purposes. Such commemorative initiatives can also be interpreted as
attempts to neutralize uncomfortable debates about the participation of members of bystander
societies in the murder of Jews.

The research will include the following case studies:
1) Sugihara House in Kaunas/Lithuania (2001)
2) Dimiter Peshev Museum in Kyustendil/Bulgaria (2003, refurbished 2013)
3) Museum Otto Weidt’s Workshop for the Blind in Berlin (2006)
4) Silent Heroes Memorial Centre in Berlin (2008, refurbished 2018, currently under
reconstruction)
5) The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilna (permaent exhibition: Rescued Lithuanian
Jewish Child Tells about Shoah, 2009)
6) Žanis Lipke Memorial in Riga (2012/13)
7) Lieu de Mémoire au Chambon-sur-Lignon/France (2013)
8) Tadeusz Pankiewicz’s Pharmacy in Kraków (1983/last refurbishment 2013)
9) Żabińskis‘ Villa in Warsaw (2015)
10)The Ulma Museum of Poles Saving Jews during World War II in Markowa/Poland (2016)
11) Villa Emma Nonatola Foundation/Italy (exhibition „Jewish Children of Villa Emma“, 2014,
currently a new museum is under construction)
12) Memorial of the Shoah and Oskar Schindler, Brněne/Czech Republic (under construction)
Wóycicka will compare how the above-mentioned museums curate and present their stories. She
will examine both the content and the form of the exhibitions and how these are influenced by
global trends in the development of World War II and Holocaust memorial museums. She will also
partly reconstruct the process of creating and negotiating the narratives of these exhibitions, the
public debates around them and the wider socio-political context in which they were established.
The underlying research question is how to explain this Europe-wide "fashion” for the "Righteous"?
Can it be seen as an expression of the “cosmopolitization of memory” that D. Levy and N. Sznaider
foretold at the beginning of the millennium? Or maybe in this case one should refer to what S.
Macdonald calls a "glocalisation" of memory, by which she means the “local reworking of global
patterns”? Wóycicka’s work is also meant to contribute to a deeper reflection on how to deal with
the topic of Jewish rescue in an appropriate manner, a reflection which is urgently needed in Poland
and other parts of Europe.

The project re-examines the history of incarceration as a tool of imperial rule in Central Europe. It
offers a new perspective on how, throughout the 19th century, Russia, Prussia, and the Habsburg
Empire incorporated the lands of the Polish crown and the Lithuanian Grand Duchy and established
new prisons as spaces of carceral statehood. By comparing the modernization of prison regimes in
three different imperial contexts, the project gives an insight into the relationship between imperial
rule and incarceration. The comparison aims to show a hybrid of practices used in establishing new
penal regimes through state coercion, practices that also confronted and responded to regional,
linguistic, and religious differences within the partitioned lands.

A close look into the changing everyday practice of incarceration reveals not only the
dilemmas of modernization policies in Poland and Lithuania, but also a story of multiple failures.
Both the contemporary public critique of the status quo and later government reform plans
formulated a vision to overcome the structural problems of prison regimes. These problems
included a lack of resources, a constantly growing number of inmates, and the unintended
consequences of bringing together men and woman with various sentences in a limited space. The
project asks to what extent those who were in charge of managing and improving incarceration
realised the actual shortcomings of their institutions. Despite their in-depth knowledge, they upheld
the discourse of reform in regards to the prisoners as individuals and the prison as an institution.
Hence, modernization was presented as an ambiguous process that aimed to implement progress,
and was reflected by the actors as utopian, incomplete, and problematic.

Laboratories of Modernity includes the Polish and Lithuanian lands in a global history of
reform thought. As the carceral regime was based initially on religious practice, the partitioning
empires had to acknowledge the diversity of their holdings as they redesigned prisons. The project
examines architectural ideas, and how Russian, Prussian, and Habsburg bureaucrats addressed the
religious otherness of their new subjects inside prison walls. It also discusses, for the first time, the
broad variety of practical options for managing religious differences within prisons, such as the
division of a chapel into two separate floors to allow Roman-Catholics and Russian-Orthodox to
pray concurrently in Vilna prison. Other ideas included the reappropriation of monastic complexes
as multi-religious spaces. The project shows how the simultaneous use of the same church by
various congregations created numerous conflicts inside and outside the prison.

In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, East Prussia was characterized by a highly differentiated regionalism. In parts of the province, Polish or Lithuanian was predominantly spoken, and Ermland formed a Catholic island in an otherwise almost exclusively Protestant country. On this basis, each of the sub-regions had developed its own culture, which often differed considerably from that of its neighbors. This is particularly evident in Ermland. This highly heterogeneous area was defined by the historical borders of the Prince-Bishopric of Ermland, which rejected the Reformation in 1525 and thus became a Catholic enclave in the Protestant Duchy of Prussia. Its population had immigrated in several waves from German-speaking areas and from Poland since the Middle Ages, which is why the southern part of Ermland was bilingual.

Against this backdrop, Ermland was a phenomenon sui generis even within the heterogeneous East Prussia. Its Catholic foundation also shaped the political behavior of the Ermlanders—while the Catholic Center Party played no role in the other regions of East Prussia, it was elected by a large majority in Ermland. The opposite was true for the NSDAP. While the Protestant rural part of East Prussia was virtually prototypical of the socio-political profile of a region where Hitler's party was successful, Ermland was just as prototypical of the voter milieu that the NSDAP was unable to penetrate. Both the election results and some acts of resistance after 1933 confirm this.

The NSDAP went to great lengths to transform Ermland into a stronghold of National Socialism like the rest of East Prussia. Based on this, the project examines the interaction between NSDAP officials, the clergy, Catholic association activists, and the population of Ermland as a case study of the attempt by a regime with totalitarian ideological claims and its most important organ to subjugate or win over a resistant region. The thesis to be examined is that although the National Socialist organs succeeded in winning over parts of the population, overall it was precisely the attempt to replace regional culture and identity with a new, supraregional loyalty to the Führer and ideology in all areas of life that led to a strengthening of regional ties and identifications.

To put this into context, two perspectives that go beyond 1945 will also be considered. First, the extent to which the separation of the expellees from Ermland from the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen (East Prussian Association) and the BdV can also be attributed to the increased regionalization of the interwar period will be examined. The working hypothesis here is that Ermland was constructed as a kind of positive counterpoint to the widespread image in the Federal Republic of Germany that East Prussia had been such a strongly Nazified province that its “loss” and the flight and expulsion of its inhabitants were to be seen as just punishment for this orientation. On the other hand, it will be shown that the Catholic character of Ermland and its Polish-speaking population made it easier for the Polish resettlers after 1945 to follow the official historical interpretation of the People's Republic of Poland, which postulated that Ermland was historically Polish territory and had returned to the motherland as a result of the border shifts at the end of the Second World War.

The study will examine the identity constructs and positions of the actors, describe the interdependencies and dynamics between them, and finally analyze their consequences for the regionalization processes in Ermland as well as their contemporary and later perception. The project thus closes a gap in identity history research, which has so far prevented a comprehensive view of the regional development of East Prussia and the classification of post-war discourses of legitimation.

As part of the joint research project “Dissolving Knowledge Boundaries,” the DHI Warsaw, the DHI Moscow, and the Orient Institute Beirut are conducting a joint research project entitled “Relations in the Ideoscape: Middle Eastern Students in the Eastern Bloc (1950s to 1991).” The project examines, from a cultural and social history perspective, knowledge relations between the societies of the former Eastern Bloc and the Middle East during the Cold War, when thousands of students flocked to universities and other educational institutions of “real existing socialism.” Students from Arab countries, Iran, and Turkey played a significant role in this process, receiving scholarships to study at universities in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc—particularly in the fields of engineering, medicine, and natural sciences, but also in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Although scholarship programs at that time were seen as a form of exporting so-called “communist-socialist modernity,” the flow of ideas was by no means one-sided, as intellectual exchange also had a demonstrable influence on the development of knowledge and science in the countries of the Eastern Bloc. The main objective of this interdisciplinary project is therefore to understand the resulting knowledge relations from the perspective of students from the Middle East and North Africa, to reconstruct the development of their career paths, and to determine the influence that the knowledge and experience they gained had on their future destinies and the development of the disciplines they represent. The project is interdisciplinary in its methodology and is based on both archival research and biographical interviews with former participants in scientific exchange programs. 

The project is supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Visualized Alliances and the Artworld – Knowledge Exchange between the Polish People's Republic and Arab Countries in the Field of Plastic Arts

Editor: Mustafa Switat

Like other countries in the Eastern Bloc, the People's Republic of Poland responded to the UN's appeal to provide educational assistance to developing countries, i.e., countries in the so-called Third World. These included countries in the Middle East and North Africa. As a result, the education of Arab students at Polish universities became one of the most important components of scientific and technical cooperation between socialist Poland and those Arab countries that had a socialist system of government or whose rulers sympathized with such a system. The first students from these countries arrived in Poland in the late 1950s. They mainly chose to study medicine, technical subjects, and the humanities.

There were relatively few students of artistic subjects, although there was a great shortage of qualified specialists in this field in Arab countries. The development of the arts went hand in hand with the modernization process in Arab countries, during which they gradually gained their independence. As an important element of local culture, art played a key role in the formation of national identity. Progress in this area was promoted by state institutions, which was reflected, among other things, in the awarding of foreign scholarships under international bilateral agreements. As a result, citizens of these countries were able to complete their studies in Poland thanks to scholarships awarded by their own governments (as in Syria, for example) or by the Polish state (for Moroccans, for example) and, upon returning to their home countries, work as lecturers at art academies or other cultural institutions. They formed the teaching staff that produced the next generation of painters, graphic artists, and sculptors.

The aim of the project is to investigate the transfer of knowledge in the field of fine arts—painting, sculpture, and graphic arts—between the People's Republic of Poland and the Arab countries from the late 1950s to the beginning of the Polish transformation (1989). The investigation of intellectual transfer will be based on oral history methodology combined with sociological and anthropological interpretation. The main actors in the exchange of knowledge were students of art history and other artistic disciplines from the Arab world studying at Polish universities and faculties of art academies (or other faculties with an artistic orientation) and their professors. Biographies of the alumni will be compiled on the basis of archival materials, personal documents, and qualitative interviews with former students and representatives of the art scene. Their analysis will provide information about their active participation and influence on artistic life in their home countries and the Arab world. For this reason, the project focuses on illustrating alliances in the field of fine arts at the individual, national, and supraregional levels.

This project explores knowledge relations in the field of architecture and urban planning between the Polish People’s Republic and Iraq through a case study of the Department of Architecture, University of Mosul. Established in the academic year 1978/1979, the department faced significant shortages of local staff that led it to search for foreign lecturers to fill the gap. Throughout the 1980s, sixteen lecturers from the Faculty of Architecture, Technical University of Wroclaw, worked at the Department, contributed to the development of its program and educated the first generations of Mosuli architects. The project aims to unpack the knowledge relations that were formed through this academic collaboration and understand their legacy on both individual and institutional level.

Here, architectural education is approached as a form of knowledge production mediated by the relation between the instructor and the student. While the project explores both the what (knowledge) and the how (methods) of knowledge production, it focuses on the relations that transpired between the Iraqi students and Polish staff and on the experience of architectural education itself. It draws on social anthropology and history, combining the archival research in Iraq and Poland, with the analysis of available literary and academic sources and in-depth interviews with actors and witnesses of these interactions.

Like other countries in the Eastern Bloc, the People's Republic of Poland responded to the UN's appeal to provide educational assistance to developing countries, i.e., countries in the so-called Third World. These included countries in the Middle East and North Africa. As a result, the education of Arab students at Polish universities became one of the most important components of scientific and technical cooperation between socialist Poland and those Arab countries that had a socialist system of government or whose rulers sympathized with such a system. The first students from these countries arrived in Poland in the late 1950s. They mainly chose to study medicine, technical subjects, and the humanities.

There were relatively few students of artistic subjects, although there was a great shortage of qualified specialists in this field in Arab countries. The development of the arts went hand in hand with the modernization process in Arab countries, during which they gradually gained their independence. As an important element of local culture, art played a key role in the formation of national identity. Progress in this area was promoted by state institutions, which was reflected, among other things, in the awarding of foreign scholarships under international bilateral agreements. As a result, citizens of these countries were able to complete their studies in Poland thanks to scholarships awarded by their own governments (as in Syria, for example) or by the Polish state (for Moroccans, for example) and, upon returning to their home countries, work as lecturers at art academies or other cultural institutions. They formed the teaching staff that produced the next generation of painters, graphic artists, and sculptors.

The aim of the project is to investigate the transfer of knowledge in the field of fine arts—painting, sculpture, and graphic arts—between the People's Republic of Poland and the Arab countries from the late 1950s to the beginning of the Polish transformation (1989). The investigation of intellectual transfer will be based on oral history methodology combined with sociological and anthropological interpretation. The main actors in the exchange of knowledge were students of art history and other artistic disciplines from the Arab world studying at Polish universities and faculties of art academies (or other faculties with an artistic orientation) and their professors. Biographies of the alumni will be compiled on the basis of archival materials, personal documents, and qualitative interviews with former students and representatives of the art scene. Their analysis will provide information about their active participation and influence on artistic life in their home countries and the Arab world. For this reason, the project focuses on illustrating alliances in the field of fine arts at the individual, national, and supraregional levels.

The research project investigated whether the use of precious metals followed the logic of a homo politicus or rather that of a homo economicus. Was their use limited to an economy of prestige and gifts, symbolic communication, and long-distance trade, or did they also circulate in regional and local trade? How can the degree of monetization be measured, and when can commercialization be assumed? And finally, was monetization a linear process, or did it show more discontinuities than continuities? 

In order to take account of the complexity of historical development and avoid a monocausal or one-dimensional explanation, a set of indicators was developed to examine the respective configurations and parameters. The starting point is several hundred silver hoards and numerous individual coin finds from settlements, castle mounds, and burial grounds that were excavated or discovered by chance in Eastern Central Europe and date from the 9th to 12th centuries. The results of the neighboring disciplines of archaeology and cultural anthropology are incorporated and embedded in historical questions with the help of the database that has been created. Another component of the study reconstructs and contextualizes trans- and intercontinental trade networks in space and time. The aim is to make an interdisciplinary contribution to the analysis of both the forms of interaction and communication within the individual societies of Eastern Central Europe and the interrelationships and influences between different actors in Western Eurasia.

Link to publication

A look at today's city tourism offerings in Eastern Central Europe reveals many opportunities for travelers to engage with the legacy of state socialism. In addition to private and state museums, memorials, and theme parks, commercial tour operators offer special city tours, mostly in English, dedicated to “communism” and its material relics. In addition to experience-oriented “communist tours” in vintage cars, the increasingly popular “free walking tours” often focus on recent history.

Such guided city tours are the focus of this research project. With the guided tour, it turns to a basic element of tourism that promises to impart historical knowledge as well as entertainment and fun. Only here, so the idea goes, can those unfamiliar with the area gain access to places and information that would otherwise remain hidden from them. As a transcultural mediator, it is the tour guide's responsibility to select and interpret the local cultural heritage for the guests. According to the research hypothesis, the state socialism of Poland and Czechoslovakia must therefore be made accessible to the prior knowledge and expectations of paying guests from all over the world. Authenticity—the central point of reference in tourism—seems to play a role at various levels: The promise of authenticity offered by “communist heritage tours” refers to the material remains of the period before 1989 as well as to the tourist experience in the here and now.

Although numerous studies on various forms of popular history education have been conducted in German and Polish memory and history culture research over the past two decades, the commodification of history in tourism has been almost completely ignored. At most, studies (e.g., on the musealization of history) refer marginally to the significance of the international tourism industry. A conceptualization of the guided tour as a generator of concrete images of history and historical meaning has yet to be developed. This is where this research project comes in: Using the presentation of state socialism in commercial city tourism, it examines the functional mechanisms of historical narration in guided tours. What happens when history becomes the subject of a service in public space? How do the city's topography and the chosen route influence the narrative, and how do the tourists' desire for experience and their (visual) prior knowledge influence it? Which topics are addressed and which are left out? How can the “fictions of authenticity” (Pirker et al. 2010) that are at work here be described? And how can the feedback loop of tourist expectations, commodification, and history be conceptualized theoretically beyond the “tourist gaze” (Urry 1990)?

To answer these questions, we draw on classic approaches to tourism sociology and theoretical considerations on the concept of heritage. Based on the thesis that urban space itself influences the representation and appropriation of history, we plan to conduct case studies in three cities that differ greatly in terms of their architectural development under state socialism: Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava. The first step is to record and categorize the various offerings in order to then describe their narrative and performative characteristics. The empirical basis of the study consists of participatory observations and interviews with city guides and tour operators in the cities mentioned.

For the nobility of the early modern period, the representative presentation of their identity in terms of the location of person and gender as well as their significance and loyalty was existential, but not entirely straightforward in the region of Royal Prussia. During its incorporation into the Polish Crown (1454–1772), historical research attests to a certain autonomy and a resulting sense of national identity. Royal Prussia was economically heterogeneous, multilingual, multi-denominational, class-based, and urban, and was marked by a turbulent history of conflict. One can therefore also speak of overlapping regional categories of reference within the region. On the one hand, the nobility was an elite that – in competition or cooperation with urban elites in Gdańsk, Elbląg, and Toruń – was concerned with securing its material and legal position. Increasing prestige and genealogical and representative “public relations” were of fundamental importance in this regard. On the other hand, there were economic, confessional, and political differences within their group.

In this respect, the research area's questions about differentiation, integration, and demarcation are all the more important for the self-image and representational cultures of the noble families. Did a noble “regional identity” or a “cosmos of regional identities” (Bömelburg) emerge in Royal Prussia in visual, material, or performative representations? And if so, how did they function? What artistic and material cultural means did magnates and wealthy szlachta use to represent an imagined or real, regional or supraregional aristocratic consciousness? What traditions and experiences did the families draw on in doing so?

These questions for the region of the “other Prussia” (Friedrich) can be answered with the potential and sources of art and cultural studies. Until now, art historical work on the region has focused on artistic creation for the cities, citizens, churches, the court, or the Teutonic Order. However, there are still major gaps in our knowledge of the nobility and its artistic patronage, as well as the mutual influence of citizens and nobles in this area. This is undoubtedly due in part to the less than ideal source situation, as the aristocratic residences and their interiors were torn apart or destroyed. The project will therefore examine works of fine and applied arts and architecture that shaped the religious, memorial, and representative spaces of thought and function of influential aristocratic families. These include aristocratic residences with their artistic furnishings, churches, tombs, foundations, collections, etc. The objects themselves will be examined or, in the event of their loss, the traces they have left behind in inventories, letters, or descriptions.

Due to the diversity of media and historical origins, various methodological approaches are combined, such as research on material culture and cultural transfer, regional formation and spatial discourses with iconographic, functional-analytical, art-sociological, and reception-aesthetic approaches. The investigation takes into account factors such as the ramified family structures of the nobility, the strong urban influence, and the relationship to other regions. From a transregional perspective, the neighboring Duchy of Prussia, the similarly structured Lusatia during the Saxon-Polish Union, and areas of Crown Poland will therefore also be examined.

(until 2020)

On November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front of World War I for the first time in over four years. The Great War was over, and peace negotiations were soon to begin in Paris. In Eastern Central Europe, too, the newly formed or reborn states (such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia), as well as those that had been significantly enlarged (such as Romania) or significantly reduced (such as Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria), set the symbolic dates of their (re)founding close to that of November 11. However, the interpretations of these events varied greatly in international comparison and were also controversial in domestic politics. The specific choice of a date was the subject of political debate in each case. The politics of memory that emerged from these discussions was also marked by controversy. 

The theme of the project "Independences. The Reorganization of East Central Europe in 1918: From Fact to Ritualization" are the public debates that have developed around the history of the various states in East Central Europe's attainment of independence, as well as the processes of state and societal ritualization of this history. In addition to a memory politics perspective, the project will also address questions of the economization and mediatization of history.

The project aims to provide a comparative analysis of the use of history in memory politics and of historical controversies in the post-imperial space of Eastern Central Europe after 1918. The sources to be evaluated include daily press and other media, archival materials, school textbooks, published memoirs, and visual material from the above-mentioned time period and geographical area.

Subproject in Research Area 1 “Regionality and Region Formation”

(until the end of 2017)

Towards the end of the 19th century, a new direction developed in geography that sought to identify and analyze regions and their boundaries using an interdisciplinary methodology based on geography, ethnography, economics, ethnopsychology, and biology. What was new was not only the scientific method, but also the extensive nationalization of the subject. Under the influence of two prominent scientists, Paul Vidal de la Blache and Friedrich Ratzel, geographers increasingly tended to associate geographical spaces with the nation state.

The First World War paved the way for the practical implementation of the new spatial concepts. Ratzel's Swedish student Rudolf Kjellén interpreted the war as a struggle for survival between states, which he regarded as living organisms. From this perspective, Germany's central location made it vulnerable to attack from all sides. However, this unfavorable position could also be seen as an advantage: as an opportunity for dynamic expansion, which was to be achieved by resettling the non-German civilian population. Eastern Central and Southeastern Europe played a particularly important role in this worldview. In the course of the war, however, German geographers refrained from distinguishing between individual regions and nationalities in this area. Instead, they saw large spaces populated by amorphous masses of people, which in their eyes were essentially a wasteland waiting for a new master. The pronounced politicization of geography was evident during the Paris peace talks of 1918–1919. Geography suddenly appeared as the guardian of the expertise that would help shape the future of the world.

Similar approaches were further developed in the postwar works of Karl Haushofer and the entire German school of geopolitics. According to German geographers, the condition for the geographical coherence of a region was its economic independence and the harmony of its natural and cultural landscape. This perspective meant, among other things, that the borders running along rivers and mountain ranges were considered scientifically unfounded because they cut through natural regions and impaired the living space of their inhabitants. And, according to Haushofer, these erroneously drawn borders were the prerequisite for future wars. He preferred borders based on biological premises: on climate or plant geography. Haushofer repeatedly emphasized that even these “natural” borders were not actually lines on a map—or in the landscape—but rather battlefields between cultures and nationalities. The discrepancies between languages and cultures in a given area often prevented any clear division of space on the map.

Although German-speaking geography dominated this discourse until the second half of the First World War, the scientific landscape was thoroughly changed by the rapid development of political groupings in the smaller states and nations of Eastern Central and Southeastern Europe. During the war years, the experts working with these groups or with the agendas of the nation states proved to be at least equal partners to their German colleagues (who, from a group biographical perspective, were often their former teachers, which seems to be a particularly interesting feature of this competition). The Central and Southeastern European authors were particularly successful in science and scientifically based propaganda. They succeeded in influencing the spatial conception of “just borders.” Geographical regions played an important role in the science policy writings of experts from Central and Southeastern Europe. Their identification or discursive abolition served the purposes of national expansion, the integration of their own states, and at the same time the disintegration of neighboring states. The tension between the national perspective of the scientists and the regional problems of their research gives rise to an interesting history of transnational interdependence. 

The project “Space, People, and State: Geographical Concepts of the Redesign of East Central and Southeast Europe 1914–1939” analyzed the scientific and political writings of authors such as Eugeniusz Romer (Poland), Jovan Cvijić (Serbia), Stepan Rudnyćkyj (Ukraine), Albrecht Penck, Karl Haushoffer (Germany), Max Friederichsen, and Joseph Partsch, the Hungarian Pál Teleki, the Romanian Grigore Antipa, and the Slovenian Anton Melik were analyzed. The project combined a discursive analysis of published writings and archival materials with a visual analysis of maps.

Subproject in Research Area 3 “National Identity and Transnational Interdependence”

(2010–2016)

Warsaw, which became the national center of Poland after the November Uprising (1830/31) and developed into a rapidly growing metropolis in the second half of the 19th century, had highly diverse cultural landmarks. On the one hand, there were extremely strong ties to Paris and Brussels, the centers of the great emigration. On the other hand, the city and region had been administratively assigned to Russia since 1831 and, after 1863, incorporated into the Tsarist Empire as the Province of the Vistula. They were thus subject to cultural influences from St. Petersburg. Added to this were influences from connections that Warsaw citizens maintained with residents of other cities in the remaining Polish partition territories, especially in Poznań, Kraków, and Lviv. This already resulted in a wide range of opportunities for cultural contact. Which ones did the Polish residents prefer, which ones did the city's Jews prefer, and how did residents of third origins situate themselves? Even a first glance at the academic biographies of 19th-century Warsaw citizens shows that cultural contacts extended far beyond French, Russian, and Polish connections, with knowledge and cultural content also flowing in from other areas and across cultural boundaries. Due to the lack of national educational institutions or their inadequate situation, young academics studied throughout Europe and brought back a wealth of experiences and impressions. Throughout the century, the city's intelligentsia cultivated transnational cultural forms and established trans-territorial networks through which numerous ideas and content were transferred. This enabled Warsaw to become an important city in the European cultural context. This European positioning and networking in the fields of culture and science, which emerged in the 19th century and also formed the foundations for political developments in the 20th century, has been little noticed and researched as a phenomenon to date.

The aim of the research project outlined above was therefore to document the European locations of Warsaw residents in cultural and scientific terms for the 19th century, to trace cultural and scientific transfer, and to highlight their influence on various discourses in society and on innovations, with interfaces between Polish and Jewish milieus and their aspirations also playing an important role. The basic assumption was that the processes of European localization and networking, as well as the transfer of culture and science, led to the development of dense interconnections within the continental space, which, among other things, also gave rise to numerous interactions with the national identities of Warsaw's inhabitants.

The study focused on Warsaw citizens born between 1770 and 1870 who studied abroad and later brought their experiences and contacts back to Warsaw, where they influenced professional life. The focus was on the question of cultural and scientific transfer, which was understood to include transfers, adoptions, and processes of movement between contexts that can involve transformation, as well as mirroring effects and mechanisms of mutual influence. These are multiplex and dynamic processes within which multiple codings of personal and collective identity constantly take place depending on the context or frame of reference. Overall, it must be assumed that these transfer phenomena are social processes that were situated between personal motivations and structural conditions.

Based on other studies of transfer processes in the 19th century, it has been hypothesized that these do not primarily take place within national polarities, but rather that, despite their heterogeneity, they have a “European dimension” inscribed in them from the outset. The agents of transfer were students from Warsaw and those who studied abroad and then returned to Warsaw in the 19th century to pursue their careers or settle down. Their experience and social profiles, their interactions, and their cultural and scientific products are key determinants in the entire process of cultural transfer. On the one hand, multipolar, complex transfer processes can be identified, which often also run through an “intermediate station”; on the other hand, phenomena of negative cultural transfer also play a role. Starting from Warsaw society, the aim was to identify links and transitional phenomena between cultural areas that had previously been contrasted with each other for various reasons or due to different perspectives.

In a broader context, the following questions were also explored: How did the far-reaching transnational friendship networks and transnational interactions develop? Did joint scientific work take place, and how did “science” develop as a regulative idea for academic work? What interdisciplinary, international, interreligious, and inter-Jewish interfaces developed, and what effects did new communication channels have on the choice of study locations and the increase in student numbers (here particularly from the perspective of the new railway connections)? What were the lasting effects of transnational communication between individual cities, a possible “nationalization” during studies, and the interplay between internationalization and the nation state? The study should also reflect German-Polish relations, provide insight into the status of German in local linguistic pluralism and as a language of science, and provide evidence of any closer relations between Berlin and Warsaw in the second half of the 19th century.

Subproject in Research Area 1 “Regionality and Region Formation”

(October 1, 2016–September 30, 2017)

The project, which aims to provide a better understanding of the contradictory developments of Polish cities between the end of the 17th and the middle of the 18th century, was carried out as part of a long-term scholarship. Using the example of the Greater Polish crown town of Fraustadt (Wschowa) on the Silesian border, the project examined how political conditions, migration, and elite conflicts affected the economic and demographic development of a city. The focus on Fraustadt was justified by the city's great importance for the Polish crown, its economic power based on cloth and linen weaving, and its border location. In Fraustadt, the political and legal structures of Poland-Lithuania clashed with economic and personal ties to Silesia, and Catholic counter-Reformation efforts collided with a traditional, closely knit Lutheran community. The king and nobility asserted their claims to power against self-confident urban elites, who in turn sought to exploit the king and nobility for their internal conflicts.

Subproject in Research Area 4 “Violence and Foreign Rule in the ‘Age of Extremes’”

(December 1, 2010–December 31, 2016)

The subject of the work was a comparative examination of the role played by the National People's Army of the GDR and the Polish People's Army of the People's Republic of Poland in the overall political system of their respective states in the 1980s, when communist rule in Poland was already being undermined from several sides – not least from within the ruling PVAP party and could only be maintained for a while by the immediate seizure of power by a civil-military regime in December 1981. In view of the destabilizing effect that this development – as clearly recognized by the SED leadership – would have on the entire “socialist camp” in the long term, and the GDR's complete dependence on its existence, the 1980s saw the SED pursue an increasingly conservative domestic policy and, at the same time, engage in increasingly active foreign policy, with the GDR leadership having to maneuver between (at least) three partners whom it ultimately considered unpredictable: “ideologically unreliable” Poland, the Federal Republic of Germany as the officially hated class enemy and at the same time the de facto economic guarantor of the GDR, and the Soviet Union as its political and military guarantor, which, however, under Gorbachev began to gradually abandon the common ideological and geopolitical basis.

The attitude and behavior of the armies, i.e., above all the officer corps closely linked to the ruling party, was particularly interesting here, as the early 1980s saw a final intensification of the arms race, which led to increased internal militarization. The fact that in Poland, under General Jaruzelski, the army exercised direct domestic power for several years, despite the formal continuation of “real socialism,” was also a peculiarity that needed to be examined. In contrast, the GDR was no longer able or willing to fall back on such national justifications since the 1970s and therefore needed – as the only CSCE state – the confrontation between systems as a motive for legitimation. Despite all their differences, the officer corps of the Warsaw Pact were similarly socialized and cooperated for decades. It is also noteworthy that the Soviet Union, in line with its current security interests, allowed its “satellite states” considerable freedom, as well as the fact that, unlike the various paramilitary troops, the army in both the GDR and Poland did not ultimately seek to violently suppress the opposition movement.

The work should therefore take three dimensions into account: the respective civil-military relations within each country, the relationship between the two neighboring states and with the Soviet Union within the eroding Warsaw Pact, and the significance of national military traditions and other normative factors in determining the armies' position in their own societies.

Subproject in Research Area 2, “Religion, Politics, and Economy in Pre-modern Poland”

(January 1, 2014–December 31, 2016)

The topic was realized as part of the HERA project “Marrying Cultures. Queens Consort and European Identities 1500–1800.” Its aim was to reconstruct the various aspects of cultural exchange associated with the marriages of the Polish king Sigismund Augustus to the Habsburg sisters Elisabeth (married from 1543 to 1545) and Catherine (married from 1553 to 1572).

The central question examined was whether and what cultural innovations the marriages of King Sigismund Augustus to the archduchesses brought to the royal court in Poland. The scope and significance of these innovations were examined in relation to court ceremony, the organization of the court, religion, literature, music, etc. In which areas were innovations possible, in which were they not, and why was this the case? In addition, the directions in which cultural exchange took place were examined. Did the Habsburg women also adopt patterns they encountered at the Jagiellonian court?

The starting point for the research was an attempt to characterize the environment in which the future spouses grew up and to identify the “cultural capital” of those involved. An important question was to what extent one can speak of a “Habsburg culture” and a “Jagiellonian culture” in the mid-16th century. Of course, these were not homogeneous, precisely defined entities, but some of their elements, such as the perception of the role of a queen and the way in which this role was performed, can be compared. This raised the question of the extent to which a queen's actions resulted from the framework imposed on her and the extent to which individual characteristics enabled her to transcend this framework.

Particularly fruitful in researching this question was a comparison of the behavior and roles of the two archduchesses at the Jagiellonian court, who were biological sisters and wives of the same king, although the circumstances of their marriages differed. At the time of his marriage to Elizabeth, Sigismund Augustus had already been elected king, but until his father's death he ruled only in Lithuania (since 1544). When he married Catherine, Sigismund Augustus was already the sole ruler. For Archduchess Catherine, it was her second marriage, and the influence of her first, albeit short, marriage to Duke Francesco III Gonzaga of Mantua must be taken into account. Nevertheless, a comparison of the roles and actions of the two royal consorts offered an opportunity to identify patterns and apply theoretical models of cultural transfer to them.

Subproject in Research Area 4 “Violence and Foreign Rule in the ‘Age of Extremes’”

(January 1, 2016–December 31, 2016)

The project, to which the researcher was committed as a long-term visiting scholar, was originally titled “Ideological Communities between Utopian Designs and Radical Projects. Excursions through Reformist Thought in the Polish Context, 1880–1965” and dealt in its initial phase with utopian ideas and concepts in artistic and academic circles of the Polish exile community. The initial focus was on radical thought experiments by representatives of these circles, which were fed by their social experiences and formed a platform for future-oriented ideas and contemporary critical action. These questions were to be examined using the two central analytical categories of nation and gender, and the paths of transfer from the transnational to the particular context were to be traced.

In the first half of 2016, the project concept was expanded in the course of applying for funding from the National Science Center (Narodowe Centrum Nauki). The expanded project, "Gender Order in Polish Scientific Structures 1890–1952. Changes, Continuities, and Discontinuities" was approved. Thanks to the funding, the researcher will continue her work on the project as part of the three-year program FUGA 5 at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAN) starting January 1, 2017.

The approved project primarily aims to examine the engagement of Polish scientific structures and intellectual collectives with questions of gender relations in a long-term perspective—from the beginnings to the founding of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1952. The project is partly based on the original idea of examining utopian ideas of gender order around 1900 and the visions of the future in the field of gender relations that were developed at that time. Therefore, the theoretical concepts and perspectives will also be adopted, including the examination of utopian thought experiments on a future gender order in academic circles. Among other things, the project will analyze the ways in which reformist ideas were transferred and “translated” into the Polish context. This involves visions of the future and radical manifestos that portrayed women as scientifically creative and productive protagonists who helped shape the modernization of society (Mary E. Bradley, Meta von Salis-Marschlins). The academic world can be described as a place that also served as a laboratory in which the further development of gender relations (increasing presence of women at universities, changes in their position in hierarchies and their social status) manifested itself. The project applies general concepts of historical gender studies (such as Karin Hausen's theses on gender order) as well as theoretical approaches and concepts from science studies (Theresa Wobbe, Margaret W. Rossiter, Londa Schebinger) and the empirically based work of German researchers such as Petra Hoffman and Annette Vogt.

Subproject in Research Area 5 “Functionality of History in Late Modernity”

Problem

Seventy years after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht and the end of World War II in Europe, we are confronted in the “new Europe” after 1989 and the EU enlargement with the simultaneity of a boom in remembrance, memory struggles, victim competition, and an increasing trivialization and acceptance of anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and racism. In view of the emergence of new right-wing parties and groups, this phenomenon raises fundamental questions about “education after Auschwitz” (Adorno), the significance of Auschwitz, and how to deal with the persecution and murder of European Jews in the present day.

Research trends and conceptualizations

The question of why, which in its attempt to adequately explain the incomprehensible necessarily focuses on the concrete historical event and raises questions about the historical conditions of perpetration and complicity in a “culture impregnated with anti-Semitism” (Dan Diner), has receded into the background in historiographical discourse. Anthropologically and comparatively oriented macrohistorical approaches, which place the persecution and murder of European Jews in a general history of violence in the 20th century and interpret the Shoah as one genocide among others, have gained in importance. Genocide is a normative, not an analytical term. In Neighbors (2001), Jan Tomasz Gross argues that the Holocaust should be understood as a “heterogeneous phenomenon” that constituted a planned ‘system’ of extermination and at the same time consisted of “individual episodes improvised by local leaders, depending on spontaneous behavior [...]”. This raises the question of what consequences this proposed conceptualization had for Polish historiography and the public debate about the Holocaust in Poland.

Discursive strategies and implications

Although remembrance of the Holocaust is considered a ticket to the new Europe, the interpretation of the event as a rupture in civilization, as something that has to do with us and our culture and affects us in the present and future, has by no means prevailed in Europe. Instead, strategies of anthropologization, decontextualization, normalization, relativization, trivialization, mystification, nationalization, and universalization of the Holocaust can be observed in academic and public discourse. These tendencies can be found both in the country of the perpetrators and in the European countries that were occupied by Germany at the time. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the official policy of “negative memory” (Koselleck) has served one purpose above all else since at least the 1980s: “the rearticulation of a German cultural nation and a new national identity” (Geyer/Hansen) – with the result that the confrontation with the reality of what happened has been pushed into the background. The dominant politics of memory of the Polish majority society places the Holocaust within a national narrative of victimhood in World War II that marginalizes the murder of the Jews. As Elżbieta Janicka has impressively shown, the self-image of the Polish majority society is at stake in the representations produced by the dominant culture.

Research interests and questions

The project focuses on the interactions between the historical images and collective symbols produced by official memory politics and the interpretations produced by actors in the academic field. It addresses the following questions: What retrospective interpretations of historical events are expressed in the various ways of dealing with them—symbolic practices and materialized forms of memory, positions in public debates, conceptualizations, concepts, and terms in academic discourse? To what extent do discursive and symbolic practices reflect identity- and history-political or rather socio-critical concerns? What distinguishes critical-analytical approaches by actors in the academic field that run counter to the dominant narratives, patterns of interpretation, conceptualizations, concepts, and practices?

Case studies

These questions will be examined using selected case studies from Poland and Germany. For Germany, examples include the discourse surrounding May 8 as Liberation Day, which is an example of the phenomenon of the “transformation of the concept of victimhood” (Koselleck) after 1945, and the “discourse of normality” (i.e., the establishment of the paradigm of “normality” of Nazi violent criminals in perpetrator research) will be reconstructed and deconstructed.

As far as the academic field in Poland is concerned, the debate on the conceptualization of Polish majority society in the face of the persecution and murder of Jews (revision of the concept and terms “witness” and “bystander”) needs to be analyzed. The debate surrounding the erection of a monument to the Polish Righteous on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto has been chosen as an example of power struggles and conflicts of interpretation surrounding symbolic representations and materialized forms of remembrance. The planned memorial, which goes back to an initiative by the Polish president's office and can be seen as an occupation of the Jewish memorial site around the ghetto memorial, is a counter-development to the academic discourse of recent Polish Holocaust research. It raises questions about the effectiveness of critical-analytical historiography in the institutionalized space of memory and about an understanding of history and time in which the here and now is not understood as something that has become historical.

Subproject in Research Area 5 “Functionality of History in Late Modernity”

Most studies on the topics of “film and history” or “film and cultures of memory” limit themselves to analyzing the way in which the past is represented. Researchers often focus on the question of how closely the film's plot corresponds to historical events. In doing so, they usually overlook both the practices of reception and the specifics of the dispositif, even though it is extremely important whether the film is seen in the cinema, on television, on DVD, or on the Internet, as each of these modes of reception creates and presupposes a different context. In order to grasp the memory-forming potential of the media, it is therefore necessary to examine more than just the content. What is decisive is what the recipients “do” with them, how they actively and creatively engage with them.

Products of late modern pop culture in particular must be treated as part of a network in which—in addition to the works themselves—the producers and their economic interests, the recipients and their practices, and the characteristics of individual media are also examined. Where do viewers watch the films? How are the films reviewed in print media and on the internet? Are there parallels between individual works and official activities in the field of historical politics? Which subjects are funded by public funds and which are more likely to be financed by private sponsors? All these questions are of paramount importance for understanding films as memory media in late modernity.

Since this is an extremely complex field of research, it can be assumed that no generally applicable mechanisms for the appropriation of cinematic images of history can be identified. Much depends on the cultural context, current political events, parallel media offerings, and individual preferences. The planned studies will therefore be limited to a few case studies from Germany and Poland, preferably films that have been shown not only in cinemas but also on television and whose reception history is largely complete. Researching the reception of selected filmic presentations of German-Polish history from both a historical and a contemporary perspective requires the application of different methods: image analysis, qualitative content analysis (in each case as a starting point), discursive analysis of press materials, in particular reviews and letters to the editor, archival research (with regard to historical reception), targeted Internet research (including qualitative and quantitative evaluation), and possibly also interviews, observations, etc. The results are to be presented in the form of essays in academic journals and anthologies.

Possible objects of analysis could be so-called scandal films that have provoked an intense media response. A good example of this would be the five-part series Am Grünen Strand der Spree (1960, directed by Fritz Umgelter), in which fictional images of occupied Poland and the murder of Jews were presented on West German television for the first time. The series was one of the biggest events on television at the time. Although audience ratings were not yet measured in the early 1960s, the audience must have been large: contemporary magazines described Am grünen Strand der Spree as a “street sweeper.” The 20-minute scene of a Jewish massacre in the first episode caused particular outrage. However, whether questions such as those concerning the activities of the audience, parallel media offerings, and ultimately the meaningful potential of the five-part series can be answered depends on the sources, which still need to be identified. More recent examples of “scandalous films” related to German-Polish history that have sparked intense debate include the three-part series Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (TV, 2013, directed by Philipp Kadelbach) and Ida (2013, directed by Paweł Pawlikowski) – although in the latter case, the Polish controversy was sparked more by the fact that the film focused on Poles and Jews and only mentioned Germans in passing.

Subproject in Research Area 1 “Regionality and Region Formation”

The aim of the project is to reconstruct the image of the peripheral region from an outside perspective. A comparative analysis examines two peripheral regions in the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century: Podlasie and Lower Lusatia. These areas are perceived as peripheral regions in relation to other Polish and German areas, both in terms of their structure and the social consciousness of their inhabitants. Both regions have been largely overlooked in previous regional research, as the focus has been on regions that played a greater role in social and historical consciousness (e.g., Galicia, Pomerania, Upper and Lower Silesia). The project's focus on Podlasie and Lower Lusatia thus closes a gap in regional research. The central research problem is the discussion of the image of the peripheral region, which was constructed from outside. What image of Podlasie and Lower Lusatia was created in the central regions? The analysis also takes into account the factor of time, i.e., the question of when the respective peripheral region gained greater importance for the centers and what role it played in this process. The research attempts to explore the use of historical, cultural, and political motifs in the central regions for the representation of the unity of center and periphery and for the internalization of this image in the peripheral regions. An important question here is who created the image of Podlasie and Lower Lusatia and what their motives were. The milieus that actively influenced the emergence of the image of the peripheral region are analyzed from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The analysis includes factors such as origin, social and professional status, and political activity. This allows us to determine the extent to which the image of Podlasie and Lower Lusatia was shaped by residents of the central regions and how strongly people from Podlasie and Lower Lusatia who left their homes to work in the central regions contributed to this image. In addition, the milieus and contacts of the actors who shaped the image of Podlasie and Lower Lusatia (e.g., writers, artists, scientists, politicians) are examined. Another focus of the analysis is the specific characteristics of the peripheral regions, which were deliberately neglected in the central perspective, i.e., the part of peripheral regionality that was not suitable for assimilation in the overall cultural discourse of society. In relation to Podlasie, this concerns, for example, the conglomerate of cultural elements from Lithuanian, (Belarusian) Russian, and Tatar traditions. With regard to Lower Lusatia, it is primarily the Lower Sorbian culture that is relevant. A comparative analysis of the two peripheral regions under investigation reveals many similarities between them at the social, economic, political, and cultural levels (including religion). All of the areas mentioned influence each other and can be described using a model of interdependencies. Its final elaboration requires further examination of the relationships between the center and the periphery. Answers to the following questions should be found:

1. What image of the peripheral regions (Podlasie and Lower Lusatia) was created in the central regions?
2. How were the categories of region and regionality constituted? Which aspects of peripheral regionality were taken into account in the central discourse and which were ignored?
3. Which milieus played an active role in shaping the image of the peripheral regions? Which milieus did the most important actors come from and which contacts and links can be identified between the center and the periphery?
4. When did the peripheral region become the focus of attention of the centers?
5. On what basis was any unity between the peripheral and central regions established? What historical, cultural, social, and political motives were used in the central regions to portray the unity of the center and the periphery?
6. Was the new image internalized in the peripheral regions?

Subproject in Research Area 1, “Regionality and Region Formation”

This research project aims to examine an East Central European economic region from the perspective of members of the Jewish economic elite. The methodological basis of the study is the analysis of networks formed by Jewish entrepreneurs. The region is thus understood as a sphere of action constituted by people. In addition, Jewish networks are described as part of aristocratic clientelist systems. The analysis of the role of individual actors is particularly relevant for Jewish history. In previous research, Polish-Lithuanian Jews have been viewed almost exclusively as an anonymous social group. As studies on the Western Jewish diaspora show, incorporating the individual perspective into research opens up new approaches to questions related to the role and functions that the Jewish population played within Christian society. At the same time, establishing a link to the clientelistic system of local magnates allows us to describe the social position of Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic in an innovative way and to look beyond rigid class boundaries when depicting their social actions. The project focuses on the following questions: How were the boundaries of the economic region constituted by Jewish entrepreneurs determined (relationship to political boundaries in the region)? What strategies did these entrepreneurs use to build personal networks? What was the ethnic and social composition of these networks? Does the structure of these networks exhibit particular regional characteristics? What role did Jewish networks play within the aristocratic clientele system? The study focuses on the Ickowicz brothers, “court Jews” of the Radziwiłł family, tenants of the Radziwiłł estates, and merchants who were active in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1730s to 1750s. The brothers – at that time the most powerful and richest Jews in the Grand Duchy – have already been the subject of earlier studies, but neither their (regional) sphere of activity nor their personal networks have been analyzed to date. The source material for the study consists of the correspondence and business papers of the brothers Szmojło and Gedal Ickowicz.

Subproject in Research Area 2 “Religion, Politics, and Economy in Pre-modern Poland”

After the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita was one of the largest political entities in Europe, but it was not unified by a single professional territorial administration (based in the center). The vastness of the territory caused communication difficulties, which researchers such as Antoni Mączak have repeatedly emphasized. Noble clientelist systems, the informal power systems of Poland-Lithuania in the early modern period, functioned well at the local level and could be mobilized for the Rzeczpospolita as a whole in certain cases, but were not effective in the long run. The various denominations and religious communities, such as Calvinists, Antitrinitarians, Arians, Mennonites, Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Muslims, and Jews, had their own networks. The same was true for German, Dutch, and Scottish minorities. Interdependencies between personal ties and “high politics” also existed in church politics in the Rzeczpospolita. Rival regional entities and ambivalences made it difficult for outsiders to find their way around. Similar to the imperial envoys, the nuncios interpreted the Polish reality, which was initially foreign to them, in an extremely personal and informal manner; Here, it played a major role who was connected to whom, whereby multiple relationships were possible.

The extent to which and how church structures influenced these networks has not yet been sufficiently investigated. Wolfgang Reinhard described the church as a channel of mobility in early modern society; accordingly, questions must be asked about horizontal and vertical mobility in Poland. Church contacts naturally extended beyond national borders. Did this lead to waves of modernization? What rivalries arose as a result? To what extent can an exchange of elites be observed? Where were the limits of church influence (the Catholic Church suffered a loss of power in Poland in the second half of the 16th century, with more than half of senators being non-Catholic at times)? What conditions and opportunities existed for careers in the Catholic Church? What were the paths to advancement and where were the limits? How did communication channels function and who were the relationship brokers? Can family strategies be identified? The careers of clergy in the secular state apparatus should be examined. Furthermore, from a center-periphery perspective, the role of Rome in the formation of local elites should be investigated. How did the Roman Curia and the various orders behave and what did they have to offer? Theoretically, the system of elective monarchy prevented the creation of lasting dependencies.

The research project focused on investigating the connections between the Arab and Western silver flows to Eastern Europe and the formation of Piast rule from a broad geographical and chronological perspective. Silver was the strategic instrument of power with which the dynasts sought to control and monopolize the redistribution of prestige goods necessary for the elite's self-image. The need to accumulate precious metals, display them, and distribute them in order to win as many “clients” as possible thus served to secure and consolidate power. The quest for precious metals influenced the expansionary dynamics of Piast rule in two ways: on the one hand, by encouraging the dynasts to “tap into” the populations that possessed silver; Secondly, they extorted taxes in kind from local communities or captured slaves, who could then be exchanged for precious metals and luxury goods. The large number of silver finds deposited in Poland – around 160 with a good 37,000 Arabic coins and at least 280 with approximately 100,000 Western European coins – clearly reflects this process.

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