Ota Konrád (Prag): Histories without History? How to Write and Research the History of Domestic Violence in the Modern Era
wt. 02.06.2026 | 18:00
Warszawa
Serdecznie zapraszamy na wykład wtorkowy w Warszawie.
Miejsce: Uniwersitet Warszawski, Sala A, Wydział Historii
Partner: Wydział Historii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Wykład: Prof. Ota Konrád
Moderacja: Prof. Piotr Majewski
This lecture focuses on how historians can study domestic violence in societies where this phenomenon lacked a specific designation, legal category, or clear place in archival records. Drawing on current research into the history of domestic violence in postwar Czechoslovakia and West Germany, the lecture approaches domestic violence as a socio-historical phenomenon. The lecture asks how individual suffering could—or conversely, could not—be transformed into a socially recognized reality within a given society.
Rather than treating domestic violence merely as a "hidden" problem in history, the lecture conceptualizes it as a condition of historical non-historicity. It is a practice dispersed across categories such as alcoholism, family conflict, moral deviance, and social pathology. It is also fragmented across police files, medical reports, welfare records, and court decisions. The lecture focuses on methodological questions of working with sources and critical reading of "enforced narratives," while addressing the epistemological and ethical problems of applying contemporary concepts to the past.
The lecture further develops an actor-oriented approach that views victims as historical agents seeking communicative spaces and avenues to justice under constrained conditions, not merely as products of social structures. Through a symmetrical comparison of socialist and capitalist societies across the Iron Curtain, the lecture challenges linear narratives of modernization or progress, tracing shifting configurations of everyday power. Ultimately, the lecture argues that the history of domestic violence is a rich field for examining the intersection of political regimes, social norms, and intimate life in postwar Europe.
Ota Konrád is professor of modern history and director of the Ph.D. program in modern history at Charles University in Prague. In 2021, he was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Munich. His research interests include the history of foreign policy, the history of the First World War in Central Europe, a cultural history of violence, and contemporary Austrian history. In his current research project, he focuses on domestic violence and its contexts in post-1945 Czechoslovakia and West Germany as a tool for analyzing complex postwar social and political reconstruction.
