Department IV: Regimes of the Social Sphere

Head of Department: Dr. Jutta Braun und Priv,.-Doz. Dr. Winfried Süß

The research projects of Department IV investigate the question of how social processes were contained and regulated by the political systems of the twentieth century. How did social inequalities develop? Which processes of mobilization and rationalization are evident? And how were normative orders subjectively appropriated? Current projects are investigating the relationship between social inequality and the welfare state, social mobilization during the Second World War, Fordism as a signature characteristic of the twentieth century, and the paradigm of resocialization.

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Members of the Reich Labor Service on the way to a rally of the NSDAP, 1933. Photo: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-P021658 / Frankl, A. / CC-BY-SA 3.0, Bundesarchiv B 145 Bild-P021658, Reichsarbeitsdienst, Marsch zu einer Kundgebung, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

Department IV’s researchers investigate concepts, instruments and practices of societal control and mobilisation, the interrelation between mobilisation and society’s self-interests as well as processes of ‘self-mobilisation’.

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Nationalismuspolitik

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The Ministry of Health of the GDR - Change of the Political in National Socialist ‘Mecklenburg’ - Commercial Sex in West Germany - German Solidarity Movements in Nicaragua - Muslime world - Exhibition project on the GDR border regime in Potsdam - Poverty policy -Cconsumer behavior - West German...

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President Horst Köhler also welcomed the Monday demonstrators on his visit to the Diplomatic Corps in Bremen on 10 September 2007. Photo: Frank Kleinschmidt, so:leb Sozialer Lebensbund e.V. Bremen, 2007-09-10 Horst Koehler Montagsdemo Bremen, public domain, details on Wikimedia Commons

Department IV addresses social inequality as a key category in contemporary societal analysis. Researchers seek to analyse social-historical questions in light of the modern state’s historical involvement in social welfare policy. At the heart of the examination is the question of the...

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"Workers on the first moving assembly line put together magnetos and flywheels for 1913 Ford autos" Highland Park, Michigan. Photo: Anonymous, Ford assembly line - 1913, public domain, details on Wikimedia Commons

This section analyses industrial production regimes of modernity as social orders from a synchronous and diachronic perspective. The individual research projects examine social consequences of the changes in the world of work in the 20th and 21st centuries.

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