Eszter Kiss
Completed PhD project

The management and control of public communication is essential for any dictatorial regime. Usually, censorship concentrates on written texts, but in the age of mass media other media, such as theatre, film and television, also had to be monitored in order to control public opinion. In the twentieth century, pictures were used more and more often for propaganda reasons, making the proactive management of images for publication crucial for dictatorial states.

Thomas Werneke
Completed research project

The project enquired after the semantic ruptures and continuities across regime changes in Germany. Consumerism is understood in the context of the project as the consumption of food and luxury goods (especially alcohol and tobacco) as well as ‘functional food’ (e.g. protein drinks). Primarily publications of state actors and experts in the area of food chemistry, nutritional science and healthcare served as sources.

Completed research project

This project examines past visions of the future in the realm of gainful employment. The scenarios of the 1970s and 1980s ranged here from the ‘good tidings of the tertiary sector’ via the strategic perspectives tied to the scientific-technical revolution, to the problem of labour migration and the associated image of uninhabited tracts of land in the middle of Europe.

Abgeschlossenes Forschungsprojekt

Marion Detjen
Completed research project

Quality trade book publishing houses were throughout the twentieth century ‘places of assembly’ (G. Hübinger), sites of crystallisation for liberal bourgeois society, for producing, discussing and pushing through interpretations and narratives. Even though they worked within nation-state frameworks and markets, they provided and organised manifold processes of transnational cultural transfer, mediating and translating concepts and traditions, especially in the Western hemisphere.

Completed research project

From a media-historical perspective, the cultural communication between Eastern and Western Europe within the system of the Cold War from the mid-1950s via the phase of peaceful coexistence to the breakup of the two power blocs in 1990 will be examined, using the example of the international exchange of GDR television programmes.

Julia Erdogan
Completed PhD project

In addition to governmental, military and economic interests, there have been sub- and countercultures dealing with the new medium since the beginnings of computer usage. In particular the hackers, but also players, pursued their own practices with regard to computers and formed networks. Thus, they shaped the discourse and practices related to computers. These cultural practices and their impact on the daily-life application of computers since the 1970s in Germany will be developed in this PhD project.

Completed PhD project

In this project, the integration of East German rock music into the capitalist German music business was examined. With the end of the GDR, a large part of the infrastructure of the music scene, such as distribution channels, performance venues and state funding, was lost. This forced change reflected the project. At the same time, the cultural dimension of "Ostrock" was analyzed for the first time in this work.

Completed exhibition project

The Waldsiedlung Wandlitz, part of the town of Bernau, is still regarded in East and West Germany as a symbol for the political style and lifestyle of the SED power elite, their privileges and increasing seclusion from the GDR population’s reality of life. The exhibition provided a critical overview of the history of the residential area of the SED’s top-ranking officials, built in 1958 and occupied until 1990.

Completed research project (together with Christopher Neumaier, ZZF Potsdam)
Cnference- and Publication projects
(2020-2023)

the project explored relationship dynamics and intimate lives of married and unmarried couples and singles in East and West Germany from cultural, social, and socio-historical perspectives.

Completed associated PhD project

The global revival of Heavy Metal music in the early 1980s did not stop at the Elbe River. Looked down upon by state media, Heavy Metal fans emerged in every GDR district. In their spare time, almost exclusively dedicated to the collective consumption of music, these groups may have formed the biggest youth subculture in the socialist state.

Completed Book project

On the one hand, images steadily gain attention as historical sources and as subjects of research. On the other hand, those who produce, distribute, edit, sell or buy pictures often remain anonymous. This book aims at answering the question of how ‘photographic action’ comes to be a new form of political action that draws on the documentary force as well as on the subjective reality of photography.

Abgeschlossenes Forschungsprojekt

Completed research project

Ever since the existence of electronic media, its transgressive character has triggered great fascination but also fears. Political attempts were accordingly substantial in the twentieth century to immunise one’s own territory where possible from within against external influences and to enlist the media for the integration of mostly nationally-defined communities.

Fabian Kuhn
Completed associated PhD project

This PhD project compared the most important political-cultural journals in East and West Germany in the context of changing political circumstances between 1945 and 1955. Organs such as the Wandlung, the Ruf, the Frankfurter Hefte and the Aufbau have a brief historical moment to thank for their prominence today, when the journals – as an important journalistic medium – addressed current political questions and initiated debates.

Competed research project

The aim of this project is to generate a website providing crucial information in the field of visual history, including encyclopaedic articles as well as case studies, information on current research projects, conferences, new books and legal standards of picture publishing.

Completed research project

Completed colalborative project with Divadlo Archa (Archa Theatre Prague), Kampnagel Hamburg, Sophiensaele Berlin, Stanica Žilina-Záriečie and the Centrum experimentálního divadlo/Divadlo Husa na provázku (Centre for experimental theatre/Goose on a String Theatre, Brno).

Ronald Funke
Completed associated PhD project

The doctoral thesis ‘Television and the Transformation of Religion, 1960-1980’ examined public representations of church and religion in the television of the Federal German Republic and its impact on religious transformation processes. Transformation is chosen as distinct from the concept of secularisation, because church and religion have experienced no loss of meaning, but rather a change of meaning in the twentieth century.