Completed associated research project

Potsdam was regarded as one of the ‘red’ district capitals in East Germany. Its function as a regional centre of SED power, border city to West Berlin and important scientific and educational site allowed Potsdam to become a conurbation for elites loyal to the system.

Annalisa Martin
Completed associated PhD project

The project examined comparatively the cities of Cologne, Hamburg, and West Berlin in the long 1960s and 1970s. The guiding question here was how local policies and regulations, in conjunction with or contrary to federal law, determined the lives of women who sold sex during this period.

Patrick Bernhard
Completed research project

The project, funded for two years from 1 May 2015 by the ‘Research Network Old-age Provision’ of the German Statutory Pension Insurance Scheme, investigates the treatment of tuberculosis patients in facilities of the Statutory Pension Insurance Scheme, which was structurally involved to a significant extent in the health politics of the ‘Third Reich’.

Stefanie Senger
Completed associated PhD project

This project researched the political practices that transferred political ideas from both parts of Germany to Sandinista Nicaragua. It also focuses on the intercultural exchange between Sandinistas and the solidarity groups, as well as on the genesis of new political ideas and practices that emerged from the Nicaraguan experience.

Completed research project

With policies on poverty, this project looks at a fundamental function of the welfare state that became increasingly important from the crisis of the Keynesian full-employment welfare state in the 1970s onwards. This challenge confronted all European welfare states in a similar way.

Completed associated PhD project

The PhD thesis concerned the perception of the Muslim world prevalent in West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Beginning with an analysis of the oriental narratives about the Muslim world in the 1970s, the central part dealed with the perception of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and its aftermath.

Completed research project

The question of how criminal offenders can be made into socially-conforming members of society while serving their prison sentences took on a completely different meaning in the Federal Republic of Germany after the experiences of the Nazi dictatorship.

Completed Collaborative project between the ZZF and the association Memorial Sites at the Potsdam Border

The course of the former border to the north of Glienicker Bridge counts today among the most visited sections of the Berlin-Brandenburg Wall, the former ‘outer ring’ of Berlin. Since the demolition of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s, however, there is not a single reference at this section, which stretches for miles and is today idyllic, to the period of the GDR and the former death strip, with the exception of short passages of text on a sign about Glienicker Bridge and two memorial posts for victims of the Berlin Wall in its immediate vicinity on Schwanenallee.

First project results:
Since November 9, 2018, the Internet portal www.grenze-potsdam.de has been activated. It offers users in-depth information as well as image, audio and video material about the former border area...

Sarah Graber Majchrzak
Completed associated PhD project

The structural change that has been taking place in the working environments and the daily lives of workers in European industrial societies since the 1970s has for some time been a research focus within the field of contemporary history. However, historical studies have almost exclusively addressed Western Europe, although Eastern European countries were similarly exposed to the intensified competition on the world market and the challenges of the ‘Third Industrial Revolution’.