Research project
as part of the joint project "The Radical Right in Germany, 1945-2000"
Waves of violence repeatedly occurred with migration to the GDR. Not just in the so called “Baseballschlägerjahre” (Years of the Baseball-bat) since 1990, but even before that, people were attacked, injured and sometimes killed in East Germany due to racist labelling. The rudimentary research into these events already indicates that this kind of violence was almost ubiquitous in GDR society. However, there are neither reliable figures nor systematic analyses of these violent incidents. The project takes a systematic, comparative look at the many hundreds of events.
It aims to gain an analytical understanding of this phenomenon and to analyse racist violence in the GDR from a social and cultural-historical perspective. To this end, the research project is dedicated to recording both representative and exceptional situations of violence. In doing so, it not only relies on the scarce reports in the documents of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR, but also extensively collects corresponding sources and examines them with the analytical instruments of violence theory and process-sociological violence research.
