Srdečně zveme na přednášku Haralda Englera (IRS) „Experiences of Transformation. New Research Approaches to Upheavals in Everyday and Social Life (in East Germany and Central and Eastern Europe after 1990)“, která se uskuteční 20. května 2026 ve Filosofickém ústavu AV ČR (Jílská 1, Praha 1, 1. patro) od 13:00. Přednáška se koná v angličtině.
Abstrakt
Whilst the post-socialist transformation since the 1990s has now been well analysed in terms of contemporary history for Eastern Germany and Central and Eastern Europe at the structural level—covering politics, the economy and society—there is a lack of in-depth studies on the question of exactly how these transformative upheavals affected people’s everyday lives. How did the ‘double transformation shock’ affect people’s new lives, where did the greatest challenges lie, and above all, how can we as historians succeed in letting people themselves recount their experiences, rather than researchers always simply explaining to people how their everyday lives changed and how they assess the transformations from today’s perspective? What were the consequences of the neoliberal shock therapy of the 1990s for people in mental and psychological terms, and what were the long-term effects? And to what extent do individual and collective memories of transformation within life histories, and the coping strategies that give them meaning, currently influence political upheavals and the voting behaviour of those affected in the post-transformation societies?
This lecture will examine these and other questions and present citizen science and other new approaches from recent research that focus their analysis on the biographical perspective of transformation history. In particular, it aims to highlight that the structural analysis of post-socialist transformation should be expanded to include a biographical dimension if we want to get a more comprehensive picture of the transformation processes.
CV
Harald Engler is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) and deputy head of the Research Area „Contemporary History and Archive/ Scientific Collections for the History of Building and Planning in the GDR“. His research interest lie on the fields of European urban history, postsocialist transformation history and the history of planning and architecture of the GDR (especially biographical research to architects and planners and to the institutional system of the building industry of the GDR).