Socialist Dictatorship as a World of Meaning. Representations of Social Order and Transformation of Authority in East Central Europe after 1945.

The project seeks to analyze the mechanisms of establishing, perpetuation and erosion of the communist dictatorships using the methods of social and cultural history. Exploiting the concept of representation of social order, it focuses on the connections between primarily non-political, everyday constructions of meaning on the one hand and the stabilization or the destabilization respectively of the state-socialist system on the other hand. It examines the ambiguous realm of pre-political acceptance, the sphere of the production of meaning lying beyond the explicit political or ideological. The aim of the project is to contribute to an interdisciplinary, comparative and trans-national contemporary history research in nowadays East Central Europe. This is encouraged by regular international seminars with invited guest speakers, short-term visiting fellowships for young scholars, and seminars organized at the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague. see details.

The three-year project, a common undertaking of the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and the Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam, started its work in September 2007. Generously funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, it is composed of altogether eight individual research projects carried out by young scholars from different Central European countries.