Change of Perspective
Historical Research on Eastern Europe
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Historical research on Eastern Europe looks back on a history of over a hundred years: the catastrophes of the 20th century were reflected in historiography. While “the East” and the Slavs had been the exotic, the alienating “other” since the 19th century, they became the object of German hegemonic endeavours from the end of the 1920s onwards and the victims of genocidal warfare during the Second World War. Historians of Eastern Europe provided the legitimisation for this as “fighting science”. After the war, silence, amnesia, and self-amnesty prevailed. From the late 1960s onwards, the generation that grew up during the war switched to a historiography oriented to social history. For quite a few members of the German student movement of the late 1960s, Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and its consequences were not just a historical subject, but a stimulus for interpreting the present. Today, classical intellectual, economic, and political history have been marginalised. The turn to a new cultural history has opened new perspectives, but it is also accompanied by de-politicisation.
(Osteuropa 1-3/2025, pp. 131–166)