Dissertationsprojekte

Paula Simon

My research project „Between Fascination and Disdain. Roma in Interwar Yugoslavia” examines the relationship between the minority of Serbian Roma and dominant Serbian society in the interwar period (1918–1941), researching Antigypsyism as one example of ambivalent enmity. Through analysis of contemporary scientific discourses as well as media discourses on Roma, the project sets out to analyse the construction and composition of the “Gypsy” category in Serbia. By highlighting Romani self-organisation and emancipation and its effect on dominant discourses, the project acknowledges the relationality of processes of enemisation. Finally, by analysing personal and discursive continuities from the interwar period to the period of German military administration and the persecution and genocide of Roma (1941–1945), the project seeks to examine how ambivalent discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion of Roma by the dominant society created the conditions for and informed the dynamics of their genocidal persecution.

Will the next International Geophysical Year not be associated with attempts to control meteorological processes through an internationally coordinated and implemented influence on the weather?

This question was asked by the Soviet geophysicist Evgenij Konstantinovič Fėdorov in an article for the USSR's leading newspaper Pravda in 1957. While today's readers will wonder about such lines coming from an internationally highly recognized scientist, for readers in the 1950s this outlook may have appeared perfectly plausible and reasonable. In the days of the Cold War's nuclear arms and space races, breathtaking scientific breakthroughs in various disciplines seemed possible, including the field of "weather modification". Scientists in numerous countries, especially in the United States and the Soviet Union, studied atmospheric processes in order to increase rainfall, supress hail or gain even more comprehensive "control over the weather".

In my dissertation project, I study the Soviet history of this weather modification by approaching the USSR's research on "active influence on metereological processes" during the Cold War through the lens of entangled history. Rather than looking at the research institutions at the 'centre' in Moscow and Leningrad in the frame of the nation state, I focus on regional scientific fieldwork and transnational circulations of knowledge, techniques and people. My research therefore draws on case studies from former Soviet Republics and Western countries alike to trace the entanglements within the Soviet Union and across the Iron Curtain that shaped Soviet research on weather modification. By doing so, my dissertation project contributes to the ongoing reorientation of the field of Eastern European and Eurasian history towards a 'decentralized' understanding of Soviet history, as well as to the field of the history of science in its efforts to overcome its primary focus on American and Western European history.

Marina Shcherbakova

The brief flourishing of Soviet Jewish ethnography in the interwar period was facilitated by two concurrent phenomena: the implementation of Bolshevist nationality policies in the 1920’s – 1930’s and revolutionary-era debates about Jewish national identity and Jewish cultural heritage. The confluence of these two developments profoundly advanced the museological and scholarly study of Jewish art and objects of Jewish material culture in the first decades of Soviet power. This scholarship developed as a logical extension of earlier studies in the field of Jewish history and ethnography as they were re-interpreted in the 1920-s within the framework of Soviet ideology. However, it reached far beyond the romanticism of the ethnographic discourse in the Jewish nationalist polemics of the late Imperial period and received its fundamental significance as one of the cultural technologies of rule in the Soviet Union.

The active stage of Jewish museology from the mid-1920’s to the early 1930’s resulted in outstanding collections presented in the Jewish museums of Samarkand, Odessa and Tiflis. Soviet authorities, however, regarded the Jewish ethnographic project rather as an instrument of propaganda, the promotion of atheism and nationalization, and sociological information acquisition and control. Jewish museums and exhibits served as an important vehicle for promoting the ideas of the Soviet political and academic leadership, and this controversial cooperation between scholarship and ideology in the field of Judaica is the leading question of this dissertation. Of special interest are the strategies of establishing a new sense of national community and shaping the narrative of Soviet Jewish culture and collective history. Marina Shcherbakova will provide insights into the dynamics of the Soviet Jewish museology in its transnational dimensions -- in Usbekistan, Ukraine and Georgia – and will consider the role of Jewish ethnography within the broader Soviet anthropological discourse.

Emanuel Grec

In his thesis, Emanuel Marius Grec examines the ways in which perpetrators and war criminals were portrayed in Romanian war crimes trials between 1944-1948. In particular, the work focuses on the clusters of defendants that were responsible for the Odessa Massacre of 1941. The research looks at how accusations against ordinary administrative staff differed from those against military personnel or from those against war criminals who were seen as fascist ideologues. The project seeks to understand the ways in which the prosecution sought to create new categories of defendants from a single event.

Unlike existing historiography, Emanuel tries to understand the phenomena of postwar justice using a bottom-up approach: how does specifically looking at the perpetrators of the Odessa Massacre change our understanding of the nature of the crimes of which the perpetrators were accused?

Matthias Puchta

Abgeschlossen 2025

Jasmin Söhner

Abgeschlossen im Januar 2023