Suchergebnisse

Call for Applications of the Masaryk Institute and Archives in Prague. Deadline: March 10, 2024

We analyze the extent and effects of job-related persecution under communist regimes in the Czech Republic and Poland using a representative sample of individuals aged 50+ from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. Retrospective information collected in the SHARELIFE interview offers a unique chance to relate past and current labor market outcomes to experiences of persecution reflecting the historical developments in Central Europe in the 20th century. Individual level data with details on labor market histories is matched with information on the experiences of state oppression. On-the-job persecution is found to have significant effect on job quality assessment and is strongly related to reporting of distinct periods of stress in both countries. Consequences of on-the-job persecution seem to have been much more severe and longer lasting in the Czech Republic, with significant financial effects of job loss or discrimination. This is explained by the greater degree of state control over the labour market in the former Czechoslovakia compared to Poland and different characteristics of the dissident groups in both countries.

"The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception. It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call 'inhabited ruins.' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezin concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village, the BMW as an itinerant lieu de memoire, Mies van der Rohe's architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time"--

This historiographical review discusses recent literature on cities in modern Central Europe – mainly on Berlin and Vienna – which reflects the great variety of approaches to urban history and underlines the importance of urban history for the study of modernity. The history of urbanisation was a central event in the history of modernity. Especially in the Central European capitals of Berlin and Vienna, where modernisation and urban growth started later and then advanced quicker than in West European cities, all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural modernity and its consequences can be observed in detail.