Projekt „Socialistická diktatura jako myšlenkový svět“
Socialist Dictatorship as Sinnwelt: A Research Project

Summary/Abstract: In this introductory essay, Michal Kopeček and Pavel Kolář present the international research project ‘Socialist Dictatorship as Sinnwelt: The Representation of the Social Order and the Change of Authority in East-central Europe in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century’. The project was carried out by Pavel Kolář, Thomas Lindenberger, and Martin Sabrow at the Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam, together with Michal Kopeček at the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague. It was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The essay introduces a block of articles that resulted from the project, and explains the aim of the project, the ideas from which the authors started, and the socio-historiographical context of the ‘historicization of dictatorships’. The authors also acquaint the reader with the contents of the project. From a comparative perspective, which covered all of central and eastern Europe, the historians in the project, using cultural history and the history of everyday life, sought to shed light on how the Communist dictatorships were established and how they reproduced themselves and ultimately collapsed. The key conceptual instrument of these scholars is the Sinnwelt (roughly, symbolic universe), usefully understood as a space for the ‘pre-political acceptance’ of socialism, a zone in which the historical actors daily constructed the meaning of the existing social order and continuously renewed its legitimacy by their everyday actions. The introductory article reports on the individual projects which constitute the project as a whole, and reports on the lecture series and conferences which were organized as part of it.

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