This research is based on the oral histories of victims of Soviet deportation from the western part of Ukraine to territories in the East of the USSR, such as Siberia and Kazakhstan. The deportees lived in the so-called “special settlements” that existed in the Soviet Union in the 1920s-1950s. The research uses narrative analysis and contextualizes stories of the deportees in the post-independence memorial culture in Ukraine.

The project compares literary and cinematic reflections on the transformation after 1989 in Eastern Europe and Germany. The focus is on stagings of truth and the tendency to radicalize discourses up to new forms of dissidence.

In the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, cinema served as a tool of National Socialist control. This project examines the extent to which feature films were employed in support of the Germanisation policy within the Protectorate.

As the number of approaches to history expand, conceptions of the past from the right-wing fringes are increasingly finding their way into mainstream, public historical culture. This project investigates how ethnicist and racist ancestor worship in popular and sub-cultural historical practices can carry far-right ideas into the heart of society.

The project is devoted to the memorialization of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Based on approaches of oral history and digital history, it aims to document sites of memory and to trace the changes that Russia’s war against Ukraine has inflicted on the culture of remembrance oft he Second World War.

The »German Resettlers from Bucovina« became a »Buchenland German Community« only after the end of the Second World War. The project examines the meaningful and identity-forming practices of the »Landsmannschaft der Buchenlanddeutschen« and, drawing on a large scale Oral History project, explores the limitations of community formation

»Who will tell our history?« asks theatre director Alina Șerban 2017 in the play »The Great Shame«. After 1989, Romanian Roma took the stage and began to speak publicly as Roma. They created a variety of texts, plays and works of art. What kind of story do they tell?

Historical guided city tours relate history in a spatially bound, oral and interactive way. Taking the presentation of state socialism in commercial communism tours as its example, this project examines the popularisation, commodification and authentication of contemporary history in today’s tourism industry.

Cobble-stones, concrete tiles, tarmac. Uneven, cracked, smooth, rough, slippery. Every city has its pavement – pavement made from different materials, each material representing a certain time and place. This project explores how a place can be read through its materials and materiality.