German Society for East European Studies
The German Society for Eastern European Studies e. V. ( DGO ) is a network of Eastern European researchers and experts in German-speaking countries.
Purpose of the association
The DGO, founded in 1913, is a non-partisan, non-profit association with its headquarters in Berlin . The DGO organizes scientific meetings, conferences, public panel discussions and publishes the magazines Eastern Europe and Eastern European Law as well as country analyzes available on the Internet. It imparts knowledge about and contacts to Eastern Europe and promotes European dialogue. The members of the DGO come from science, politics, business, media and culture. The society awards an annual prize to promote young scientists.
Branches
In addition to its office in Berlin, the German Society for Eastern European Customers has 23 branches in university cities. They serve as regional platforms for the East-West dialogue. The branches are located in the following cities: Bamberg, Bochum, Bremen, Dresden / Freiberg, Düsseldorf, Erlangen / Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt / Oder, Freiburg, Gießen / Marburg, Göttingen / Kassel, Hamburg, Hanover, Jena, Kiel, Cologne / Bonn, Constance, Leipzig, Mainz, Munich, Münster, Regensburg, Salzburg and in Tübingen.
Board
The company's board of directors is the decision-making body for matters that are not reserved for the general assembly. It consists of the President, the Vice President, the Executive Board member and seven other members. The board is elected every two years by the general assembly as part of the DGO annual conference. In 2013 it is composed as follows:
Ruprecht Polenz (President), Wolfgang Eichwede (Vice President), Thomas Bremer (Executive Board Member), Timm Beichelt , Caroline von Gall, Jan Kusber , Sebastian Lentz , Rainer Lindner , Birgit Menzel , Stefan Troebst .
Publications
Eastern Europe
The DGO is the publisher of the interdisciplinary monthly magazine Osteuropa, which is published by Berlin's Wissenschafts-Verlag . The magazine was founded in 1925 by Otto Hoetzsch . She analyzes the societies of Eastern Europe from a comparative perspective. Country issues offer regional expertise, special issues deal with pan-European issues. Elements of authoritarian rule and the potential of democratic change, historical politics and opportunities for modernization, economy and ecology, human rights and music are topics of the magazine. The editorial office is based in Berlin.
Eastern European law
Together with the Institute for Eastern Law at the University of Cologne , the DGO publishes the journal Eastern European Law. The magazine was founded in 1954 by the DGO to investigate the legal systems in Eastern European countries. Even after the upheaval in Eastern Europe, regional focal points are the east, east-central and south-east European states as well as the CIS states. From a factual point of view, public law and commercial law, the case law of the national constitutional courts and the decisions of the international courts relating to the observation countries, as well as Eastern Europe-related research and the exchange of scientists, enjoy special attention. Editing has been with the Institute for Eastern Law at the University of Cologne since 1966.
Eastern European economy
The DGO was the publisher of the Eastern European Economy magazine founded in 1956. The journal dealt with economic development, transformation problems and progress, structural peculiarities and economic policy in the countries of Central Eastern Europe and the successor states of the Soviet Union as well as peculiarities of east-west trade. The publication of the magazine was discontinued in 2011.
Country analyzes
Free online information services on Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Caucasus and Central Asia regularly offer brief analyzes, statistics and chronicles on political, economic, social and cultural developments. The country analyzes for Russia and the Caucasus are also published in English. The country analyzes are published by the DGO together with the Research Center for Eastern Europe at the University of Bremen with various partners and sponsors.
history
Beginnings (1913-1917)
In 1913 the Society for the Study of Russia was founded in the Prussian House of Representatives in Berlin. Representatives from universities and newspaper editorial offices, corporate directors and diplomats from the Foreign Office were part of it. The purpose of the company was scientific and practical. It was supposed to expand knowledge about Russia in all areas through lectures and publications. It should also promote relations between Germany and Russia. Otto Hoetzsch, who founded the Society for the Study of Russia, stated in a memorandum from February 1913: “Our public opinion by and large knows nothing of the nature of the great transformation process in the present day Russia. The judgment of the neighbor must become more certain ”.
Fractions (1917–1945)
After the First World War , the political map of Europe was redrawn. The tsarist empire had collapsed, revolution and civil war shook Russia. In Berlin in the 1920s, Hoetzsch turned the German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe (DGSO) into a hub for contacts to the East. For example, on March 25, 1925, the monarchist Michael von Taube gave a lecture in a series on the name of the DGSO on Russian intellectual life. His theme was "Vzaimootnošenija meždu Rossiej i zapadnoj Evropoj za minuvšee tysjačeletie" (The interrelationships between Russia and Western Europe in the past 1,000 years).
In 1925 the magazine Eastern Europe appeared for the first time.
After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, scientific research on Eastern Europe was quickly ousted by folk research on the East, and Otto Hoetzsch was defamed as a "Salon Bolshevik". Jews and Russian emigrants who had worked as scholars and mediators in the editorial team either left Germany or were murdered. The new management of the company and the editorial team ensured that they were self-aligned. The magazine was discontinued after the invasion of Poland in 1939.
Continuities (1945–1989)
After the Second World War , the Hoetzsch student Klaus Mehnert , who had gone to Moscow as a correspondent in 1934, founded the German Society for Eastern European Studies in 1949. In 1951, the magazine Eastern Europe appeared again under his leadership. Mehnert reached an audience of millions with books about the Soviet Union. University and non-university research on Eastern Europe was expanded in all disciplines with institutes in Berlin, Cologne and Munich.
At a DGO conference in 1963, Willy Brandt outlined the contours of his later Ostpolitik. The struggle for a new foreign policy was reflected in debates about the assessment of the reform potential of communist rule in Eastern Europe. In 1980 the DGO hosted the 2nd World Congress on Eastern European Studies. In the shadow of the Cold War, however, the involvement of Ostforschung in the National Socialist War of Extermination and the Holocaust was only slowly processed.
Turning point (1990-2013)
With the end of the East-West conflict and the overcoming of the division of Europe, a new era began for the DGO. The East Europeanized itself and with it the DGO. Dialogue took the place of enemy observation. The concentration on the Soviet Union gave way to a differentiated examination of the diverse Eastern Europe. In 2005, the 7th World Congress on Eastern European Studies took place in Berlin under the aegis of the DGO.
In addition to Russia, the Ukraine and Poland are now also the focus of interdisciplinary Eastern European research.
See also
literature
- Hans Jonas, Otto Schiller, Klaus Mehnert, Werner Markert, Ernst von Eicke: Fifty Years of Eastern European Studies. On the history of the German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe and the German Society for Eastern European Studies . Aachen, 1963, pp. 5-34.
- Oskar Anweiler : 75 years of the German Society for Eastern European Studies. In: Osteuropa, Volume 38, Issue 10. Aachen, 1988, pp. 881–886.
- Karl Schlögel: On the futility of a professor's life. Otto Hoetzsch and the German Russian customer . In Eastern Europe: Spiegel der Zeit 1925–2005. Eastern Europe: Traditions, breaks, perspectives. 55th year, issue 12, Berlin, 2005, pp. 5–28.
- Michael Kohlstruck: "Salon Bolshevik" and pioneer of social research. Klaus Mehnert and the German Society for the Study of Eastern Europe 1931–1934 . In Eastern Europe: Spiegel der Zeit 1925–2005. Eastern Europe: Traditions, breaks, perspectives. 55th year, issue 12, Berlin, 2005, pp. 29–47.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Anweiler: 75 Years of the German Society for Eastern European Studies , p. 881.
- ^ Jonas et al.: Fifty Years of Eastern European Studies , p. 6.
- ^ Anweiler: 75 Years of the German Society for Eastern European Studies , p. 882.
- ↑ Karl Schlögel: From the futility of a professor's life , p. 5.
- ^ Jonas et al.: Fifty Years of Eastern European Studies , pp. 25–26.
- ^ Jonas et al.: Fifty Years of Eastern European Studies , pp. 28–29.