Tag: ‘Unpolitisch’

A Western Bias in Modern History?

March 3, 2016

In the last couple of months, I had the pleasure to listen to a few highly interesting and engaging lectures and research seminars. Unsurprisingly, when considering my field of interest, most of them were located in the realm of medical and Cold War history. While attending these events, however, I was astonished how some established historians claimed for themselves to rewrite a topic’s historiography of international relevance post-1945, without acknowledging Eastern Bloc, or even Soviet Union sources, developments and historical research.

In this post, I want to draw attention to this Western bias, which in my opinion hampers historical research and cultural understanding in many ways. Continue reading “A Western Bias in Modern History?”

Doctors in East Germany after 1945 – Part I:

February 25, 2016

Investigating GDR history, one would encounter the claim of being ‘apolitical’ quite frequently – a claim, which describes the notion of being somehow removed from ‘big’ politics as well as the everyday political penetration of the private sphere by the socialist state. Historians in the past postulated that this notion was a typical reaction of the people towards the politicisation of their lives, establishing so-called ‘niches’ of retreat – some might claim it was the second ‘Biedermeier‘ era. Unsurprisingly, with this assumption the picture of the so-called ‘Gartensparten‘, or ‘Dachas‘ in Soviet Russia, was connected, which offered exactly the desired private realm, supposedly removed from politics.

However, this is only one part of the story. Augustine L. Dolores study about the ‘technical intelligentsia’ and my research about the ‘medical intelligentsia’ surfaced a multifaceted picture of why these two professions, in particular, claimed to be ‘apolitical’. Continue reading “Doctors in East Germany after 1945 – Part I:”