Laufende Dissertations- und Habilitationsprojekte
Dissertationsprojekte
Timur Mitrofanov
Peasant legal culture and volost’ courts of the Russian Empire: the Case of the Kazan province (1861 – 1917)
The research project is focused on the legal history of the peasants' rural communes in post-reform Imperial Russia. In particular, I study volost' courts ("волостные суды" in Russian, the closest translation is "township courts") intended especially for the peasantry after the abolition of the serfdom in 1861. Insofar as the greatest part of the rural population was illiterate and did not understand legislation, litigants had to apply local customary law for settling disputes. However, applying local customs raised a few legal issues. For instance, the rural composition of the Kazan province contained a few different groups: Russians, Tatars, Mari, and Chuvash. All of these groups possessed their own customs and traditions. The province was thus a unique region of the Empire and exemplified characteristic features of the complicated social and confessional structure of the Empire. In this connection, the main aim of the research is to reveal and explore legal culture and volost' justice in the Kazan province's countryside. The second half of the 19 century was an initial period of nation-state building in Russian. Rapid transformations and modernization raised a problem of "inclusion" of the peasantry into social, economic, and legal relationships in late imperial Russia. From this perspective, in the broader context, I explore how local processes in the Kazan Province's countryside interacted with the imperial ones. I expect to provide full-scale research based on interdisciplinary approaches, a wide range of archival and ethnographic sources.
Keywords: Russian Empire, peasants, rural society, legal culture, customary law, local self-government, local courts
Henchmen to Killers: War Criminals and Perpetrators in Romania's Postwar Trials (1945-1948)
My research deals with the ways in which perpetrators and war criminals were presented in war crimes trials in Romania between 1945 and 1948. I look at how the public prosecutors constructed the accusations and at the way in which they changed according to the nature of defendants. In this sense, accusations against ordinary administrative and military staff could have followed one pattern, while those against military personnel could have followed another. Furthermore, accusations against war criminals that had been considered ideologues substantiality different from case to case. I argue that a certain heterodoxy was present in creating an accusatory framework in Romania’s immediate postwar trials, one that is not simply a reflection of each of the defendant’s status. Rather, I look at the possibility that these postwar trials created new categories of accusations from the pool of accused defendants, depending on circumstance, each of the defendant’s personality and role in social and political mechanism, as well as the character of their victims. The new governments that came to power after Romania’s August 1944 switch of allegiance had to deal with the issue of maintaining fully functioning executive and judicial systems while also prosecuting those considered responsible for Romania’s role in genocide policies across Eastern Europe in Romanian-occupied territories. This was not easy as, like other cases in Eastern Europe, one needed to maintain the capability of delivering justice, even that of a political nature. The environment of Soviet influence which led to the communist takeover of Romania complicates the question of “How was justice served?”. Rather, I look at “What did justice mean?” insofar as understanding the mechanisms that were endemic to the political situation of Romania after 1944 can help scholars better separate war crime trials from the show trials of the 1950s and 60’. This confusion in analysis has led to a historiographical debacle in understanding justice in a totalitarian context in Romania.
Some of my main questions for research are: In which way have postwar trials in Romania been organized? How accusations in these trials can lead to a stratification/classification of perpetrators? Were individual war criminals tried differently for the same accusations than collective war criminal groups? Was antisemitism present in trials? Was it politically used in any way? Have the trials taken into consideration the reason for perpetration/collaboration? Was there a link between the large number of accused that did not go to court and the development of accusations leveled against perpetrators? Were there mitigating circumstances found by the courts in some cases? How did witnesses and survivors influence these situations?
While my intention is not to offer a complete and overall view of all trials in Romania’s postwar years (that would be a quixotic endeavor), I hope to shed light on the peculiarities of Romania’s postwar investigations and trials inasmuch as showing how can we better understand both the general and specific features of Romania’s situation in the postwar years. I would thus like to transcend the intentionalist and functionalist divide, especially since Romania’s case can be a paradigmatic case of both approaches being used. A reflection of this is present in a study of postwar trials.
Wehrmacht und sowjetische Kriegsgefangene in Russland. 1941-1944
From Gray Zones to Red Courts – Soviet Collaboration Trials of Jewish Council Members and Ghetto Policemen from Transnistria
The research project “From Gray Zones to Red Courts” examines Soviet trials of Jewish Council members of Transnistrian ghettos charged with collaboration. Analyzing sociopolitical implications of these trials, the project primarily draws on recently declassified Soviet secret services’ investigation and trial documents as well as memoirs and oral history interviews. Taking on a perspective “from above” as well as one “from below”, the judicial proceedings are conceptualized as a “locus for interaction” between Soviet state and Holocaust survivors, who constituted the majority of witnesses. For survivors, the trials offered an opportunity to voice demands for justice and retribution and to try to come to terms with the recent past. Here, the project also asks about the influence of social conflicts in the ghetto upon witnesses’ perceptions of defendants. The Jewish Councils in Transnistria were mainly recruited from among the deportees from Romania, while the local Ukrainian Jews were excluded from such positions. This lead to a partial “nationalization” of the structural opposition between Jewish Councils and ghetto inhabitants, which is echoed in witness’ testimonies. The investigation and trial records thus offer unique insights into survivors’ perceptions of the role of Jewish Councils and their experiences during the Holocaust from the immediate post-liberation period.
The Soviet judiciary met survivors’ demands and perceptions “from below” with its own agenda. The trials allowed the Soviet authorities to prosecute political enemies, such as some rather “bourgeois” defendants, who had been educated Jewish community leaders in Romania. Furthermore, the trials enabled the judiciary to present Soviet rule as legitimate legal rule by adhering to a “demonstrative lawfulness”. Both approaches aimed at facilitating the re-Sovietization of reconquered territories. Branding defendants’ behavior as “treason to the Soviet Motherland”, authorities also established an official version of what had happened in the ghetto, which constituted a judicial form of “politics of history”. The trials examined in the project were held primarily in the Ukrainian and Moldovan Soviet Republics between 1944 and 1951, a transitional period between liberation and the “black years” of late-Stalinist anti-Semitic campaigns. The project thus focusses on an unstudied aspect of Soviet-Jewish relations during this period.
Soviet Jewish museums within the framework of the national policies of the USSR
The brief flourishing of Soviet Jewish ethnography in the interwar period was facilitated by two concurrent phenomena: the implementation of Bolshevist nationality policies in the 1920’s – 1930’s and revolutionary-era debates about Jewish national identity and Jewish cultural heritage. The confluence of these two developments profoundly advanced the museological and scholarly study of Jewish art and objects of Jewish material culture in the first decades of Soviet power. This scholarship developed as a logical extension of earlier studies in the field of Jewish history and ethnography as they were re-interpreted in the 1920-s within the framework of Soviet ideology. However, it reached far beyond the romanticism of the ethnographic discourse in the Jewish nationalist polemics of the late Imperial period and received its fundamental significance as one of the cultural technologies of rule in the Soviet Union.
The active stage of Jewish museology from the mid-1920’s to the early 1930’s resulted in outstanding collections presented in the Jewish museums of Samarkand, Odessa and Tiflis. Soviet authorities, however, regarded the Jewish ethnographic project rather as an instrument of propaganda, the promotion of atheism and nationalization, and sociological information acquisition and control. Jewish museums and exhibits served as an important vehicle for promoting the ideas of the Soviet political and academic leadership, and this controversial cooperation between scholarship and ideology in the field of Judaica is the leading question of this dissertation. Of special interest are the strategies of establishing a new sense of national community and shaping the narrative of Soviet Jewish culture and collective history. Marina Shcherbakova will provide insights into the dynamics of the Soviet Jewish museology in its transnational dimensions -- in Usbekistan, Ukraine and Georgia – and will consider the role of Jewish ethnography within the broader Soviet anthropological discourse.
Thomas Somló
Von einem Wehrersatzdienst für "unzuverlässige Elemente" zu einem "mobilen Schafott" ― Alltag und (Über-) Leben im jüdischen Arbeitsdienst der ungarischen Armee während des Zweiten Weltkrieges im Spiegel von Augenzeugenberichten
Das destruktive System des jüdischen Arbeitsdienstes [ungar. munkaszolgálat] im Zweiten Weltkrieg versinnbildlicht die Klimax einer diskriminierenden und mörderischen Behandlung ungarischer Juden durch einen von hungaristischem Gedankengut weithin durchsetzten Militärapparat. Zugleich unterstreicht es die stark antisemitischen Tendenzen eines nationalistisch-konservativen sowie autoritären Staates, dessen Verantwortung für die Partizipation im Holocaust von gegenwärtigen Stimmen in Ungarn allzu gerne mit einem nationalen Opfernarrativ kaschiert wird. Als eine vom Verteidigungsministerium vorangetriebene Militärinstitution, deren Tätigkeiten sich vom so genannten „Trianon-Ungarn“ bis hin zur Ukraine erstreckten, symbolisiert der Arbeitsdienst nicht nur einen integralen Bestandteil ungarisch-jüdischer Geschichte, sondern repräsentiert ebenfalls eine singuläre Erscheinung des Holocaust. Er bildet ein Alleinstellungsmerkmal, da Ungarn das „einzige Land“ war, das „im Zweiten Weltkrieg das Judentum zu einem unbewaffneten Dienst an der Front verpflichtete“ [Krisztián Ungváry, 2005]. Das Prinzip des militärischen Arbeitsdienstes entfaltete sich im Verlauf des Krieges sukzessive zu einer „ausdrücklich antisemitischen Institution, basierend auf einer kollektiven Stigmatisierung und rassistischen Diskriminierung“ [Zoltán Vági et al., 2013], und wird in persönlichen Augenzeugenberichten nicht selten als „mobiles Schafott“ [Elemér Sallai, 1979], gar als „Konzentrationslager nach deutschem Muster“ [Rudolf Kasztner, 1945] charakterisiert. Dennoch sind der deutschen Forschung bis heute die Geschichte und das Ausmaß jenes Systems weitestgehend unbekannt.
Wie erlebte eine kleine Gemeinschaft jüdischer Männer unterschiedlichen Alters, Herkunft und Sozialisation den Arbeitsdienst? Welche subjektiven Beobachtungen über die Situationen, mit denen sie konfrontiert waren, machten die jüdischen Arbeitsdienstler und was waren ihre Reaktionen hierauf? Was lässt sich daraus über den Alltag erfahren und lassen sich hierbei typische Muster oder Eigenschaften des Arbeitsdienstes definieren, die von bestimmten Faktoren oder Zäsuren beeinflusst wurden? Wie beurteilen die jeweiligen Augenzeugen retrospektiv den persönlichen Arbeitsdienst und welche Narrative sowie Motive stechen dabei heraus?
Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen arbeitet das Projekt mit alltags- sowie erfahrungsgeschichtlichen Ansätzen und richtet sein Augenmerk auf die jüdische Majorität des ungarischen Militärarbeitsdienstes. Unter Berücksichtigung räumlicher und zeitlicher Spezifika erforscht es den Alltag jener Männer seit der offiziellen Initiierung des Systems 1939 bis hin zum deutschen Einmarsch in Ungarn im März 1944. Hierfür bilden hauptsächlich so genannte „first-hand accounts“ die Quellenbasis, deren spezieller Wert in den facettenreichen Informationen über symptomatische Zustände, Beobachtungen, Reaktionen und Abläufe im Arbeitsdienst liegt. Die multiperspektivische Quellenarbeit basiert sowohl auf schriftlichen als auch audiovisuellen Dokumenten, die man vereinzelt gegen Kriegsende, aber insbesondere danach anfertigte (z. B. Erlebnisberichte, Zeugenaussagen, Memoiren, Interviews, Erinnerungsprotokolle).
Ziel ist es nicht, die ereignisgeschichtlichen Fakten zu rekonstruieren, sondern nach den wechselhaften Erfahrungs- und Lebenswelten zu fragen, die im Zuge der sich wandelnden Prämissen im Krieg aus der Interaktion der Arbeitsdienstler miteinander sowie mit ihrer direkten Umgebung hervorgingen. Anhand der Erforschung individueller Erlebnisse und Erinnerungen wird versucht, „von unten“ Einblicke über die im jüdischen Arbeitsdienst vorherrschenden Grenzsituationen zwischen Leben und Überleben zu geben, neue Erkenntnisse über die Art und Weise zu gewinnen, wie ehemalige Arbeitsdienstler ihre persönlichen Erfahrungen nach dem Dienst beschrieben oder sich an jene Zeit erinnerten, und somit einer weiteren Marginalisierung der Opferperspektive entgegenzuwirken.
Politisierung und Praxis der deutsch-sowjetischen Justizkooperation im Kalten Krieg
Roman Tsirulev
Russian Empire in the Far East: Colonization, Identity and Nation Building, 1855-1905
The project explores Russian colonization of Amur and Ussuri regions in the second half of 19th century from the point of view of transcultural processes in the area involving various groups of local population. On the one hand, rapid massive immigration of peasants and Cossacks from different parts of the Empire resulted in cultural transformations and shifts of identity, when “to be Russian” in the Far East meant not the same as in the European Russia. On another hand, the settlers faced active influx of Chinese and Korean immigrants who constituted the major “Other” in the new area and possessed different cultural and even legal characteristics compared to encounters in other regions of Russian colonial expansion. The study looks into the gap between official narratives which with the course of time more and more tended to nationalist and racialized rhetoric, and the realities of the everyday life in the Far East where “the Asian other” were inherent element of economic and cultural dynamics. This ambiguous nation building attempts in the youngest colony shed light onto inconsistent nationalist politics in the latest prerevolutionary decades of the Russian Empire on a larger level, as well as onto the complexity and fragility of identities in the vast peripheries of the Empire.
Post-Doc-Projekte
Timo Hagen, M.A.
Gemeinschaftsbauten als "gemeinsames Bauerbe". Siebenbürgisch-sächsische Schul-, Pfarr- und Gemeindehäuser um 1900 und nach der Auswanderung
Das Forschungsprojekt beschäftigt sich mit der gemeinschaftsstiftenden Rolle von Architektur in den heterogenen Milieus des östlichen Europa im langen 19. Jahrhundert und untersucht den Status und die Wahrnehmung solcher Bauten nach den Bevölkerungsverschiebungen der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, welche die Auflösung der Gemeinschaft, für die die Bauwerke ursprünglich bestimmt waren, bewirkten.
Untersuchungsgegenstand sind Schul-, Pfarr- und Gemeindehäuser, die von evangelischen Stadt- und Landgemeinden der deutschsprachigen Sachsen in Siebenbürgen errichtet wurden. Infolge von Enteignungen im kommunistischen Rumänien und der Auswanderung eines Großteils der Sachsen in die BRD nach 1989 wurden viele dieser Bauten neuen Bestimmungen zugeführt oder sind durch Leerstand und Verfall bedroht.
Im Rahmen des Projekts soll die gegenwärtige Nutzung solcher Bauten durch die örtliche, heute überwiegend aus meist orthodoxen Rumänen und Roma gebildete Bevölkerung ebenso in den Blick genommen werden, wie der Umgang der staatlichen rumänischen Denkmalpflege mit diesem architektonischen Erbe. Ein besonderes Augenmerk gilt Kulturguterfassungskampagnen, die in den 1990er Jahren auf sächsische Initiative und mit bundesdeutscher Finanzierung von Experten aus Deutschland und Rumänien in den ehemals sächsischen Siedlungen durchgeführt wurden, ihren Intentionen und Auswirkungen.
Die Freilegung der ursprünglichen gesellschaftlichen Bedeutungsdimensionen der (ehemaligen) Gemeinschaftsbauten ist notwendige wissenschaftliche Grundlage für einen erneuten Dialog über die Erhaltung eines schrumpfenden Baubestands, der das Potential besitzt, zum „gemeinsamen Bauerbe“ der unterschiedlichen Akteure und Bestandteil ihrer jeweiligen Erinnerungskultur zu werden.
