About the Research Centre for East European Studies

1. archive,

2. academic research,

3. analytical digests of current events and

4. exhibitions.
    

History of the Research Centre

The Research Centre for East European Studies was founded in 1982 under Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Eichwede as a repository for Samizdat (underground literature) documents from Eastern Europe. Its task was and still is to collect materials documenting alternative thinking and social movements in Eastern Europe, to analyse them and place them in the historical, social and political context of East European structures and developments, and to publish the results of research carried out using them.

During the years of the Eastern Bloc, censorship and repression, the Research Centre acted as a depository of cultural memory for dissenters and members of the opposition in Eastern Europe. Documents from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the GDR arrived in Bremen via various routes. The Research Centre came to be a place of refuge for dissidents and their work in spite of the Iron Curtain. As a result, during the 1980s, the Research Centre concentrated on manifestations of independent artistic activity and intellectual creativity in the underground. It looked for the unofficial streams and dissenting thoughts behind the facade of official politics that gave a view into the internal workings of these societies.

The political and social upheaval in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s represented a turning point for the Research Centre. The amount of material collected by the archive rocketed following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR in 1989 and 1991. Documents that had been smuggled to Bremen illegally or semi-legally could now be transported officially. In the 1990s, the archive grew rapidly. Today, Bremen and its growing archive structure continue to offer a suitable home for materials documenting the activity of alternative groups and individuals.

Moreover, the Centre's research activity increasingly centred on the process of transition in Eastern and Central Europe. Its historians, political scientists and literary scholars concentrated less on economic processes, which are often the subject of research on transition, and more on the historical traditions and cultural continuities that exerted an influence after 1989 and 1991 and laid the foundation for the transformation in politics, economics, society and culture.
 

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