“The year 1990 begins. What will it bring for Poland and for myself?” Polish communist party leader Mieczysław Rakowski opened his diary on January 1st, haunted by uncertainty and depression. The new government was about to build capitalism, while he himself expected a nervous breakdown to be long overdue. With many fellow countrymen, regardless of political affiliation, Rakowski shared the experience that everything, which hitherto had seemed inalterable and stable, now simply crumbled away. In this respect Poland was not unique. Throughout Eastern Europe, the unexpected and irrevocable fall of communism sparked excitement paired with uncertainty, fear, and enormous challenges, in politics and society as much as in private lives. Shaping a new order was not a jaunt, and the outcome far from preordained.

The aim of this international conference will be to explore the manifold aspects and reactions to a world in rapid transition in Central and Eastern Europe in the first year after the collapse of state socialism. We will draw on case studies from the fields of politics, economics, intellectual history and everyday life in order to reconstruct, within a comparative framework, people’s efforts to cope with unexpected challenges and to shape events. What role was played by established concepts, paradigms and values? Where, if at all, did people attempt novel approaches? Or, to paraphrase Reinhart Koselleck: In what way did experience still shape expectations? Rather than reproducing the ongoing debate on why communism failed, and rather than taking the ensuing attempts at democracy for granted, this conference will contribute to developing an historical approach to the foundations of our contemporary world.

Enquiries about attendance should be sent to imre-kertesz-kolleg@uni-jena.de