GERMAN HISTORY SOCIETY REGIONAL CONFERENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WALES SWANSEA
17-19 APRIL 2001 (please note altered dates)
Call for Papers: A Social History of Central European Politics, 1945-1953

Before 1989, the peoples of Central Europe were arguably written out of
their own recent history. The region was seen as a chess-board, with
individual countries being regarded as little more than pawns in the Cold
War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. There is
now a need to write the people back into the history of Central Europe after
1945.
This distortion of the historiography of post-war Central Europe was the
result of a number of factors. Firstly, the lack of access to archival
sources in the Soviet Bloc made it extremely difficult to build up a picture
of what was happening on the ground in those areas which fell under Soviet
occupation. Secondly, the preoccupation with the political imperatives of
the Cold War led to a concentration on high politics and an under-estimation
of the degree to which policies emanating from Moscow and Washington were
modulated by grass roots realities. Finally, the division of Europe into two
mutually hostile blocs led to the temporary obscurement of Central Europe as
a political concept.
Developments since 1989 have made possible a thorough reassessment of
contemporary Central European history. The scholar now has access to huge
amounts of hitherto unavailable archival material, and is no longer
constrained by the ideological straight-jacket of the Cold War. With the
demise of the Iron Curtain, Mitteleuropa has re-emerged as a salient feature
of European politics.
As a result, it is now possible to construct a more sophisticated analysis
of the interaction between American and Soviet policies in Central Europe,
and the political concerns and behaviour of ordinary people. The countries
of Central Europe were more than mere pawns, and their peoples should not be
seen as passive objects of policies being imposed by the White House and the
Kremlin.
The purpose of this conference is to look at popular politics and high
politics and their interaction in a comparative perspective. "Central
Europe" will be considered to comprise Austria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany
and Hungary. The sessions will be organised according to some of the
following themes, depending on the response of participants:
* workers
* women
* minorities
* peasants
* intellectuals
* veterans
* youth
* middle classes
* refugees
* religion
If you would like to attend the conference or contribute a paper on one of
the above themes, focusing on one or more of the above mentioned countries,
please contact Dr Jill Lewis or Dr Gareth Pritchard at the History
Department, University of Wales Swansea, SA2 8PP. Papers should be no longer
than 30 minutes. Proposals are welcome as soon as possible, but no later
than 15 January 2001.
email: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
Some funding is available for speakers and for transport for postgraduate
students who wish to attend. Accommodation is available on the University of
Wales Swansea campus (pictured below).


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