Multiple transformations: an introduction

In summary, system transformation can be characterized as a specific type of social change aimed at the alteration of the entire social structure of institutions. Individual actors deliberately and instantaneously initiate these processes of change. The balance between conscious control and momentum within the processes shifts in favour of the latter; the process as a whole may last years, if not decades. (Kollmorgen et al. 2019, 6)

The last thirty years have seen ever new waves of scholarly efforts to evaluate the effects of the political turnaround of 1989/90. The early post-transition period was characterized by euphoria about the new beginning and the joy over newly won freedoms and opportunities, setting both political and personal change in motion. A variety of terms have been used in various national languages and scholarly contexts to describe the scale and nature of the social and cultural changes ushered in by the “peaceful revolutions” of 1989/90. Transformation and transition are among the most widely used concepts despite the degree of ambiguity and limitation both entail – and which we will discuss in detail below.

A narrow concept of transformation primarily implies changes in politics, law and the economy that are institutional and controllable (Kollmorgen et al. 2015, 12). This understanding has gained importance especially in the social and political sciences, which take a macro-perspective to the study of institutions. The research featured in this Special Issue differs from this approach in that it foregrounds a narratological, praxeological and actor-based approach. Even as we tackle the same historical caesura, we reflect on how it was encountered by various actors in a range of different fields. In doing so we explore the broad questions of how people have coped with the system change and what sorts of incisive biographical experiences have been inextricably associated with the period. When the everyday world of state-socialism was gone, the need to adjust to new social demands, freedoms and constraints emerged. Hence our focus on vital strategies for acting and coping (e.g. new forms of community-building and voluntarism, dealing with the commercialization of cultural heritage or with the rebuilding of the infrastructures for culture), which aptly demonstrate the multifaceted impact of the transformation on the life world and the cultural sphere. As the essays explore social experience and subjective perceptions in these realms, different role patterns, generational distinctions as well as resilience strategies become visible and take tangible shapes.

The early post-socialist period was marked, on the one hand, by euphoria about new beginnings, the rhetoric about freedom, and the joy of newly won opportunities and broadened horizons. At the same time, the shock over the shutdown of socialist enterprises, the rapid establishment of capitalist structures and mass privatization harshly affected almost all areas of everyday life. Thus, the assessment of the regime change has never been bereft of a darker undertone, also acknowledging the adverse effects of these processes. The difficulties and insecurities resulting from the sudden requirement to re-invent biographies and career trajectories led, in many cases, to alienation from the new environment, the loss of solidarity and deepening social division. The challenges emerging in many people’s life worlds while seeking to reorient themselves in the new social order represent the problem field this thematic issue addresses. The focus is set on the plurality and heterogeneity of expectations, experiences and memories. This approach opens up space for alternative narratives that also incorporate the profound mental and emotional consequences of the post-socialist transformation and, as a result, for the possibility to expand and differentiate the (alleged) “success story” of 1989.

Temporal frame and pluralizing the transformation

Now that over three decades have passed since the epochal turn of 1989, a trend to critically historicizing the system change has established itself in cultural studies and the humanities. The editors of this Special Issue take the existence of processes of change that began well before 1989 as a starting point and trace these processes in the domain of everyday social life and culture. The inspiration for doing so was found in the temporal approach of the project “ (The Longue Durée of 2023). Regime Change and Everyday Life in East Germany,” carried out at the Centre for Contemporary History (Potsdam) between 2016 and 2020 (cf. zzf-potsdam.de). The recognition that, in post-socialist societies, transformation(s) of varying speeds and intensities have been observed in almost all areas of life took centre stage in the Potsdam research project. While some of these processes can be considered to have ended in the 1990s, others continue to have an impact even today (Brückweh et al. 2020, 32). On a similar note, Kaja Kaźmierska and Katarzyna Waniek recently proposed an understanding of transformation as “a social change stretched in time and space” (Kaźmierska and Waniek 2020, 589).

The extended duration and some unfinished facets of the transformation, especially in the case of East Germany, are reflected in the latest annual report on the status of German reunification. A chapter of this government document underscores the continued relevance given to “eliminating legacies of the former GDR” and “coming to terms with the excesses of the SED dictatorship” as well as regarding the “reunification as an outstanding event in the long history of democracy in Germany” (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie 2021, 12). Apparently, the political field still largely relies on a solidified narrative in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR, popularly known as East Germany) as such is being reduced to a dictatorship that had to be overcome in order to progress.

In his commentary on the annual report, Marco Wanderwitz, Federal Government Commissioner for the New German States (from 2020 to 2021), has emphasized a shift in measuring internal unity. Whereas, in the past thirty years, the aim had been to “reduce the differences caused by division and transformation,” the focus is now less on catching up but rather on jointly shaping the future (Bundeskabinett 2021). There is an intention – or promise at least – in this statement to declare the transformation complete. On second thoughts, however, a continued emphasis on the need to overcome the GDR’s historical legacy seems to reinforce (rather than dissipate) the widespread perception that the transformation has been in fact an incomplete adaptation of the East (of Germany) to the West. The study feeding into the annual report works with selected parameters (e.g. “structural change” or “labour market development”) that help create an overall pattern according to which “a convergence of living conditions and the renewal of the East German economy” have been taking place since the upheaval of 1989/90 (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie 2021, 14). An exclusive focus on economic and political indicators, however, works to reproduce the master narrative of transformation as an uncontested success story with a corresponding promise of salvation at the end of a path. But, has “the historical legacy of the GDR” really been worked through and the transformation indeed completed? Can they ever be? A look at the micro-level disproves this. It is therefore a welcome novelty that a recommendation for a “Development Centre for German Unity and European Transformation” (Zukunftszentrum für Deutsche Einheit und Europäische Transformation) found its way into the latest report. This centre will “research social transformation processes and their consequences with a focus on East Germany and Central-Eastern Europe, make knowledge about transformations visible and tangible, and promote encounters and dialogue in a variety of ways” (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie 2021, 14).

It remains to be seen whether the Zukunftszentrum will leave behind the linear logic inherent in dominant notions of the post-socialist transformation. Their logic is linear inasmuch as it assumes that entire societies can be transformed from one certain condition into another. The nature and direction of this change have also demanded that former socialist states be “modernized” and catch-up with their Western European neighbours. It is worth noticing in this context that the suggested name for the Development Centre now implies and aspires for a development facing forward (in German “Zukunft” literally means future).

Both in English-language academic literature and political or public discourse, the early years of the system change were often captured by the term “transition.” A wide range of transitology scholarship came to life (and died out again), seeking to chronicle the events after the collapse of state-socialism(s) in Central and Eastern Europe (Tőkés 1998, 32; Bartha 2001). Its major term, transition, has been contested by many on the grounds that it implied “an unproblematic trajectory and a destination that is known” (Watson 2000, 186), namely, a destination away from socialism and towards market capitalism. The connotations and the concept of transformation go beyond this teleological understanding and the term has therefore proved to be the more suitable one for describing social change after 1989/90. Similar corrective attempts can be observed in the shifts occurred in Hungarian-language terminology. Thanks to the nuances that can be created in this language, three competing words were in use: redszerváltás, rendszerváltozás, rendszerváltoztatás – until redszerváltás (“system/regime change”) and rendszerváltozás (“system/regime shift”) solidified as the most widely used terms. As József Antall, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of post-socialist Hungary insightfully pointed out, “It is your underwear that you change.” Refusing this connotation, he offered the preferential term “regime shift.” The subtler “regime shift” is also favoured because the word does not so much describe the transformation as a disruptive epochal event, a sudden and consciously administered “change,” but rather as a “shift,” i.e. a transition, a process (Majtényi et al. 2009, 10), with all the uncontrollable dynamics characterizing those years. The colloquial German term die Wende (“the turning point”) reflects a similar perception of this period of change. The third Hungarian word, rendszerváltoztatás (“changing the regime”), is sometimes used in public and political discourse, too, and entails an added reference to certain individuals or political circles that initiated the change, while the connotation of a slower transformation process remains. In Czech usage, transformace (transformation) similarly denotes the shift from one political or economic regime to another. Social change after 1989 is, however, also captured by the expression doba porevoluční (“a period after the revolution”), which highlights the aftermath of the peaceful revolution as an open-ended process.

With all its commendable nuances, the concept of transformation nevertheless remains ambiguous in several aspects. It tends to obscure some common traits between the societies at both ends of the transformation process. One such trait is for instance the fact that both socialist and capitalist systems are built on the modern ideas of progress, growth and industrial production (Niedermüller 2004) but might have embarked on alternative routes to reach those ideals. The “golden narrative” (Giordano 2015) of transformation ignores these alternative paths and only one of the trajectories is recognized as progressively leading to a better future with a promise of wealth and freedom, and the former socialist states are placed in an always-already normative comparison with the democracies and economies of the West. This narrative inevitably casts a shadow of backwardness or un-modernness on these societies, which results in a sort of marginalization – if not subalternalization – both of the people living there and of their experiences of the political and economic changes around 1989.

A further remark needs to be added to the concept of transformation: this process has had a distinctly neoliberal imprint in its goals and in the methods deployed to reach these goals. By now, there is a long list of authors who interpreted transformation from dictatorship to democracy, from centralized planned economy to market capitalism as a neoliberal teleology (see e.g. Ther 2016; Żuk and Toporowski 2020; the essays in Gagyi and Slačálek 2022). Some of these authors follow in the footsteps of Katherine Verdery (1996) or Nancy Fraser (1997) who were among the first, in the late-1990s, to identify the neoliberal world order as a post-socialist world order. Fraser’s analysis contained a reference to the condition of the political left after the downfall of Western capitalism’s great alternative.

What some theorists (Hess 2003; Appadurai 1986) called a gatekeeping concept in the field of anthropology may also apply to “transformation” itself in some ways. Because they become strongly associated with a given world region, such concepts gain a hegemonic status when thinking about that locale. As they become the only legitimate lens through which that place is viewed, they set limits for theorizing that region. It has been argued (Cahalen 1996) that the preoccupation with transition and transformation in the research on Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe in the 1990s and 2000s were gatekeepers when describing societies and their possible future. The “multiple transformations” approach makes it possible, we trust, to better open up this prevailing gatekeeping concept through capturing, on the one hand, the processual quality of the system change and, on the other, devoting attention to numerous and concrete small stories which, in the end, will diversify the overall picture.

The historical trajectories of the territory of the former GDR and those societies east of the Elbe significantly differ, they nevertheless (temporarily) converged during the period of Soviet Rule. In the wake of the peaceful revolutions of 1989, the former Communist Bloc again became fragmented, which is also reflected in the practices of contemporary history and, increasingly, in contemporary cultural and art historiography. The new federal states and post-socialist Eastern Europe are seldom viewed in the same conceptual framework and a lot has been invested in the elucidation of a German Sonderweg (“special path”), also in reference to the post-socialist transformation as an “ostdeutscher Sonderfall” (Bösch 2019). Contrary to this approach, it has been the editors’ conviction while conceptualizing this collection of essays that some significant traits of the “East German special case” could arise precisely from a juxtaposition with the rest of the post-socialist space. One main theoretical foundation for us is the comprehensive Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation, edited by Wolfgang Merkel, Raj Kollmorgen, and Hans-Jürgen Wagener. We proceed from their definition, according to which transformations are accompanied by the following characteristics: They aim “at the alteration of the entire social structure of institutions. Individual actors deliberately and instantaneously initiate these processes of change. The balance between conscious control and momentum within the processes shifts in favour of the latter; the process as a whole may last years, if not decades” (Kollmorgen et al. 2019, 6). Unlike the controlled institutional processes, Merkel et al. argue, value change and knowledge accumulation in a transformation can probably only be explained in evolutionary terms (Merkel et al. 2019, 4). Our essays show that changes in values, norms, attitudes, or practices within the process of a transformation are not merely evolutionary, but stem from acting individuals and collectives. Their agencies are often only to be understood in detailed studies. Within this frame an important question would be if (and how) these agents act on or react to the transformation.

Transformations at the micro-level

Contemplating the post-socialist transformation is considerably affected by the way this change has been discursively tackled. Even the experiences of those whose life worlds had been radically swayed amidst this change are shaped by the (master) narratives on, and the historical assessment of, the state-socialist period. While master narratives are eager to promise interpretive sovereignty, they are in fact incapable of depicting the actual dynamics of change. Being convinced that those dynamics reside in the multiplicity of (minor) narratives, the essays in this volume explore the agency of people living through the regime change and thereby capture more varied narratives of the post-socialist transformation. Conceiving of transformation as an open process allows the contributors to illuminate concrete social experiences and subjective perceptions as well as generational changes in this decade-long contemporary history. Although they are not unaffected by the broader institutional political framework, these accounts go beyond that sphere and shed light on how the rapid change played out in everyday life. This is not to say that (minor) narrators offer access to or reveal the immediate reality of life during transformation. Rather, they tell us what they people remember. As narratology and memory studies conclude, reminiscences are usually a mixture of primary personal experiences and secondary experiences, as well as judgements taken from media contexts (Lehmann 2007, 39–42). Furthermore, people who tell their own life stories tend to convert contingencies into a coherent story, constructed from the present perspective and featuring themselves as capable of purposeful action most of the time (Meyer 2018, 51). When people narrate times of crisis retrospectively, they often create a sense of continuity, thus blurring the rupture so that they can evade feelings of defencelessness or having been at the mercy of concurrent political events. This enables them to foreground their own agency when being confronted with tough moments in contemporary history. The simple circumstance that systemic ruptures do not necessarily coincide with biographical ruptures (Lorek 2016) can contribute to this style of narration, too.

Another hard-to-face feeling when recalling the transformation on the level of everyday social and cultural practices turns out to be a loss of relevance and embeddedness: a Sinnverlust (“loss of meaning”). Arguably, 1989 also brought great changes for those working in the arts and culture. Even though they were heavily controlled and restricted under the earlier political regime, the arts, culture and literature, together with writers and artists, film makers, etc., were of central importance in most socialist societies in East-Central Europe. The West German cultural sociologist Karl-Siegbert Rehberg who, after the “Wende,” relocated to the new federal state of Saxony, made the important observation that the function of “cultural production” in socialism not only lay in providing aesthetic support for the regime, but it was also a significant site for opening up questions and problems (Rehberg 2020). The guideline for cultural policy at the time insisted on “Culture for All!,” whereas culture and even more so the visual arts became the preoccupation of the elite or experts only after reunification. As a result, many areas experienced a kind of Sinnverlust. This same experience has been captured by the American researcher Andrew Wachtel (2006) in the dilemma of “remaining relevant after Communism.” Following this observation, many view the German-German “image controversy” (Bilderstreit) – a debate about the question whether serious art could have existed at all under the conditions of the SED dictatorship – as a proxy discourse on Germany’s post-reunification difficulties. The harsh controversy erupted in the wake of a prominent West German painter’s provocative interview statement in the summer of 1990 and quickly gained publicity well beyond the artistic community. The scandal was an early indication that the unification of the two German art worlds and cultural spheres was going to take a conflict-ridden path (Tack 2011). Likewise, the voluntary commitment of many people was dismissed as an ideologically necessary sacrifice for a collective that no longer existed. In this way, not only was the (legitimate) question raised of the extent to which volunteering might have been indeed voluntary in a dictatorship, but at the same time the praised (socialist) togetherness that helped many people live through the post-socialist transformation was called into question. In the area of paid and unpaid care work, for instance, people’s motivations for and experiences of caregiving were devalued if they arose under the conditions of “care dictatorships” (Jarausch 1999), in which the state supposedly either forced them to care for others or made any forms of self-help superfluous. In the contributions collected in this Special Issue, we therefore also shed light on (care) workers and volunteers, beside artists, who encountered the problem of Sinnverlust, devaluation and a general suspicion of “being outdated.” The demise of the “working-class society” confronted above all workers with a sudden loss of meaning, a situation for which they needed to develop resilience strategies, re-purpose their formerly acquired knowledge or generally re-set their personal goals.

Post-socialist transformation as lived experience

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the political turnaround of 1989/90, the networked research project “Multiple Transformations: Social Experience and Cultural Change in East Germany and East-Central Europe before and after 1989” was initiated by four research institutes in Saxony, Germany. The research network has been sponsored by the Saxon State Ministry of Science and Art; the participating institutions are: Serbski institut|Sorbian Institute (SI), Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden, Leibniz-Institute for the History of Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), and Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (ISGV).¹ This thematic issue arose out of this project and involves researchers within the network (acting as editors and/or authors) and invited contributors. The essays concentrate on two social groups in a small range of transformation societies: those involved in volunteering for certain communities on the one hand and those in the cultural and creative sector, on the other. These groups have not usually stood in the limelight of studies on the transitional phase. The conference “1990–2020: Transformationsprozesse in Deutschland und Ostmitteleuropa – Bilanz und Perspektiven” in March 2020, similarly convened to commemorate 30 years of democratic transformation, invited experts from the fields of politics, economy and society at large to contemplate the “events, causes, developments and aftermaths of the transformation process.” The programme therefore stuck to what we would call the macro-perspective and excluded the less representative domain of culture, or less conspicuous activities of everyday life like care work, or the demise of old and the emergence of new forms of collectives.

Exploring these fields through archival research and qualitative interviews with contemporary witnesses, however, provided us with insights and narratives in which questions of individual and institutional transformations become entangled.

Falling back on the motto extracted from the comprehensive Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation (Merkel et al. 2019) for this Introduction, contributors to this volume seek out the ways in which individual actors have initiated, shaped or coped with processes of change aiming “at the alteration of the entire social structure of institutions.” The balance between conscious control and momentum within the processes became a particularly important aspect for us: Unlike controlled institutional transformation, changes in values, norms, attitudes, or practices as well as knowledge accumulation stem from acting individuals and organizations or collectives. Our detailed inquiries intend to throw their agency and scope of action into relief. The investigations are located at the micro-regional, regional, national and cross-regional level: essays dealing with former East Germany focus on the federal state of Saxony and Lusatia, a district in Saxony and home to the West Slavic ethnic group the Sorbs, one of Germany’s officially recognized ethnic minorities. The cultural and creative sector and its players are taken into account. A Romanian case study sets the examination of volunteering and care work in East Germany into a comparative frame of reference, while effects of the transformation of the cultural infrastructure are gauged with the example of Lusatia’s minority culture, the Saxon federal capital Leipzig’s new museum and, taking a region-wide perspective, international sponsors of the post-socialist art scenes. The different layers of analysis allow us to showcase a variety of viewpoints, and the heterogeneity of both the post-socialist area and the transformation paths, thus further multiplying accounts of the regime change.

Maren Hachmeister examines voluntary care practices under the auspices of Volkssolidarität (Peoples’ Solidarity), a welfare organization for older people founded in the former GDR, without any counterpart in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, popularly known as West Germany). Hachmeister considers volunteering and caring as social practices of everyday life, which are particularly affected by people’s social relations, and monitors volunteers’ motivations to care for older people from late socialism to the post-1989 transformation period. As this essay reveals, it was not the socialist state alone that provided care for older people, but in many cases volunteers took over care responsibilities. The constant need for care as well as shared values of caring continued to motivate the volunteers’ commitment under different political conditions and amidst newly emerging care economies of the post-socialist transformation. While Hachmeister considers the transformation mainly as a social change, Leyla Safta-Zecheria approaches shifts in care practices as a biopolitical phenomenon. Her essay discusses care and sorting practices for children with disabilities in a Romanian children’s hospital that underwent several decades of infrastructural transformations, beginning in the early 1980s and continuing even after the hospital’s closure in 2001. Safta-Zecheria emphasizes that biopolitical infrastructures and practices excluding or including people with disabilities contradicted a linear explanation of post-socialist transformation in institutional care.

In order to adjust the general picture provided by an Eastern Europe-focused transformation research customarily paying little attention to East-West transfers during the transformation process itself, the historian Philipp Ther (2016) has introduced the concept of co-transformation. When talking about social change and transformation, Ther asserted, regions or locales should not be considered in isolation from each other, but always in interrelation (Ther 2016, 285). Cultural and social adaptations typically take place on both sides, acquiring the form of both exchange and demarcation (Ther 2016, 39). Thus different processes of change also overlap the transformation or run in parallel. Oliver Wurzbacher’s essay shows that the post-socialist transformation in industrial work collectives also needs to be analysed under the perspective of a broader industrial history and the general post-industrial changes in Central Europe. Nevertheless, Wurzbacher’s research field is characterized by post-socialist specificities. He presents findings from interviews with former workers in state-owned enterprises, who now have the goal of safeguarding and remembering local industrial history. They are volunteering in communities based on the former work collectives to organize exhibitions and events or establish archives and museums. But although their individual experiences of the transformation are crucial for their motivation, they do tell stories that go far beyond the economic privatizations and liquidations of the 1990s.

The German post-unification theatre landscape, especially the case of Berlin, offers an illuminating example for such two-directional co-transformation in which “the East” does not simply adapt to familiar Western models. The inevitable structural changes and financing models implemented in the Eastern part of the country actually provided a kind of sandbox situation or avant-garde laboratory to develop new arrangements (Ibs 2016). The new models of organization elaborated here were gradually also applied to theatres in West Berlin, thus leading to a general and much needed modernization of those cultural venues as well.

When investigating shifts in administering and financing culture in the period of transformation, the common denominator among the reviewed national and regional contexts is that the state had promoted and controlled art and culture according to strict ideological criteria in the state-socialist decades. As a result, the old cultural infrastructure collapsed together with the state after 1989 or witnessed substantial alterations, most conspicuously in the form of decentralization and demands to adjust to pre-existing models, often those in effect in Western democracies. The Sorbian institutional structure is a special case. Many organizations have been preserved after 1989/90, albeit under new sponsorship (e.g. as an association or Verein). One organization, however, was dissolved in 1993 and found no new equivalent, i.e. the House of Sorbian Folk Art. As a link between professional and amateur art under state supervision, the dissolution continues to have an impact to this day. In a great many post-socialist societies, international sponsors with a region-wide portfolio seized the opportunities that the financing and administrative vacuum opened up. Their programmes and the regional network built up by their activities have done much to reform existing local structures of arts management. Beata Hock’s contribution, an exchange with grantees of two such foundations, the Soros Foundation (later Open Society Foundations) and the Austrian ERSTE Foundation, revisits the activities of these major donors and assesses their impact from today’s perspective. As East German museums and institutions were “taken over” and gradually became integrated into federal cultural funding, international actors did not play any significant role in this context.

Due to the abuse of a centrally managed cultural policy in the Third Reich, contemporary Germany’s cultural funding only makes funding possible on the level of the Länder, the individual federal states. This also means that the various “new federal states” (states of former East Germany) followed different trajectories; Saxony itself showing some distinguishing features. The Sächsische Kunstfonds/Saxon Art Fund in Dresden is a 30,000 piece strong collection of fine art related to post-1945 and contemporary Saxony. Its post-1989 funding structures did not in a flash destroy, but rather slowly adapted those inherited from its predecessor, the Office for Visual Arts at the Dresden District Council, hence preserving relative continuity in acquisition policy. In the assessment of Susanne Altmann, this was unlike processes observed in the other new German states where an apparatus already tried and tested in the FRG was implemented (Altmann 2020). These cultural funds invested more in project funding and focused less on building new infrastructures (which, on the other hand, is not quite unlike the approach of international sponsors in East-Central Europe); consequently, hardly any new institutions emerged there after 1989.

In the city of Leipzig, the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (GfZK) presents another unique example, an institution that emerged, in 1996, in the wake of an original goal to overcome the isolation of East Germany from Western art. This Museum of Contemporary Art was founded as a limited company and was a joint initiative of the State of Saxony and the Förderkreis der Leipziger Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Patrons of a Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig), chaired by the industrialist Arend Oetker from Cologne. Oetker solicited a whole series of donations from the West German business community, while the municipality and the last GDR government also contributed financially to the development of the collection. Franciska Zólyom’s text “Role models vs. modes of rule. The foundation of GfZK, a public-private museum in Leipzig” in this Special Issue explores the founding history of the GfZK, also reflecting on the conflicting interests and social fears of the immediate post-Wende years.

Minority cultures represent a further site from which to contemplate the socio-political change. As a West Slavic minority, the Sorbs live predominantly in Lusatia, a region in the eastern part of Germany, close to the borders of Poland and Czech Republic. Today they are one of the four recognized national minorities in Germany. While the GDR’s new legal framework recognized the Sorbs as the only national minority and the state was intent on protecting and promoting their national heritage according to its political principles, the post-Wende years also brought the transition to market economy, the closure of several cultural institutions and, with that, an increasing number of freelance creative workers. Ines Keller and Fabian Jacobs describe the activity and significance of closing the House of Sorbian Folk Art in 1993, a state cultural institution, and its consequences for the Sorbian minority. Their essay is complemented by that of Theresa Jacobs who, by way of introducing the notable Sorbian composer and freelancer Juro Mětšk (1954–2022), depicts the conditions in freelance artistic work before and after the political changes. In both contributions, the conditions and effects of transformation processes are exemplarily examined from a minority perspective in terms of their multiplicity, with questions of “cultural security” (Carbonneau et al. 2021) and “resonance” (Rosa 2016, 2016) being discussed. Thus, the two contributions on Sorbs become exemplary for the diversity of multiple transformations. Subaltern, vulnerable groups have different worlds of experience that are of a different kind and which are characterized by stories of relationships with specific knowledge in dealing with diversity and change. Thus, according to Elka Tschernokoshewa, minority research has a key function if culture and identity – especially in change – are to be understood (Tschernokoshewa 2009, 33). Such minority-sensitive research approaches enable the assertion of new perspectives and make a forward-looking contribution to the international research landscape (ibid., 13).

The interdisciplinary approach of multiple transformations presented here enables a deeper understanding of transformation processes, with a strong focus on the actors and their experiences. In this Special Issue, this is reflected in the particular writing formats selected. Classical styles, for example, are vignetted; individual interviews are used as examples of the actual multidimensionality of entrenched narratives and supposedly already proven contexts. Doing transformations thus particularly emphasizes a different perspective on transformation processes, which is intended to stimulate the questioning of rigid images and master narratives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This thematic journal issue was published in the framework of the research project “Multiple Transformations. Social Experiences and Cultural Change in East Germany and East Central Europe before and after 1989” (2020-2022), supported by the Saxon State Ministry for Higher Education, Research, Culture and Tourism (SMWK). The endeavour was financed through tax resources in accordance with the budget adopted by the parliament of Saxony.

Notes on contributors

Maren Hachmeister

Maren Hachmeister is a research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the TU Dresden. Her research interests include the social history of East Central Europe and East Germany, care, volunteering, organizational sociology, and aging. Her most recent publication in English is “Care at home: voluntary care in the lives of those who provide and need help in three (post)socialist states,” in Studia historica Brunensia, 69, no. 1 (2022).

Beáta Hock

Beáta Hock is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. Her areas of research and teaching include East-Central European art and art history, feminist cultural theory, and the cultural dimensions of the global Cold War. In the academic year 2015–16 Beata was visiting professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; in 2021/22 she was Käthe Leichter Visiting Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Vienna. Beata also occasionally works as independent curator.

Theresa Jacobs

Theresa Jacobs/Jacobsowa studied musicology, communication and media studies as well as German studies in Leipzig (Germany), Krakow (Poland) and Bratislava (Slovakia). Her research focuses on music and dance studies as well as comparative minority studies. In 2012, she completed her doctorate on folk dance practices among the Sorbs. Since 2015 she has been a research assistant at the Sorbian Institute | Serbski institut in Bautzen and since 2021 she is deputy head of the department of cultural studies. She is currently working on the transformation of the Sorbian cultural and creative sector after 1989/90. As a freelancer, she manages projects and production in the fields of contemporary dance and performance as well as cultural education.

Oliver Wurzbacher

Oliver Wurzbacher researches cultures of memory, work cultures, and the post-1989 period of transformation in Eastern Germany. He studied ethnology, cultural history, and sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. Wurzbacher was a research fellow at the Institute of Saxon History and Cultural Anthropology (ISGV) from 2020–2022, where he worked on the project “Social Heritage: Post-Socialist Organizations of Former GDR Production Collectives – Traditionalization and New Collectivization”.

Notes

1. The research group’s blog contains further information and output from the three-year period (2020–2022): https://multitrafo.hypotheses.org.