Making Sense of Dictatorship

Dr Celia Donert is University Lecturer in 20th Century Central European History, since c. 1900 at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Ana Kladnik is Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana. Martin Sabrow was from 2004 to 2021 Director of the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam and Professor of Recent and Contemporary History at Humboldt University, Berlin.

List of Figures

List of Acronyms


Foreword

Pavel Kolář and Michal Kopeček

Editors’ Note

Ana Kladnik and Celia Donert


PART I. Sinnwelt and Eigen-Sinn

Socialism as Sinnwelt: Communist Dictatorship and its World of Meaning in a Cultural-Historical Perspective

Martin Sabrow

Neither Consent nor Opposition: Eigen-Sinn, or How to Make Sense of Compliance and Self-Assertion under Communist Domination

Thomas Lindenberger


PART II. Authorities and Domination

Policeman Nicolae: The Story of One Man’s Life and Work in the Socialist Republic of Romania (1960–89)

Ciprian Cirniala

The East German Reporting System: Normality and Legitimacy Through Bureaucracy

Hedwig Richter

Late Communist Elites and the Demise of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1986–89)

Michal Pullmann


PART III. Everyday Social Practices and Sinnwelt

Local Self-Governance, Voluntary Practices, and the Sinnwelt of Socialist Velenje

Ana Kladnik

Modern Housekeeping Worlds; or, How Much is Thirty Percent Really? Eigensinnige Consumer Practices and the Hungarian Trade Union’s “Washing Machine Campaign” of 1957–58

Annina Gagyiova

Single Mothers, Lonely Children: Polish Families, Socialist Modernity, and the Experience of Crisis of the Late 1970s and 1980s

Barbara Klich-Kluczewska

“Since Makarenko the Time for Experiments has Passed”: Peace, Gender, and Human Rights in East Berlin during the 1980s

Celia Donert


PART IV. Intellectual and Expert Worlds and (De-)Legitimization

Problems with Progress in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia: The Example of Most, North Bohemia

Matĕj Spurný

Authentic Community and Autonomous Individual: Making Sense of Socialism in Late Socialist Hungary

Péter Apor

The “Will to Publicity” and its Publicists: Curating the Memory of Czechoslovak Samizdat

Jonathan Larson

Dissident Legalism: Human Rights, Socialist Legality, and the Birth of Legal Resistance in the 1970s Democratic Opposition in Czechoslovakia and Poland

Michal Kopeček


Contributors

Translators

Index