I stood before the Saint Anne’s Gate ready to enter the Vatican City. It was January 2023, particularly wet and cold. I had just crossed Saint Peter’s Square, rather empty in the brisk winter weather, cobblestones gleaming from the morning rain. I had been waiting for this moment for nearly three years. Yet, there are scholars who waited decades. The part of the Vatican Apostolic Archive pertaining to the period 1939-1958 opened in March 2020 and, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, closed just a couple of days later. Figure 1 Saint Peter’s Square in January 2023. I first learned about the opening ..read more

In economic terms, state socialism is usually associated with the monopoly of an authoritarian state over core elements of the economy such as trade, the distribution of resources, and the regulation of wages and prices. Yet, limited forms of legal private enterprise – often in the form of micro-craft and retail (family) businesses –existed sporadically in some state socialist countries, including Hungary and the GDR.1 Perhaps the most striking example, however, is the Polish People’s Republic, where a small private craft and retail sector beyond non-collectivized agriculture persisted mo ..read more

Lithuania is one of the most pro-European countries in the European Union and positions itself as strongly opposed to its biggest existential threat – Russia. However, when it comes to civil rights, the moral compass of the political elite sometimes points more towards the East than the West. This is particularly the case with LGBTQ people’s rights. A good example of how political homophobia works in Lithuania is the controversy around the book Amber Heart (Gintarinė širdis), created by the children’s author Neringa Macatė (pen name Dangvydė) and published in 2013. The book featured ..read more

‘One day a poster announcing the “preparatory course”, an accelerated training programme for university, appeared in a village in central Poland. The ad presented Pokusa – a surname meaning temptation – as the first to enrol: He was accepted after passing an exam. Now he is one of the best students! “You just have to want to do it,” he explains.’1 This is how a local newspaper in 1953 encouraged youths from rural areas to study at the University of Łódź, a model socialist university established in Poland’s largest industrial city in 1945. In the announcement Mr Temptation is awarded a sch ..read more

When you stroll through the city centre of Vienna at any time of the year you will notice the guided tour groups at all the famous sights, for example St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Hofburg or along the Ring. Most tours focus on the city’s imperial past and all the connected places and personalities, such as the Habsburg family and the various composers and painters. However, Vienna has many more stories to tell. Take for instance the city’s long and rich history of immigration. Without the large number of workers from Bohemia and Moravia, the imperial government would not have been able to construc ..read more

Business as usual was no longer an option in the former GDR post-1989. Liberation opened up previously state-controlled technological production to globalized markets. Uncompetitive operations soon led to closures. But some workers took the crisis into their own hands, combatting exponential unemployment by regrouping and taking a resourceful lead. Economic crash The accelerated development of computer chips, semiconductors and further microelectronic components in the GDR started at the end of the 1970s. The central committee of the SED decided to heavily invest in the development and product ..read more

The concept of friendship played an important role in the creation of a new world order amidst post-WWII reconstruction efforts. In countries such as Hungary, just as the Communist Party was resurfacing from its interwar illegality, new organizations such as the Hungarian Women’s Democratic Federation (Magyar Nők Demokratikus Szövetsége, MNDSz) were formed. As an umbrella organization, the MNDSz included women from a broad societal spectrum: ‘no matter what social status, party affiliation, profession, religion, all the women and girls who love their country and want to work’ were encouraged b ..read more

In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it seemed that everything had changed and would never be the same again. When Poland, run by a distinctly anti-refugee government,1 opened its gates to millions, many Europeans dropped everything to go to the border and volunteer. The solidarity with Ukraine was overwhelming. It gave hope. The same was true among Ukrainians. The existential threat and consequent ‘rally ‘round the flag’ effect produced the highest-ever levels of social cohesion, previously unimaginable from Ukraine’s diverse patchwork of histori ..read more

Across the world, monuments are being questioned. Statues of ‘great men’ have been wrested from the invisibility that Austrian writer Robert Musil identified as their most striking feature. Once revered, heroes and benefactors represented in stone and bronze are now being interrogated for being implicated in colonialism, slavery and antisemitism. Countless examples can be found in the English-speaking world, but even countries in continental Western Europe such as the Netherlands and Germany have started grappling with monuments as reminders of their colonial tyranny. In Austria, no monument h ..read more

‘Although the future belongs to the young, future thinking … is more the domain of older people,’ wrote Andrzej Siciński.1 The sociologist’s provocative statement follows the study he and a team of researchers conducted on young people’s visions of the future in Poland during the second half of the 1960s. The then 44-year-old researcher had become curious when he noticed that young people in 1960s Poland seemed increasingly interested in their own future, and that of their country and the world. Youth in Poland in the 1960s Being young in Poland during the 1960s meant coming of age in a h ..read more