(Last modified September 2010)

The research unit aims to contribute to a social history of contemporary Germany that will illuminate how the country can respond appropriately to the changing political responsibilities and challenges of the post-1989 world. These challenges relate to both the foundations of the country’s production regime and its foreign policy concepts. Following a course of misguided structural conservatism would be no less disastrous than blind deregulation. Our research attempts to identify underlying continuities and abortive constellations and thus pinpoint preexisting potentials that warrant reactivation but also other, practices, institutions, and ways of thinking that are in need of revision.

With the end of the post-World War II period, two historization processes began: the first is the historization of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which is currently being reconstructed as both an “authoritarian regime” and a “state of ordinary working folks”. The former, nostalgic perspective on the GDR can be interpreted, on one hand, as an attempt to assert the right to one’s life; on the other hand, it veils the traces of collective self-repression that were also part of East Germany’s history. Today, the eastern part of Germany is a fragmented society with highly productive regions, development zones that rely on transfer payments, and areas that are increasingly isolated, socially as well as economically. With the Solidarity Pact II and its additional funds for the east scheduled to end in 2019, the question now is: who will leave, who will stay, and who will return?

The second historization pertains to the Federal Republic of Germany. In this case, mainstream opinion in contemporary history favors a one-sided “success story” that has replaced the earlier, ideologically-charged interpretation, which portrayed West Germany’s development as a process of restoration. This perspective has lead to specific “blind spots”, since it ignores conflicting developments and unexpected occurrences. Historicizing the Federal Republic of Germany lacks the hermeneutic distance needed to grasp the contingent nature of post-1945 West Germany as a “buffer state” (Charles Mayer) that separates us from the National Socialist regime.

The Bundeswehr, the RAF, and open-ended history

Two integral projects examine post-1945 Germany’s development as a highly irregular process that lacked guarantees and certainties. Studies on West Germany’s military elite retrace the process of generational transposition in the semi-sovereign republic’s discourse on security policies. Traditions and new concepts merged and what resulted was neither restoration nor a new beginning. Dealing with contingency within the framework set by the country’s integration into the Western power alliance determined the course of events. A project that addresses the history of protest in East and West Germany reveals even more clearly how contradictory German progress was. The terrorism of the 1970s disclosed the regressive tragedy inherent in post-1945 Germany’s ironic program of “business as usual”. And on the backdrop of the history of the RAF, the student movement of the 1960s must be reinterpreted as an attempt to deal with the German past by revisiting it.

Beyond Continuity

The emergence of a class of “superfluous” individuals, the effects of a shrinking population, legitimacy deficits in the educational system, and the inner weakness of trade unions and other associations: these phenomena mark the horizon of research projects that address contemporary issues.

Precarity, Vulnerability, and Exclusion

A new area of work recently established within the research unit examines the architecture of state welfare and social precariousness. Here, the focus is how the welfare state is being redesigned institutionally, legally, and politically and on the recent rise in inequality associated with changes in the world of employment. Studies on “Why Society Needs the State” and on “Administering Social Life” form the conceptual framework for investigating the welfare state as a producer of social inequality, as an employer who shapes individual work histories, and, finally, as the site of conflicts about normative principles.

These conceptual explorations have laid the groundwork for a number of studies that examine these issues on an empirical level. One study considers the changes in the German labor court system, as an institutional interface between the world of employment and state policies.

A publically-funded project addresses the increasingly precarious nature of employment biographies on the periphery of the job market. This research is being conducted in cooperation with the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung, Bundesagentur für Arbeit [Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Agency] in Nuremberg and the Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung [Institute for Social Science Reseach] in Munich. A key focus here are the so-called “Grenzgänger” (a term formerly used to refer to cross-border commuters), who must negotiate the rocky terrain of temporary and part-time employment, mini jobs, and social assistance.

Another project deals with the emergence of a growing “service proletariat” that is employed in the areas of security, cleaning, and serving. The focal point here is not so much the precarious status of these jobs but rather the proletarian nature of the life styles that accompany them. How people experience their jobs, what forms of subordination they are subject to, and how they perceive society are some of the central issues investigated in this work.

In all of these projects, people and their actions are the focal point of empirical research on the welfare state: people who are administrators or protagonists of social change, but also those characterized by their precarious positions as "Grenzgänger" or status defenders. Our goal is to illuminate the architecture of the welfare state sociologically from within and to deal with social precariousness not as a structural problem but rather as an experiential process and a challenge that calls for action.

The analyses undertaken in these various sectors of social life are intended to offer insights into the fundamental changes in the overall design of the Federal Republic’s social order, changes that will lead to a society that transcends “middle class leveling”, an educational system that transcends “educational reforms”, collective organizations that transcend “macro-corporatism”, and a welfare state that transcends “social patriotism”.