Socialist Scandals. Corruption, Revolution and the Quest for Justice in Poland and East Germany (Jakub Szumski)

Imagine a world without corruption, where politicians put the common good above private interests. In East-Central Europe, socialist elites promised this, but often profited from office-building private homes, hoarding goods, and bending rules. How did the socialist political culture tackle corruption? In particular, how did Poland and East Germany handle corruption scandals? Jakub Szumski is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. His research interests revolve around the political, intellectual, and legal history in East Central Europe.

What can the lens of football tell us about the transformation years in East Germany? In this episode, historian and journalist Jan Mohnhaupt and Jelena Đureinović (RECET) reflect upon this question. After a series of books about the history of animals, Jan’s new book Der geteilte Rasen: Fussball in den Wendejahren 1989-1992 (The Divided/Shared Pitch: Football during the Transformation Years) tells the story of East German football during the transformation years and its legacies today. In this episode, he explains how East German clubs, players and fans experienced the period between 1989 and 1992, surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany and the Bundesliga. Jan Mohnhaupt is a historian and journalist. His books Der Zoo der Anderen and Tiere im Nationalsozialismus, published in 2017 and 2020, have been translated into multiple languages. He contributes regularly to different newspapers and magazines, such as ballesterer, der Freitag, P.M. History and Spiegel Online.

What does the lens of sex work and sexuality tell us about the history of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe? In this episode, Priska Komaromi (Humboldt University) discusses tourism aimed at Westerners that developed in socialist Hungary from the 1960s onwards, often marketed in a sexualized way. She tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about the interactions between Western tourists and Hungarian women, the perceptions of them in Hungarian society, and the discourses about race, civilisation, and Europeanness that permeated these relations. Priska Komaromi is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research examines the history of gender, sex work and sexuality in Central Eastern Europe during the state socialist period, focusing particularly on Hungary.

How might we capture historical events like war and revolution from street level? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Claire Morelon (University of Manchester) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how private courtyards, shop windows, graffiti and darkened public transport might shed light on changes in political regimes. She reflects upon how conflict shaped a place as far away from the front as Prague throughout the First World War, and indeed how such a study might productively collapse strict binaries between the battlefield and home front. Claire Morelon is a Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920 (Cambridge, 2024), which won the Lizabeth Cohen Prize for the Best Book on Cities and Political Power, the Lynn Hollen Lees Prize for Best Book in European Urban History and the Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize. She recently published, with Mary Elisabeth Cox, an edited volume titled Hunger Redraws the Map: Food, State, and Society in the Era of the First World War (also Cambridge, 2025).

How have the Croats in Argentina preserved their identity, memory, and community? How have they transmitted it across generations to this day? Following the collapse of the fascist Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945), around 10,000 Croats fled to Perón’s Argentina and settled there. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Nikolina Židek (IE University Madrid) discusses the formation of the Croatian diaspora in Argentina after the Second World War, its long history, and transformations. She tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about their self-perception as victims of communist persecution, postwar killings, and displacement, while erasing the wartime fascist state and its atrocities, and the meanings of this foundational myth for new generations today. Nikolina Židek is a Professor at IE University Madrid and a researcher specializing in diaspora and memory studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her work examines the Croatian post–World War II diaspora in Latin America and Spain, as well as the Spanish exile in Yugoslavia. Her book, The Croatian Diaspora in Argentina: From Martyrs to Memory Guardians, is forthcoming from CEU Press in early 2026.

Why have the histories of work and the histories of welfare been told separately, and what happens when we bring them together? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alexandra Ghiț (GWZO Leipzig) focuses on domestic servants, social workers, and users of welfare in interwar Bucharest to argue that “histories of welfare provision are histories of work, and histories of work are histories of welfare provision.” She tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how welfare provision has historically been gendered, how this has changed over time, and how a locally-specific but transnationally-connected form of “austerity welfare work” was developed by unpaid and paid, formal and informal workers alike in Depression-era Bucharest. Alexandra Ghiț is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. She is the author of Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Ghiț is an editor of the 2024 volume, Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Brill, 2024), and the author of numerous articles in Aspasia, The European Review of History, and International Labor and Working Class History.

What does the Non-Aligned Movement look like on a plate? Starting with a series of informal dinners in Rijeka and expanding into various events and workshops, Kevin Kenjar (University of Rijeka) pays homage to the Non-Aligned Movement through exploration and fusion of various culinary traditions coming from its numerous member states. In this episode, he reflects on Naan-Aligned Cooking and, with Jelena Đureinović (RECET), explores the tradition of non-alignment through food and cooking. Kevin Kenjar is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rijeka as part of the ERC project “REVENANT: Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation,” where his research spans a number of sites, particularly in the post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman borderlands. He earned his PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley, specializing in Linguistic and Sociocultural Anthropology. His dissertation, which was 300 year micro history of a single street corner in Sarajevo, is the basis of his forthcoming book, “The Street Corner that Started the 20th Century.”

The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation analyzes the pivotal year of 1989 and the transformation processes that resulted from a historical perspective. It brings research done over the past five years at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) into dialogue with cutting-edge scholarship by political scientists, sociologists, historians, literary scholars and anthropologists at institutions across Europe and beyond. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, two of the handbook’s editors Rosamund Johnston and Jannis Panagiotidis (both RECET) talk through the four main arguments made by the book: that the “great transformation” presented here started earlier than 1989; that its legacies linger in spaces, practices, and objects; that in order to grasp the scale of what happened around 1989, it is important to bring Eastern and Central Europe into conversation with other global regions; and that the former Eastern Bloc served as an important node in a larger, global transformation. They also reflect upon how the events of that momentous year can be used as a hinge to explore longer-term processes of economic, social, political, and cultural transformation linked to the rise of neoliberalism and globalization since the 1970s. Find out more about the Routledge Handbook. Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 (Stanford UP, 2024) and Havel v Americe (Host, 2019). Jannis Panagiotidis is the Scientific Director of RECET. He wrote the books: Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland (Anti-East European Racism in Germany) (Beltz/Juventa, 2024), The Unchosen Ones. Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP, 2019) and Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: Eine Einführung (Beltz/Juventa, 2021).

Ever since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has used the historical memory of WWII to legitimize its rule. Exactly how the historical conflict gets framed, and which parts of it are highlighted while others get omitted, has been subject to dramatic changes – just like China itself – as the different CCP leaderships adjusted and readjusted their agendas, domestic and international politics, and their imagining of what a “New China” – should mean. In this Transformative Podcast, RECET Scientific Director Jannis Panagiotidis talks to Markéta Bajgerová Verly (Austrian Academy of Sciences) exploring China’s Everchanging History of WWII. Want to find out more about this intriguing topic? Read Markéta’s blogpost for our RECET Transformative Blog. Markéta Bajgerová Verly is a political scientist focusing on the memory politics of East Asia and the globalization of memory. Recently, she was a fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies leading research on the memory politics of Shanghai Jewish Refugees in China and Austria. She holds a PhD from the University of Vienna in which she focused on World War II museums in contemporary China. Her PhD research was conducted within the ERC project "Globalized Memorial Museums" at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2020, she obtained an MA degree in China Studies (Politics and International Relations) from Yenching Academy at Peking University. In China, she led a Dean's Grant project mapping 30 museums across different Chinese provinces devoted to the memory of the War of Resistance against Japan and its memory politics.

What does football tell us about Ukraine's political and economic transformations after the collapse of the Soviet Union? In this episode, Kateryna Chernii (ZZF Potsdam) tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about football in the Soviet Union and Ukraine, the legacies of communism, the role of elites and what is happening in this sphere in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Chernii reflects on the legacies of the Soviet system in football, illuminating bottom-up perspectives on the post-Soviet transformation in Ukraine. Kateryna Chernii is a research associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, where she also completed her PhD. Her doctoral thesis focused on the transformation process of Ukrainian football and its elites after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her research interests include sports history, the history of transformations, and the legacies of communism.