Jenny Price (Weimar): Ost Voices. An everyday history of structural change in 1990.

The transformation in East Germany in the early nineties was unprecedented and involved an unforeseen amount of political, social, economic and cultural change in just a few months.

At a time when our world is confronted with unexpected political upheavals, a global pandemic and climate change, a look back at the process in the East can shed light on how structural change is experienced, appropriated and co-created. The lecture not only relates to broader questions of recent German politics and history, but also shows how times of uncertainty can lead to practices of social and financial marginalisation that significantly redefine the political agency of local people.

Dr Jenny Price is the academic director of the International Heritage Centre of the Bauhaus University Weimar. She studied Modern Foreign Languages at the University of Manchester and researched East German and Turkish-German identity constructions in contemporary literature. She completed her Master’s in Global History at the University of Warwick in 2016 with a scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council. Subsequently, she was a visiting doctoral student at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena and a research assistant at the Research Training Group The GDR and European Dictatorships after 1945. In 2020, she was awarded the completion scholarship of the Ettersberg Foundation and received her PhD from the University of Warwick with a thesis on structural change in East Germany from 1989-1991. This was followed by positions as research director at the Jena Center History of the 20th Century and as a lecturer in German Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include global and everyday history, oral history, literary studies, transformation processes and memory culture in united Germany.

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