ABSTRACT
The most widespread topic in the recent German discussion was the question whether Eastern Europe as a specific political-geographic entity has disappeared
as a result of the collapse of Soviet state socialism. The historian Jo¨rg Baberowski has provoked much of that discussion with his assumption of the
inevitable end of “East European History” as an academic discipline (Baberowski 19981). Later on (in 2003), the German “Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r
Osteuropakunde” (German Association of the Study of Eastern Europe) organized a workshop mainly of political scientists on the same question. In one of the
statements, Hans-Henning Schro¨der (a Historian and Political Analyst of presentday Russia from the think tank SWP in Berlin) stressed the political mandate of the German “Oststudien” (studies on Eastern Europe) in the 1930s. And he saw a
kind of continuity in the 1950s and 1960s, in the time period of the cold war, when German Sovietology was a clear weapon within the systemic contestation
between West and East. It seems logical from this perspective that at least after 1989, there should be a clear break with this tradition.
