Transformative Podcast

In this episode, Izabela Mrzygłód explores the interwar right-wing radicalisation of student communities at the University of Vienna and the University of Warsaw. How did academic milieus contribute to both the integration and exclusion of communities in Central Europe? Through a comparative lens, she examines how mutual aid organisations such as Bratnia Pomoc and Deutsche Studentenschaft became key sites for the formation of nationalist, often antisemitic, agendas. The discussion traces how political violence, generational tensions, and the crisis of liberal democracy shaped student activism, positioning youth as a powerful force mediating between social structures in times of transformation.

Izabela Mrzygłód is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Warsaw and the author of Uniwersytety w cieniu kryzysu. Nacjonalistyczna radykalizacja studentów Warszawy i Wiednia w okresie międzywojennym [Universities in the Shadow of Crisis: The Nationalistic Radicalization of Students in Warsaw and Vienna in the Interwar Period], which was awarded the Marian Turski History Prize for the Debut by the Polish magazine POLITYKA.

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).