If there is any institute at Freie Universität Berlin that has been entangled with some of the most iconic, generation-defining moments of modern history, then it has to be the Institute for East European Studies (OEI). Founded in 1951, the institute was established as an interdisciplinary center with a focus on regional studies, just as the Cold War in West Berlin was heating up and the separation between East and West was beginning to take shape. Eastern Europe, the subject of its research, lay behind the Iron Curtain, in the socialist dictatorships of the Warsaw Pact.

Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dramatic – yet mostly peaceful – dissolution of the Soviet Union, followed by brutal conflicts such as the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. All of a sudden, the regions in which the OEI specialized had totally reconfigured – with new states, new alliances, and new perspectives on the agenda.

The forces of history once more struck the institute when Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, causing close ties that had been maintained since the 1960s and even survived the Cold War to be torn apart. Russia, the largest part of what had made up “eastern Europe,” was now beyond reach.

Oscillating Between Fascination and Enmity

The OEI was founded just three years after Freie Universität Berlin itself and pursued the academic tradition of “area studies,” which had become a fairly well-established research field in the United States. A frequent critique of this approach was that researchers could find themselves caught between the desire to pursue their genuine scholarly interest in the languages, cultures, and histories of a region, and pressure to use this expertise for more cynical ends, such as those tied to business, politics, diplomacy, and even military domination.

According to Robert Kindler, professor of East and Central European history at the OEI, this feeling of ambivalence pervaded the institute from its inception. While there was an expectation that knowledge of eastern Europe would be used to serve the interests of the state – or in extreme cases, to better understand “the enemy” – researchers first and foremost wanted to maintain their autonomy, as well as share their expertise, make their knowledge accessible, and promote exchange.

Kindler describes the aim of the OEI as being to conduct research on countries and societies in eastern and central Europe, ideally in tandem with colleagues from those very regions. However, they have always been relatively fraught relationships.

Susanne Strätling is no stranger to these sorts of complex situations. The professor of comparative literature with a special focus on East European literatures undertook several years of research on the Russian avant-garde to produce her book The Hand at Work, but was unable to travel to Moscow for the launch of its Russian translation in 2022 because of the war.

Strätling says that while cultural and literary studies are often perceived as being less enmeshed in politics than other subjects, nothing could be further from the truth: “Research should remain autonomous and free from party politics, but that does not necessarily mean that it exists outside of politics. When it comes to subjects like literary and cultural studies, we see this in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war in debates concerning what belongs in the artistic and cultural canon of eastern Europe and the position that Ukrainian and Russian artists take within it.” This includes revising the decades-long practice in research of labeling the works of Ukrainian artists as “Russian.”

Unearthing a Treasure Trove in the Archives

Together with their students, Kindler and his colleague Clemens Günther made concerted efforts to critically reflect on and redress the institute’s history in a seminar they held in the 2026 summer semester. Students embarked on a series of mini research projects using materials they found in the University Archive.

One of these was an analysis of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the position of women’s representative, especially the discussions that took place at the time and opposition to the plans.

Nicolo Luzzatto, together with his classmates Paul Grohmann and Hans Wegener, decided to work on the exchange program that the OEI maintained with Leningrad University during the Cold War for their project. A partnership between Freie Universität Berlin and what is now Saint Petersburg State University existed from 1968 to 2022. During this time, the OEI sent two students to St. Petersburg and hosted two students from St. Petersburg in Berlin every year.

Luzzatto came across a folder in the archive that held a collection of testimonies from students about their exchanges. These reports paint a vivid picture of the atmosphere at the time, illustrating not only the students’ own fascination with the Soviet Union, but also their initial prejudices about the people who lived there. They faced particular suspicion as foreign students from the West, and quickly learned which behavior could land them in hot water. An especially striking aspect of the testimonies was the students’ experiences of coming from the country that had produced the Nazis to a city that continued to actively memorialize a devastating siege that had lasted eight hundred days between 1941 and 1944, killing at least one million people through starvation, disease, and bombardment.

Student Amadeus Albrecht has been investigating how the OEI has viewed Ukraine throughout its history. He is of the opinion that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine represented a shock to the OEI akin to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc after 1989. Perhaps this speaks to the relevance of the institute, which is sure to be impacted by upheavals in the region – both positive and negative – for many years to come.

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The original German version of this article appeared in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin.