Outside the "Comfort Zone"

Traditionally, privacy studies have focused on the liberal democratic societies of the global West, whereas non-democratic contexts have played a marginal role in the discussion of the private and public spheres, not in the least because of the political stances of the Cold War era. This volume offers explorations of highly diversified performances and discourses of privacy by various actors which were embedded into the culturally, economically, and politically specific constructions of late socialism in individual states of the Warsaw Pact. While the experience of socialism varied across the Bloc, there were also some reactions to socialism and some reverse responses of socialist regimes to these reactions that one can trace through all states. Contributions to this volume take us across the Eastern Bloc and beyond itfrom the Soviet Union, into late socialist Poland, Romania, and East and West Germany. While looking at specific countries, they provide a glimpse into a broader perspective that reaches beyond the borders of individual late socialist states. Together, these articles document a palette of paradigms of the construction and transformation of the private spheres that overcame the national borders of individual states and left an imprint across the Eastern Bloc, thereby contributing to rethinking Cold War rhetoric in regard to these states.

Autorentext

Tatiana Klepikova and Lukas Edeler, University of Passau, Germany.

Klappentext

How did the societies of late Socialist Eastern and East-Central Europe construct their private and public spheres? This volume reaches beyond the comfort zone of privacy studies, which originated in western liberal democracies, by exploring contexts in which ideas about privacy and publicity have been approached differently, thereby offering unique insights into our global understandings of these concepts.