The Czechoslovak Harbor in Hamburg – A Cold War Case Study

In 1929, the Czechoslovak Republic leased a territory at the free port of Hamburg that would become the “gateway to the world” and a central hub for Czechoslovak international trade for the following sixty years. After 1948, this prominent location became a socialist outpost in the midst of Hamburg. This presentation will interpret this unique microcosm of the Cold War, where interests, actors and interpretations of the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc met. It will present a case study of state control and dockworkers’ “Eigensinn” in a socialist context when bloc confrontations and co-operation were negotiated on an everyday basis by people on the ground.

To request a copy of the paper, please email cseees@unc.edu.

Dr. Sarah Lemmen is a cultural historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Her research interests include concepts of migration and exile, the entanglement of national and global history, the history of travel, and postcolonial studies within an East European context. She has published broadly on these topics, including the co-edited volume on “Orientalisms in East Central Europe” (2015; in German) and the special issue of European Review of History (vol. 6, 2016) on “Transformation in East Central Europe, 1918 and 1989.”

The Carolina Seminar: Russia and Its Emipres, East and West is co-sponsored by the Carolina Seminar Program, the UNC Department of History, and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Please note that the participants will give an overview of their projects, but will not read a formal paper. Instead, papers or book chapters will be circulated ahead of time to those who are interested in attending and participating in the discussion.

Co-presented by the UNC Center for European Studies.