The 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the peace conference in Paris and thorough reconstruction of borders in Europe is behind us. The historians devoted much attention to this, meticulously analyzing the mechanisms of transformation of the political order in Europe and doing justice to the actors of this great political change. Who and how contributed to this change was the key issue in these considerations. The most common answer is: politicians and military men.
However, the third professional group whose role is of increasing interest among scholars are experts, being often distinguished scientists. In recent years, their involvement has been particularly readily written about, more often favorably than with a critical distance. Service to the state or duty to the nation in such dramatic circumstances as the Great War and the rebuilding ofthe world seems to be a natural behavior also today and it does not require any special explanation. It seems that scholars, like politicians and military men, simply fulfilled their duty.
The organizers of the conference on the public roles of experts invite you to jointly reflect on the issue of the political involvement of intellectuals in the fight for an independent state – both from a group and intellectual perspective. The sociology of knowledge, which also deals with the observation of scholars' attitudes towards the Great War, clearly shows that science is a social phenomenon and it cannot be reliably studied in isolation from non-scientific factors. This unambiguity of sociological observations is not always tantamount to the state of consciousness of the scholars themselves. During our meeting we would like to reflect, among others, on the questions such as whether serving the homeland really was an obvious choice and free from controversy. How to reconcile service to one's own state (homeland) with the rigors of science and scholar's ethics? How to represent the interest of the state without ceasing to consider yourself an objective scholar? What were the other values that had been tried to combine with the service and science and which of them became impossible to reconcile? Answering these questions requires an inversion of the question: we are not so much interested in the experts' contribution to the state-building but rather in the place of this involvement in their professional careers and biographies. What was the place of the service to the state and to the nation within this spectrum?
The conference will be broadcasted online via Zoom.
Please register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mjV4i1PnSfG_uuipZ06dig .
Streaming live without registration will be available on the Facebook page of the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (CBH PAN) in Berlin.
The event will be held in English and German. Simultaneous translation will be provided.
Programme
9:55 Welcome
Iwona Dadej (Berlin), Maciej Górny (Warsaw)
Panel 1: Geographers and Borders
10.00 – 12:30
Vedran Duančić (Zagreb), Geography is an Objective Science, and it Favors Us: Geography and Politics in Yugoslavia, 1918–1941
Balázs Ablonczy (Budapest), "Turan Cannot Be Humiliated" - Jenő Cholnoky, the Hungarian Geographer in the Period of the Peace Conference, 1918-1921
Maciej Górny (Warsaw), Nature, Culture, Failure: Erwin Hanslik's Borders of Civilization
Chair: Agnes Laba (Wuppertal)
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break
Panel 2: Experts and States
13:30 – 17:00
Jawad Daheur (Paris), Which state to serve? German foresters facing political change in Western Poland (1918-1922).
Anna Nowakowska-Wierzchoś (Warsaw), Social "female military staff" - co-creators of defense and state education
Iwona Dadej (Berlin), Polnische Historikerinnen und Kuratorinnen im Dienste des Staates? Das Beispiel des Museums Verdienstvoller Polinnen in Lemberg 1929-1939
Sophie Schwarzmaier (Berlin), "Aufbau der polnischen Schule". Polnische Pädagog:innen und der Aufbau des/eines? eigenes Nationalstaates 1911-1925
Martin Rohde (Halle/Saale), "Meine Pflichten als tschechoslowakischer Staatsbürger habe ich ehrlich erfüllt, … ohne den Weg des Karriererismus zu gehen." Galizisch-ukrainische Experten im Bildungswesen der Podkarpatská Rus
Marion Röwekamp (Mexico-City), Serving two masters? Female lawyers between the law and the women´s movement.
Chair: Jan Surman (Prague)
17:15 – 18:45 Keynote Lecture
Katrin Steffen (Sussex), Balancing interests in a post-imperial setting: Experts, modernity and the state in Poland after 1918
Closing remarks
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