Maximilian Graf joins the PanEur1970s team
Maximilian Graf joins the PanEur1970s team on 1 September 2017 for two years.
Maximilian Graf is a historian who specializes in Cold War Studies and the History of Communism. He earned his PhD from the University of Vienna in 2012. As Junior Researcher and later as Post-Doc he worked at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. In November/December 2013, he was chercheur associée at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and April–June 2017 Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. In 2014, he received the Karl von Vogelsang Prize – Austrian State Prize for the History of Social Sciences, and in 2015 the Dr.-Alois-Mock-Wissenschaftspreis. At the moment, he is working on a book with the working title Overcoming the Iron Curtain. A New History of Détente in Cold War Central Europe.
Graf’s most recent publications include his first book on Austrian–East German relations during the Cold War Österreich und die DDR 1949–1990. Politik und Wirtschaft im Schatten der deutschen Teilung (Vienna: ÖAW, 2016) which recently received the best publication award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences 2017; the edited volumes Franz Marek. Beruf und Berufung Kommunist. Lebenserinnerungen und Schlüsseltexte (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2017); Österreich im Kalten Krieg. Neue Forschungen im internationalen Kontext (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016); Orient & Okzident. Begegnungen und Wahrnehmungen aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Vienna: Neue Welt Verlag 2016, 2017); and numerous articles and book chapters, including: together with Wolfgang Mueller, An Austrian mediation in Vietnam? The superpowers, neutrality, and Kurt Waldheim’s good offices, in Sandra Bott/Jussi Hanhimaki/Janick Schaufelbuehl/Marco Wyss (eds.) Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War. Between or within the blocs?, (London: Routledge, 2016), 127–143; (Kalter) Krieg am Bergisel. Skispringen im Spannungsfeld von Politik, Sport und Nation: Österreich und die DDR als Fallbeispiele, in Zeitgeschichte 42 (2015) 4, 215–232; The Rise and Fall of ‘Austro-Eurocommunism’. On the ‘Crisis’ within the KPÖ and the Significance of East German Influence in the 1960s, in Journal of European Integration History 20 (2014) 2, 203–218.
In the PanEur1970s project he will reassess the East German economic and détente polices in the broader European context of the long 1970s. A special focus will be on the question how European integration shaped the rather bilateral East German attitudes of dealing with the West.