The History of Volunteer Fire Departments in East Central Europe, 1980-2000

Organized voluntary engagement for the common good of the local community was and is a constant feature in modern societies since the 19th century, and across very diverse political regimes. Using the venerable institution of Voluntary Fire Departments (VFD), this comparative project in contemporary history aims at exploring the practice, and relevance of volunteering during late state socialism and the transformation to democracy and market economies in small medium sized cities and their surrounding rural areas (district towns) in Germany and East Central Europe. The following questions are addressed: 1) What was the role of VFD under late socialism? 2) How did VFD with all their traditions and continuities of voluntary service interact with the political ruptures and societal transformations around 1989/1991)? How did voluntary firefighters perceive themselves and how were they perceived by other local actors in these processes? Did VFD as nuclei of local sociability contribute to maintain and stabilise the cohesion and identity of communities, including social markers of difference such as gender, ethnicity, and class, in a time of radical change, and how were they in turn affected by these changes themselves? 4) How did VFD organisations get involved in inter-communal, including international, cooperation on the grass root level before, during and after the changes of 1989-91? The historical comparison and the areas of investigation are defined by two commonalities: (1) VFD were established and existed almost uninterruptedly as part of municipal self-governance since the 2nd half of the 19th century, as it was typical for Germany and the Habsburg Empire. (2) They came under communist rule after 1944/45 and experienced its erosion and final breakdown during the late 1980s and early 1990s, followed by however highly diverse processes of transformation towards liberal capitalism. Local case studies in (East) Germany, Czech Republic, Slovenia and Vojvodina (Serbia) will provide empirical data and be set within the larger institutional and political contexts on the national level. Research will be based on archival records and include the extensive use of oral history interviews. Regional workshops, one international expert seminar, and one international conference, complemented with presentations at national and international conferences, will serve as seminal milestones of the project`s work programme. Project results will include a comprehensive project volume, two monographs ensuing from two PhD theses, and four articles in international and national peer-reviewed journals. To realize the research programme the funding of a team of one postdoc researcher and two doctoral candidates directed by Thomas Lindenberger, ZZF Potsdam, and Philipp Ther, Unversity of Vienna is applied for within the D-A-CH cooperation of DFG and FWF.

Organized voluntary engagement for the common good of the local community has been a constant in modern societies since the 19th century across very different political regimes. Using the time-honored institution of volunteer fire departments (FFW) as a case study, this comparative contemporary history project aimed to examine the practice and relevance of volunteerism during late state socialism and the transformation to democracy and a market economy in small medium-sized towns and their surrounding rural areas in Germany and East Central Europe. In doing so, we addressed questions such as: 1) What was the role of the FFW in late socialism? 2) How did the FFW with their traditions and continuities of voluntary service interact with the political ruptures and social transformations around 1989/1991? 3) How did the volunteer fire departments perceive themselves and how were they perceived by other local actors in these processes? Did FFWs, as nuclei of local sociability, help maintain and stabilize community cohesion and identity, including social difference markers such as gender, ethnicity, and class, during a period of radical change, and how were they in turn affected by these changes? 4) How did FFW organizations engage in intercommunity, including international, grassroots collaboration before, during, and after the changes of 1989-91? Local case studies in (East) Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Vojvodina (Serbia) provided empirical data for the larger national context. The research draws on archival material and the (2) use of oral history interviews. Three aspects can be highlighted. 1) The FFW can be used as an example of a twofold transformation. The first one took place in the early 1950s and changed the FFW decisively. They were nationalized, centralized, and subordinated to the new political ideology. 2) Even in the state-socialist regime, voluntary structures can be described that until then had been considered genuinely democratic. 3) In the transformation period of 1989, the FFW combined its traditions of the 19th century and its democratic history of the interwar period with the specific mobilization patterns of state socialism. As a result, the FFW focused not only on its core tasks (fire protection), but also increasingly on youth work, firefighter sports and local cultural work. As a result, the FFW in the Czech Republic remained a mass organization, which today comprises almost 4% of the total population and which, after a brief decline in its membership in the early 1990s, successfully gained new members. The project thus provides another piece of the puzzle in the historical reappraisal of the everyday life under state socialism and the history of transformation from below.