List of Figures
List of Acronyms

Foreword
Pavel Kolář and Michal Kopeček
Editors’ Note
Ana Kladnik and Celia Donert

PART I. Sinnwelt and Eigen-Sinn
Socialism as Sinnwelt: Communist Dictatorship and its World of Meaning in a Cultural-Historical Perspective
Martin Sabrow
Neither Consent nor Opposition: Eigen-Sinn, or How to Make Sense of Compliance and Self-Assertion under Communist Domination
Thomas Lindenberger

PART II. Authorities and Domination
Policeman Nicolae: The Story of One Man’s Life and Work in the Socialist Republic of Romania (1960–89)
Ciprian Cirniala
The East German Reporting System: Normality and Legitimacy Through Bureaucracy
Hedwig Richter
Late Communist Elites and the Demise of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1986–89)
Michal Pullmann

PART III. Everyday Social Practices and Sinnwelt
Local Self-Governance, Voluntary Practices, and the Sinnwelt of Socialist Velenje
Ana Kladnik
Modern Housekeeping Worlds; or, How Much is Thirty Percent Really? Eigensinnige Consumer Practices and the Hungarian Trade Union’s “Washing Machine Campaign” of 1957–58
Annina Gagyiova
Single Mothers, Lonely Children: Polish Families, Socialist Modernity, and the Experience of Crisis of the Late 1970s and 1980s
Barbara Klich-Kluczewska
“Since Makarenko the Time for Experiments has Passed”: Peace, Gender, and Human Rights in East Berlin during the 1980s
Celia Donert

PART IV. Intellectual and Expert Worlds and (De-)Legitimization
Problems with Progress in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia: The Example of Most, North Bohemia
Matĕj Spurný
Authentic Community and Autonomous Individual: Making Sense of Socialism in Late Socialist Hungary
Péter Apor
The “Will to Publicity” and its Publicists: Curating the Memory of Czechoslovak Samizdat
Jonathan Larson
Dissident Legalism: Human Rights, Socialist Legality, and the Birth of Legal Resistance in the 1970s Democratic Opposition in Czechoslovakia and Poland
Michal Kopeček

Contributors
Translators
Index