2019 Issue №2

In 2017-2018, the historical community commemorated the centenary anniversaries of revolutions that took place at the end of the First World War. Although the revolutionary events in Russia attract greater attention, the German revolution of November 1918 is of no less interest. In this article, I set out to highlight the situation of the German ruling elite on the eve of the war. The absence of bright personalities among the country's political estab­lishment, on the one hand, and the lack of unity among the German elite, on the other, were the major causes of the bankruptcy of the Kaiser’s Germany. Social and class conflicts within the German elite, in particular, the tensions between the German bourgeoisie and agrarians rendered it impossible to de­vise coherent domestic and foreign policies. Incompetent leadership and fre­quent political scandals, which discredited the German ruling elite in the eyes of the public, created an extremely negative image of the monarchy. Thus, the lack of competent managers and political leaders able to take responsibility and lead the country out of the crisis created a revolutionary situation in the country.

Relying on previously unexamined archival documents and regional press materials, I consider the creation and later transformations of the histor­ical exposition at the Kaliningrad Regional Museum of History and Art. Analysis of exhibition boards dedicated to the past of the region reveals the po­litical and ideological context in which local museums developed. Moreover, it renders it possible to describe the politics of memory pursued by the local au­thorities and trace changes that took place in the regional historical con­sciousness from the first post-war years until Perestroika.

In this article, we analyse faculty recruitment practices at the Kalinin­grad State Pedagogical Institute. Our study relies primarily on the analysis of the 1946–1990s personal records database of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Feder­al University. In particular, the database was created to examine the phases and principles of faculty recruitment in the first decade of the pedagogical in­stitute. Although our project is still in the early stages, we can conclude that faculty recruitment had some controversial features. This is why the database includes sections on the social and professional characteristics of the faculty and mobility paths.