Contact
Work group
The Economy (Junior Fellow)
Max Trecker, born in 1989 in Strausberg, studied history and economics at LMU Munich and CEU Budapest. His dissertation on the coordination of East-South economic relations in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance was published by Routledge in 2020 as Red Money for the Global South: East-South Economic Relations in the Cold War. His most recent book, Neue Unternehmer braucht das Land: Die Genese des ostdeutschen Mittelstands nach der Wiedervereinigung, on the birth of a new entrepreneurial class in East Germany after 1989, came out in 2022. In Munich, he will work on a research project on Ukraine as a site of economic imagination.
Research Project
"Economic Concepts for a New Country? The Struggle for Ukraine’s Economic Future between Perestroika and the Orange Revolution (1985-2004)"
Like no other country in Europe, in the modern era Ukraine has been a site onto which economic ideas are projected. On one hand, these ideas came from different strata of the Ukrainian population, but, on the other hand, they also originated from non-autochthonous actors. In some cases, Ukraine was seen as a component of a larger (imperial) economic space, and in other cases as an independent economic entity that was not primarily dependent on integration into other economic spaces in order to unfold its full imagined potential. What all these ideas had in common was that they attested to Ukraine's—in theory—great potential, if only the space could be reshaped in the right way. In his research project, Max Trecker wants to focus on the period between the beginning of perestroika and the Orange Revolution.