A particular spatial focus of the chair's research and teaching is on the Baltic Sea region: Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and the German, Polish, and Russian coasts of the European inland sea are historically connected by the body of water. Two key areas of contact in the modern era that the chair places particular emphasis on are tourism and environmental history.
Furthermore, the chair also addresses the Baltic Sea region's connections to the rest of the world, as well as questions of experience and everyday history regarding societies under German occupation during World War II, issues of transnational civil society, and Europeanization from below. In addition to the transnational perspective, methodological diversity, openness to new topics and transdisciplinary approaches are characteristic of the chair's work.
The phenomenon of overtourism is currently on everyone's lips wherever there is unease about the extent and consequences of tourism. When the limit is reached and which phenomena are non-desired is subject to a cultural and political negotiation process that by no means only began with mass tourism in the second half of the 20th century. As early as the middle of the 19th century, some regions newly opened up to tourism were criticising changes to the landscape. This reflexive criticism of tourism was partly based on a cultural-critical impulse and shares the same roots as tourism. Historically, however, another important source of critical perspectives on tourism developments lay in the distribution of economic benefits to be realised for those who travelled.
This research project is located in the period of economic upheaval in the 19th century and persecutes the establishment of capitalist logics in the newly emerging economic sector of tourism. It aims to analyse the economic history of Baltic seaside resorts from their beginnings in the 19th century. Investments and innovations came from very different actors: Some spas were founded by sovereigns, others were founded by merchants united in joint-stock companies, while others were based on room hire by local fishing families, the initiatives of spa doctors or investments by local innkeepers. But what conditions led to positive development in the short and long term? What role did transnational innovation and knowledge transfer play and what interdependencies existed between the players? To what extent did the newly created commercial structures challenge old orders? What gender order was enrolled in the tourism industry? And above all: To what extent was the acceptance of the changes in the living environment brought about by tourism linked to a broad participation in its economic successes? These questions are analysed comparatively in case studies of individual seaside resorts throughout the Baltic Sea region.
The Baltic Sea is not exactly known for being a rich source of oil, even though the largest ever discovery of oil deposits under the seabed in Poland's Exclusive Economic Zone was publicised in 2025. However, there has been continuous exploratory drilling around the Baltic Sea since the 1950s, with smaller quantities of oil being successfully funded commercially, both through offshore and onshore drilling on islands and in coastal areas. In the absence of overwhelming economic pressure to exploit these smaller oil fields, the social disputes surrounding the pros and cons of support can be analysed particularly well here. This is because a number of projects were at least temporarily recruited due to civil society interventions. This focus opens up a field of tension between the transnational organisational form of the oil companies and the ecological consequences that cannot be limited to states on the one hand, and the civil societies and governments that were initially still operating at national level on the other, which were given an impetus to cooperate across boundaries.
In addition to exploration and support, interest also focussed on processing and transport, as debates were often sparked by oil tanker accidents or the ecological problems associated with the normal operation of refineries. For the ecosystem of the very shallow Baltic Sea, which has little water exchange with the world's oceans, even comparatively small amounts of pollution are particularly threatening. The practices of resource use are therefore analysed firstly in terms of their perception by key transnational stakeholders - such as the fishing industry, tourism or civil society or institutional environmentalists - and secondly in terms of their concrete ecological consequences.