Privatschulden und Eigentumsbildung im Kontext historischer Umbrüche in Deutschland und den USA

Outline

This Junior Research Team investigates how credit-based relationships between people and property evolve during periods of historical upheaval. The study focuses on three key moments: the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s, the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany in 1989, and the Great Recession of 2007–2009, when real estate credit and personal debt profoundly disrupted people’s relationships to the world. Examining these periods enables an asymmetric comparison of ownership history, highlighting how access to credit, fiscal policy, and debt shape people’s experiences and property structures in modern societies.

The JRT will explore the role of credit as a site of social inequality in historical comparisons of home ownership. The study will focus on the dual dynamics of ownership as both empowerment and precarisation, examining how these forces intersect with gender, the racial wealth gap, and class disparities in the US, as well as the unequal credit conditions faced by citizens in East and West Germany. The project targets historical moments where structural shifts in property relations, driven by economic and political crises, shaped people’s financial liabilities and debt relationships. The underlying hypothesis is that credit and private debt are not peripheral to structural change but, in interaction with property systems, function both as drivers and consequences of these transformations.

Project Staff

PD Dr. Felix Krämer

Principal Investigator

Erfurt