Punitive education. On the relationship between violence, ideology and care in "total institutions" under communist rule
We invite you to an international conference: Punitive education. On the relationship between violence, ideology and care in „total institutions“ under communist rule, to be held April 15–17, 2026, at the Gedenkstätte Bautzner Straße in Dresden (Bautzner Straße 112a).
The conference will focus on those institutions and social places where people were particularly exposed to repressive re-education. We are talking about labour colonies, camps, youth work centres, special children’s homes, but also regular prisons, in which the idea of re-education through labour and within a collective, often in reference to the Soviet pedagogue Makarenko, was the official guiding principle. For the study of these institutions, it is important to pay close attention to the relationship between ideals and norms and practice. According to the theory, the logic of revenge and retribution did not inform such re-education. The explicit aim was to reintegrate everyone into socialist society. However, the practices of punitive education in numerous ‘total institutions’ of real socialism thwarted these self-declared goals and turned them into their opposite. They caused or favoured the development of group dynamics that were characterised by a high degree of violence, humiliation and contempt for humanity, and this systematically and permanently. In consequence, communist rule created and reproduced its own ‘asocial’ or ‘negative’ milieu.
This ambivalence of re-education practices in communist dictatorships stands at the centre of the conference. Its aim is to develop a differentiated understanding of the Janus-faced nature of the relationship between care, education and repression in communist regimes. Based on the treatment of non-conformists and delinquents in different contexts and regions, communist practices and concepts combining education and repression will be explored. Focusing on generic institutions will also allow comparisons with the rival systems in the West and with precursors of these typically ‘modern’ institutions. The conference is based on the conviction that the treatment of people in state-enforced custody and care – be it prisoners in prisons and camps, patients in psychiatric wards, children and young people in residential care, or similar – is one indicator of the humanity or inhumanity of the ruling system.
We are co-organising the conference with the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism and other partners.
