Doctoral research fellow Daniel Weinmann
Daniel Weinmann holds a B.Ed. and M.Ed. in History and Russian from the University of Tübingen, where his final theses examined Soviet-era memory politics (on the Blockadebuch) and Vladimir Medinskii's "Kaleidoscopic Histotainment." He also spent a semester at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, on a scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg-Stiftung. His previous research includes work on the human rights and history organisation Memorial and its dismantling under Putinism. More broadly, he is interested in the role history plays in society, how it is used, contested, and instrumentalised, with a particular focus on Russia and Ukraine. Within this, his work centres on how Putinism (mis)uses and produces historical narratives, and on how the Russian state seeks to control and instrumentalise the Internet, YouTube in particular, as an arena for its narratives and propaganda.
Since January 2024, he has been a PhD candidate in History at Heidelberg University, supervised by Prof. Dr. Tanja Penter. His PhD project investigates how officially sanctioned historical narratives are utilised in present-day Russia under Vladimir Putin to construct and stage hostility. The primary object of analysis is the 'Russian Military-Historical Society' (RVIO), a Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization (GONGO) that effectively simulates civil society while executing state memory politics. By combining historical inquiry with memory theory and media analysis, the project examines the 'staging of enmity' across two levels: the institutional rise of the RVIO, and the analysis of digital propaganda. Case studies focus on a YouTube series about "The Wild 90s," and the RVIO journal "Ideology of the Future." These sources reveal how the "Wild 90s" and the "Great Patriotic War" are reshaped to legitimise Russia's war against Ukraine, producing an "Ambivalent Enmity," characterised by simultaneous contradictions, such as framing Ukraine as both a "brother nation" and a "Nazi state." The project thus contributes to understanding the performative dimensions of Russian authoritarianism in digital spaces, and the development of its historical narratives.
