Till Hilmar

• PhD
• University of Vienna

Zusammenfassung Während der Coronapandemie haben sich die ohnehin schon von Personal- und Zeitmangel geprägten Arbeitsbedingungen für Pflegekräfte weiter verschärft und es hat sich ein Diskurs über moralische Verletzungen entfacht. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir, wie solche Erfahrungen artikuliert werden. Dazu werten wir Twitter-Daten zum Thema...

The economic shock of the Covid-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted small businesses and the self-employed. Around the globe, their survival during the pandemic often relied heavily on government assistance. This article explores how economic relief to business is understood through the lens of deservingness in the public. It examines the cas...

In this introduction to the special issue, we explore the political salience of emotions in times of large-scale social change, emphasizing the role of personal narratives in understanding and framing these transformations. We introduce the concept of ‘deep transformations’ to analyse radical shifts in various aspects of life and their emotional an...

This contribution sheds light on memories of the 1990s from the perspective of East German and Czech engineers who experienced this time as young adults. Through a comparative perspective, it shows that the reference to professional competencies – narrated as neutral, technically founded knowledge and skills – plays a central role in the representa...

Wem gehört die ostdeutsche Nachwendezeit? Diese Frage steht zunehmend im Zentrum politischer Polarisierungsprozesse und Wertkonflikte in Deutschland. Seitdem sich die Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) als „Stimme“ des Ostens erfunden hat – „Wende 2.0“ plakatierte die Partei im Osten bei den Landtagswahlen 2019 – erhielt der Deutungskampf um die Eri...

In times of major change, people reassess what is a valuable and, therefore, prideful achievement in the context of a new societal structure and culture. Our article challenges the traditional view of achievements and pride as purely individual experiences, arguing that pride has social and cultural sources and modes of articulation, which may shif...

The economic shock of the Covid-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted small businesses and the self-employed. Around the globe, their survival during the pandemic often relied heavily on government assistance. This article explores how economic relief to business is understood through the lens of deservingness in the public. It examines the cas...

As the spread of Covid-19 hit societies around the world, governments stepped up to contain the pandemic's economic shock. Governments saved businesses and stabilized employment through extensive fiscal relief packages. In this paper, we analyze public debates around zombie firms-businesses that are unprofitable and/or unable to pay interests on th...

Recently, as a corollary of intensified efforts to understand the rise of right-wing populism, the topic of social recognition has gained renewed attention in sociological research. It seems that a sense of misrecognition and exclusion is shaped as much by cultural as by economic factors. Just how these elements are interlinked, however, remains a...

The spread of Covid-19 severely affected economies around the world, forcing governments to implement extraordinary recovery policies. In this paper, we look at the cases of Germany and Italy during the pandemic. We study the narratives that social actors (political institutions, trade unions, and trade associations) in these two societies craft to...

Right-wing populists legitimize their political agenda by promoting cultural ideas. At the same time, support for right-wing populists is fueled by a sense of economic injustice. How do these two factors interact? This article addresses this question by tracing how these actors promote ‘economic narratives’ about the past. It studies how two right-...

The concentration of wealth is a key component of the rise in economic inequality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While the abolition of taxes on private wealth during the 1990s and 2000s is recognized as an important institutional driver behind this development, comparatively little is known about the justification of tax cuts for th...

In this chapter, I call on memory scholars and activists to revisit the relationship between class and memory. Class, operating through the unequal distribution of both material and symbolic resources, has an inconspicuous, hidden, and tacit quality to it. Thinking through the contradictions posed by class, memory activists fighting for economic an...

Zusammenfassung Der vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojekts zur Nachwendezeit in Ostdeutschland, das mit 41 Personen, die den Umbruch von 1989 als junge Erwachsene erlebt haben, durchgeführt wurde. Auf Basis von semi-strukturierten Interviews diskutiert der Beitrag symbolische Grenzziehungen, die Gesprächspartner/innen i...

Tie dissolution in non-romantic relations is commonly understood as a structural process. This article challenges this prevailing view by tracing agency behind dynamics of disassociation. It distinguishes between “natural” and “moral” tie dissolution and explores the “broken tie”, as a former positive tie turned negative, theoretically and empirica...

How does the aftermath of 1989 shape the meaning of this event today? On the basis of an interview study with sixty-seven respondents from former East Germany and the Czech Republic administered in 2016–2017, this article asks how individuals articulate “economic memories” against the background of the 1990s, a time in which the transition to democ...

Employing a cultural sociological approach, this article asks how individuals from two postsocialist societies articulate principles of justice by providing narrative accounts of other peoples’ perceived choices and social mobility trajectories after 1989. Using data from an interview study of 67 respondents from former East Germany and the Czech R...

Power in sociological studies of memory is commonly understood as a function of political interests that are successfully framed as an inclusive and convincing story about selected elements of the past. By showing how negotiations of memory are driven by dynamics of symbolic exchange and by distinguishing techniques of narration emerging from this...

A majority of today’s visitors to the Auschwitz memorial site take photos to document their stay. By calling attention to visitors’ photography on site, this article investigates the role of visual perception and visual techniques of memory for visits to memorial sites and empirically discusses the significance of historical imagination in linking...