In this third episode of the ZZF Podcast in English, Mario Bianchini and host Lee Holt talk about scientific utopias in the former GDR, the hopes and disappointments associated with the scientific-technological revolution, and the history of energy and the environment in both East and West Germany. Bianchini explores how utopias about technology, science and progress intersected with notions about ennobled labour and ultimately the liberation of the working class. Their discussion ends with an examination of how public energy knowledge shapes the perception and practice of energy supply in the modern world.

Mario Bianchini is a Research Associate at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam; a Lecturer of History at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, Germany; and the principal researcher on the “German Democratic Republic for the ‘Economic Collectivism: Old and New: Lessons from the Communist and Post-Communist Experience’” project at the University of Vienna. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, based at the Freie Universität. His work has appeared in The Journal of Energy History; German Studies Review; Science, Technology, and Human Values; das Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung; and Technology’s Stories. He has also been the recipient of a Fulbright research grant, two DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grants, a DFG (German Research Foundation) grant, and a Linda Hall Library dissertation research grant. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, based at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Lee Holt is a Research Associate (Copy Editor and International Research Coordinator) at the ZZF (Department "Globalizations in a Divided World"), where he has worked since September 2023. He received his Ph.D. in Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and has worked as a translator and editor since 2007.

Learn more about Mario Bianchini’s research project at the ZZF: https://zzf-potsdam.de/en/research/projects/production-and-dissemination-energy-knowledge-federal-republic-germany-and-german

Literature:

• Alexander Amberger, Dissident Marxism and Utopian Eco-Socialism in the German Democratic Republic. Haymarket Books, 2025.

• Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism. Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

• Dava Sobel, Longitude. Bloomsbury USA, 2007.

• Oliver Sukrow, Arbeit. Wohnen. Computer. Zur Utopie in der bildenden Kunst und Architektur der DDR in den 1960er Jahren. Heidelberg University Press, 2018.