Perestroika triggered a landslide of changes throughout the Eastern Bloc. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 at the latest, the world order of the Cold War was suspended – and the knowledge systems of East European Studies had to completely reorient themselves. The OEI responded to this tabula rasa by applying for an interdisciplinary graduate programme. “The Transformation Processes of Social Systems in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and Their Historical Preconditions” was the first major German research network on the era of the great transformations and at the same time one of the first research training groups funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The group became a hotspot for encounters between East and West.