Shortly before Koch’s death, the OEI moved into a villa in the Bogenhausen district; despite its cramped layout, the layout of the rooms fostered internal academic communication and staff motivation. It was here that the major reorientation began in the 1960s.

Koch’s successor from 1960 to 1963, the Munich-based historian of Eastern Europe Georg Stadtmüller, was ousted when the forces that had long been pushing for a reorientation towards economics and society succeeded in securing the appointment of the economist Hans Raupach to the newly created Munich Chair of Economics and Society in Eastern Europe. Members of the Board of Trustees such as the economist Adolf Weber, the lawyer Reinhard Maurach and the Slavicist Erwin Koschmieder were likely also keen to see a decisive break with Koch’s anti-Bolshevik, German nationalist and Ukrainian exile networks and related topics, as these hindered the establishment of contacts with the research community, particularly in Poland and the Soviet Union. Stadtmüller himself had already promoted the transformation of the ‘Jahrbücher’ into a publication serving the German-speaking academic ‘community’ with an international focus, which was also intended to contribute to the collaborative documentation of research within German-speaking historical scholarship. However, even here he encountered a formidable rival in the form of Günter Stökl (Cologne) and, in early 1966, stepped down from the position of editor.

Under the leadership of the Prague-born, broadly educated and cosmopolitan Hans Raupach (1903–1997, Director 1963–1975), a Department of Social Economics was established, initially with two posts, which brought about a scientific resurgence. Raupach not only established, in the traditional vein, a series of books on economics, the journal *Jahrbuch der Wirtschaft Osteuropas* and the series *Gegenwartsfragen*, but, above all, by uniting the resources of the university and the OEI, he also initiated a ‘Postgraduate Programme in Eastern European Economics’ featuring a modern supervision model based on Anglo-Saxon examples and scholarships funded by the Volkswagenwerk Foundation. Its primary aim was to train academic researchers, and it ran from 1964 to 1970. From 1970 to 1979, the German Research Foundation (DFG) funded a groundbreaking research project which, with the aid of new econometric methods, modelled the economy of the Soviet Union and decisively distanced itself from the Cold War consensus, which sought to view the East solely as a command economy devoid of economic rationality. In the course of the project, collaboration took place with British and American academics; two project staff members obtained their doctorates in the USA; and the project’s staff – and later that of the Institute – became increasingly international, with the former Prague professor Jiří Sláma (1929–2020) deserving particular mention. Although under Raupach and his successors—who also came from the field of economics—there was no ‘reassessment’ of the Koch era and its links to the Nazi period and the anti-communism of the 1950s, Raupach systematically and successfully promoted dialogue with Eastern European academics and worked to dispel the reservations towards the OEI and Munich as a centre for Eastern European studies that had arisen in the communist bloc during the post-war period. The History Department, which remained under Stadtmüller’s leadership and effectively had only one post (the editorial team for the ‘Jahrbücher’ was headed by Günter Stökl), also succeeded in 1974, under the leadership of Gert Robel, in securing funding for a major research project on ‘The German press’s image of Russia, 1859–1890’.

Raupach’s reform proposals for the OEI could only be implemented in part. Nevertheless, in 1969 he appointed Heinrich Vogel (1937–2014) as managing director, who, like his successor Hermann Clement (from 1977), possessed the ability to lead. Despite all its academic successes, the Institute could not be placed on a more solid financial footing. The reasons for this were, on the one hand, the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs’ attitude, which was more passive and administrative than actively proactive, and, on the other hand, the Brandt government’s new Ostpolitik. During the preparations for the Eastern Treaties, the latter developed undifferentiated and virtually unshakeable reservations towards non-university German research on Eastern Europe, which was perceived as unhelpful and, due to its budgetary funding, as being too independent.^[1] Added to this was the reorganisation of research financing (1969–1973), which only permitted federal and state financing of institutes once they exceeded a de minimis threshold of 1.5 million DM. The report by the Federal Audit Office on federally funded research into Eastern Europe, presented in 1974, with its focus on departmentaland contract research, as well as on the wishes of political clients, set in motion a problematic development – perceived particularly by the dominant Economics Department – which, by the time the evaluations began in the 1990s, confronted the OEI with the same problems as other non-university institutes: They were accused of conducting too little research, and above all too little research of an ‘academic’ standard. Consequently, non-university institutes were obliged to affiliate themselves with universities as ‘affiliated institutes’; many experienced, at least temporarily, a ‘downgrading’ to ‘service’ organisations. In 1976, the OEI was transferred from the Federal Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and received the federal contribution – usually just over 50 per cent of the institute’s budget – solely for consultancy work. Whilst this did succeed in transferring staff working on the econometrics project to permanent posts, it came at the cost of making it virtually impossible to carry out ‘basic research’.

The new director (from 1975), Günther Hedtkamp (1928–2018), Raupach’s successor to the chair, succeeded in stabilising the institute’s budget for ten years from 1979. In 1987, the Institute was allocated a specialist on Polish affairs, a post required for the preparation of expert reports. The sociologically oriented research project—conceived in 1981 following an American project and only concluded in 1994 after various follow-up projects—which involved surveying Russian-German repatriates from the Soviet Union, marked another academic success, particularly as the project leader, Barbara Dietz, became a sought-after policy adviser on issues relating to the integration of Russian-Germans and, later, on migration matters. The ‘Yearbook of the Economy of Eastern Europe’ was renamed ‘Economic Systems’ in 1988, with Richard Frensch as managing editor; it was internationalised and switched to a modern peer-review system.

The small History Department, weakened by the de facto separation from the Yearbook editorial team and headed since 1976 by Edgar Hösch, Stadtmüller’s successor to the chair, made a name for itself, amongst other things, by taking over the journal *Russia Mediaevalis*, continued to produce publications and research documentation, and, from the late 1980s onwards, undertook digital projects such as the Amburger database on foreigners in pre-revolutionary Russia and (from 2000) the Virtual Specialised Library on Eastern Europe, etc. in close co-operation with the Bavarian State Library in Munich. A number of successful research projects funded by external grants were also carried out.

After the handover of the institute’s leadership to Hedtkamp’s successor in 1989 had failed, the 1990s saw Eastern European studies once again called into question. In 2004, the federal government ceased its financing of the OEI.

In the spirit of reform policies aimed at enhancing the status of academia, the Bavarian State Government sought, at the turn of the millennium, a solution to the long-standing problems (organisational and spatial fragmentation, lack of co-operation; inadequate accommodation) facing Munich’s research institutes on Eastern Europe. The Ministry of Finance pushed for the relocation of the OEI, the South-East Institute (whose contemporary history department had been moved to Berlin) and the Institute for Eastern European Law to Regensburg – issues that were now resolved at the highest political level. The Ministry had already shown a clear preference for Regensburg back in the 1960s, when, during the founding phase of the new university, circles with a strong sense of local pride, drawing on the city’s thousand-year-old ties with the East, had sought to establish an ‘Institutum Salisburgo-Ratisbonense Slavicum’ . The fact that Eastern Europe was once again being offered as a means of ‘shaping Regensburg’s profile’ must have seemed tempting, even if the euphoria surrounding the issue was not to last long there.

The last major reorientation took place during the brief (2001–2005) directorship of Lutz Hoffmann (1934–2019), a professor emeritus from Regensburg. From his time as Director of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) in Berlin, Hoffmann was familiar with the issues surrounding departmental and contract research, and he initiated the institute’s consistent reorientation towards ‘academic’ research. For the History Department, this meant, for example, the discontinuation of the book series and the formal integration of the JGO editorial team into research activities.

In 2007, the three institutes mentioned moved to Regensburg, where they were initially housed in the Old Tax Office – under one roof but with a shared library. From the end of 2009, efforts were made to merge them – a process completed in 2012 – into the Institute for East and South-East European Studies as an affiliated institute of the University of Regensburg, and to pursue a successful application for Leibniz Research Alliance status. The current academic standard of the Institute’s work has been demonstrated by the individual awards of professorships to members of the Institute.