070110 VO Cultural History of Eastern Europe in the Modern Period (2013W)

This lecture course will focus on the cultural history of Eastern, East Central and South-Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Much has been said about the role of culture for the emergence of the condition of modernity in the western world. Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades has become as synonymous with the turbulent events of the French revolution as Baudelaire's poetry with the phenomenon of the urban flâneur in nineteenth-century Paris. While the cultural production in Eastern, East Central and South-Eastern Europe reflected upon the very same fundamental social processes that transformed the continent during the modern period, its history has rather been linked to the emergence of modern nationalism. In an attempt to bridge the two historiographic traditions into a more coherent cultural history of Europe in the modern period, this course will look at the links between literary, artistic, musical and cultural circles and networks and investigate how they influenced and reacted upon each other. This will be further supported with the study of cultural and everyday practices as well as other phenomena that could be grouped under the term 'low culture': street life, coffee house culture, the emergence of the satirical urban press and cultural entertainment industry.