070147 GR Guided Reading - Between collective memory and history (History and memory controversies) (2017S)

History and collective memory

The general framework of this guided reading is the relation between the historical memory and the collective memory. This topic is particularly important in the so called “era of the witness” when history has returned into public awareness and the national state is not anymore its only guardian.
The seminar intends to focus on several historical debates, but also on the memory of various social groups, on their different rememberances and incompatible or even incommensurable narratives, on their traumatic memory sites and their silences and oblivion. How are the historians involved in the rewritings of the national histories influenced by the events in the political „public sphere“ (Jürgen Habermas)? How history is it told in the school textbooks (Marc Ferro)?
The selected topics cover a wide range of historical cases from different regions and periods: starting with the famous Historikerstreit, through the debates concerning the different East European post-communist memory laws and politics of memory and going to the less known debates on the deportation and the salvation of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II.
What are the political uses of the past? What are the stakes in the “historians’ quarrel” (the positions of Ernst Nolte, Jürgen Habermas, Konrad Jarausch, François Furet etc.)? What are the “lieux de mémoire” and the „lieux de contre-mémoire” of the Nazi and the communist past in different national contexts? How should the attempts to “normalize the memory of the nazi past” be interpreted? What are the laws criminalizing communism that have been adopted in different East European countries and what are the stakes of the new politics of memory behind them? How should we interpret the communist nostalgia? What is the role the historical expertise? Who finally has the right to legitimately speak about the contradictory collective past? Who speaks in the place of those who have not a voice (a question asked by Dispesh Chakrabarty from the perspective of the ‘subaltern studies”, but also by Maria Todorova in her research on European South-Eastern periphery „Imagining the Balkans“)? What is the memory of the Algerian war and how does it influence today’s politics and historical debates?
These problems will be analysed through different texts and archives as well as visual documents (the first films on the genocide of the Jews in Soviet Cinema, Wolfgang Becker’s “Good Bye, Lenin”, Peter Sis’s “The Wall. Growing up Behind the Iron Curtain” etc.).

(The seminar will be in English)