210079 SE BAK15: East European Studies (2020W)

UPDATE! This seminar is now held in digital form (BBB via Moodle), no separate groups, no classes in presence.

The seminar will be held in hybrid form, which means that students will be divided into two groups with digital classes and classes in presence taking place alternately (every other week). The first class will be held in digital form in Moodle for all students. During this class two groups will be formed.
The first course date takes place digitally!

Since the end of the Cold War, public debates on history and memory have increasingly affected national and European politics. In Eastern Europe in particular, political elites have used historical memory in order to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the post-communist regimes and to demarcate them from their authoritarian predecessors. The traumatic events of the 20th century World War II and the post-war division of Europe, the experience of communism and fascism, the Holocaust, Stalinist repressions, ethnic cleansings and mass deportations have been in the center of public debates and political conflicts in these countries since 1989. More recently populist and nationalist politicians have started to pursue an active politics of history in order to re-shape national majorities around Eurosceptic narratives.

This course aims at introducing students into such concepts as collective memory, national myths, politics of history, memory politics, memory regimes, coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), historical responsibility, reconciliation and (post)transitional justice. The course addresses such issues as post Soviet nation building and politics of history writing, collective memory as a source of political conflict, political instrumentalisation of memories and manipulation of the past, institutionalisation of national memory (state archives, institutes of national remembrance, historical commissions) and the political role of museums, monuments and memorials. Combining top-down and bottom up approaches, this course takes into account different types of societal and political actors (state institutions as well as communities of memory, cultural and professional associations, political parties, NGOs, media) and considers the regional and local dimensions of memory politics. The course uses a comparative approach and puts individual cases in the context of the transnational debate on European memory. During the course various approaches, research strategies and methods will be discussed using examples from the newest academic literature. Methods: introductory input from the lecturer, work in small groups, discussions in class, written assignments.