210124 SE M9b Spezialisierungsseminar: Politics of history and memory wars in Eastern Europe (engl.) (2013W)

While the role of traditional ideologies in contemporary societies is fading, collective
memories and historical disputes continue to animate political life. This is especially true for
the countries of Eastern Europe, where the fall of the communist regimes and the
disintegration of the USSR opened the way to nation building and transition to democracy. 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. Eastern European nations demonstrate a broad variety of ways of
coping with the past, or, in the terms of Stefan Troebst, commemorative cultures. During the
last decade, the European enlargement to the East, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and its
failure, the authoritarian tendencies in Russia and Belarus challenged the political balance in
this part of Europe and led to a number of memory wars on the national as well as
transnational level. Among them is the Russian-Polish dispute on Katyn, the issue of the
Famine of 1932/33 in Ukrainian-Russian relations, and the Ukrainian-Polish tensions on a
difficult past, which complicate the reconciliation process.
This course focuses on the politics of memory in Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus,
countries with rather different political regimes and political cultures. It aims at introducing
students into such concepts as collective memory, national myths, politics of history, memory
politics, memory regimes, coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung), 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 regional
and local dimensions of memory politics. The course uses a comparative approach and puts
the individual cases in the context of the transnational debate on European memory.