210135 SE M9: Eastern European Studies (2021S)

This seminar will be held in digital form (in BBB-room via Moodle).

This course aims at introducing students to Memory Studies and focuses on recent trends in this multidisciplinary field; at the same time, it is specifically designed for political scientists interested in Eastern Europe. In this region, 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, such as 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.

We will start with key notions and themes, such as collective and national memory, memory regimes, mnemonic actors and the role of memory politics in democratic and authoritarian regimes. The contents of the course includes post-Soviet nation building and politics of history writing, collective memories as a source of political conflict, political instrumentalisation of memories, institutionalisation of national memory and the political role of museums, monuments and memorials. We will discuss such issues as coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), (post)transitional justice, legislation of historical memory, mnemonical security and weaponization of memory, mnemonic activism, apology, reconciliation and memory wars in international relations.

Various examples from the region will be analyzed in class; attention will be paid not only to the official political rhetoric, but also to civil society, churches, historians’ commissions and other institutions and actors. We will use a comparative approach and put 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, class presentations, work in groups, discussions in class, written assignments.