The year 1989 is remembered primarily through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling down of the Iron Curtain, two occurrences which were perceived as happening very suddenly.
This seminar is dedicated to challenging this common misperception and to pointing out how the events in the fall of 1989 did not take place just by chance. They were the result of a transnational popular pressure slowly but irrepressibly building up all over Central Europe in the course of the whole year and even before, leading the Iron Curtain to display serious signs of tear and wear already before its visible collapse.

We will contemplate the short- and long-term, conscious and unconscious, effect of this massive popular engagement for freedom onto the reshaping of current trans-European identity.

Concept and organization: Dr. Muriel Blaive, Prof. Dr. Michel Cullin, Prof. Dr. Thomas Lindenberger, Guillaume Griffart

An event of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for EuropeanHistory and Public Spheres in cooperation with Felix Kreissler-Forschungsstelle für österreichisch-französische Beziehungen an der Diplomatischen Akademie Wien

Sponsored by MA 7 – Abteilung für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Stadt Wien and Österreichisch-Französisches Zentrum für Annäherung in Europa (ÖFZ)

Reservation is not required.