After Memory. Conflicting Claims to World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures

After Memory. Conflicting Claims to World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures

Veranstalter
Matthias Schwartz (Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin, ZfL), in cooperation with Nina Weller (Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) and Heike Winkel (Institute for East European Studies / Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin)
Veranstaltungsort
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL), Schützenstr. 18, 10117 Berlin
Ort
Berlin
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
06.11.2015 - 08.11.2015
Von
Schwartz, Matthias

The conference aims to inquire the fundamental shifts in the literary representations of World War II, which have taken place in East-European literatures in the last decades. 70 years after the end of the war the breakdown of state socialisms and the vanishing of the generation of witnesses cause massive changes in the ways of remembrance. In Eastern Europe today, cultural memory is both post-socialist and post-memorial. This coincides with an increased pluralisation and diversity in the region. Conflicting claims to an authoritative representation of World War II dispute the former hegemonic narratives of remembrance. At the same time literature not only in Eastern Europe has gradually lost its role as a key genre of collective and individual memory, as other, mostly visual media, have become more important. The conference takes these observations as a starting point to explore literature’s changing role in shaping the memory of World War II in a comparative perspective

Programm

Friday, 6 November 2015

14.00 Opening of the conference, words of welcome

14.30 Keynote
Ernst van Alphen (Leiden): Legacies of Stalinism and the Gulag. Manifestations of Trauma and Postmemory

16.00 Panel 1: Beyond Socialism. Figurations of National Heroism
Chair: Matthias Schwartz (ZfL)
Valerij Viugin (St. Petersburg): Death of a Hero. WW II in Russian Fiction and Cinema under Putin
Davor Beganovič (Tübingen/Zürich): Conflicting Narratives. Contemporary Serbian Literature Between Četniks and Partisans

18.00 Panel 2: After Oblivion. Post-Socialist Reinventions of a Contested Past
Chair: Stefan Willer (ZfL)
Aleksandra Ubertowska (Gdańsk): Zombie-Stories as Reinventing the Past. Holocaust (Post)Memory in Polish Literature after 1989
Eleonora Narvselius (Lund): United by History, Divided by Memory? The Volhynian Massacres in 1943-44 and Attitude to Polishness in Western Ukrainian-based Intellectual Polemic

Saturday, 7 November

10.00 Panel 3: Documentary Fictions. Changing Devices of Remembrance and Testimony
Chair: Aurélia Kalisky (ZfL)
Stephenie Young (Salem, Massachusetts): Bodies of Evidence: Memory, Forensics, and “Documentary” Literature about Ex-Yugoslavia
Dana Mihăilescu (Bukarest): The Thrusts of Ghost-Writing. Eastern European Survivors’ Memories of the Holocaust in Post-Cold War Western Societies. On Sara Tuvel Bernstein’s The Seamstress and Leah Kaufman’s Live! Remember! Tell the World!

12.00 Panel 4: Postmemory Literatures. Rewriting the Textual Space
Chair: Tatjana Petzer (ZfL)
Nina Weller (Munich): Demythologizing History. On the Phantasmatic Dismantling of the Leningrad Blockade Narrations
Stephan Krause (Leipzig): “… within the uselessness we have to get from somewhere to somewhere, if we see more sense in speaking than in silence…” The ‘Textual Space’ of Holocaust and WW II Memory in Contemporary Hungarian Literature

15.00 Panel 5: Affective Media. Textual and Visual Representations
Chair: Erik Martin (Frankfurt/Oder)
Madlene Hagemann, Gernot Howanitz (Passau): Pictures from the Past. The Graphic Novel Alois Nebel as Drawn Postmemory of WW II
Schwartz, Matthias (ZfL): Feeling History. Szczepan Twardoch’s Affective Revisions of National Representations

17.00 Panel 6: Beyond the Nation State. Reshaping the Memory of World War II
Chair: Yael Almog (ZfL)
Kris van Heuckelom (Leuven): Transnational Aspects of Postmemory in Third-Generation Fiction on WWII and the Holocaust. The (Contrapuntal) Cases of Piotr Paziński and Erwin Mortier
Tatjana Petzer (ZfL): The Legacy of the Holocaust and World War II in (Post-)Yugoslav Writing and its European Echo

Sunday, 8 November

10.00 Panel 7: Postmemory and Affect. Post-Traumatic Refigurations of War Histories
Chair: Stephan Krause (Leipzig)
Joanna Niżyńska (Bloomington; Indiana): Traumatic Fantasies. Memory, Affect and Compensation in Contemporary Polish Literature
Heike Winkel (Berlin): Ambivalent Victims. Figurations of Expulsion in Contemporary Czech Literature

12.00 Panel 8: Beyond Postmemory. Comic and Dramatic Enactments of War Stories
Chair: Nina Weller (Munich)
Brigitte Obermayr (Berlin): (Im)possible Modes of Laughter in Historic Narration of the Great Patriotic War
Magdalena Marszałek (Potsdam): War, Media, and Capitalism. Remembering WW II as Social Criticism (Paweł Demirski’s Plays)

13.30 Concluding discussion

Please be so kind to register:
Sarah Affenzeller, affenzeller@zfl-berlin.org

Daily Scenes – An Eastern Travelogue
During the conference, video material from an ongoing art project by Matei and Andrea Bellu will be on view.

Kontakt

Sarah Affenzeller

Schützenstraße 18
10117 Berlin
+49 (0)30 20192 193

affenzeller@zfl-berlin.org

www.zfl-berlin.org
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