Eighty years ago, in June 1941, the then Soviet socialist republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were invaded by the Wehrmacht; thirty years ago, in August 1991, the three countries were put back on the European map of independent states. The fifty years that lay between these two dates have been the subject of heated debate ever since. The specific Baltic perspective on World War II and the postwar years poses a challenge to many seemingly incontrovertible historical truths shared both in the post-Soviet Russian world and in the so-called West. The presentation will focus on two of these "truths" and the various ways in which they have been challenged by social memory and historiography, as well as by Baltic legislation and jurisprudence.

Speaker: Eva-Clarita Pettai is a research associate at the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the University of Jena. Her research focuses on the comparative study of memory politics, democratization, and transitional justice in the former communist region, particularly in the Baltic states. She has published widely on the rewriting of history after communism, the contestation of memory in national, bilateral, and pan-European arenas, and the politics of truth and justice after extended repressive rule.

Please register here: www.uni-goettingen.de/WWII-memory.

The lecture is part of the event series " Of “memory wars” and joint commemoration. Discussion series on the 80th anniversary of the German attack on the Soviet Union, which is organized by the Professur für Neuere Geschichte Osteuropas at the University of Göttingen together with the Higher School of Economics St. Petersburg, Polotsk State University, State Linguistic University Minsk; the Foundation Adam von Trott, Imshausen e.V. and the German-Belarusian History Commission; it is sponsored by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Further events:

2nd of June 2021, 18h pm | Panel discussion
Researching the Second World War:
Historical Science in Belarus, Russia and Germany between politics and society.
With Alesia Korsak (Polotsk State University), Oleg Budnitskii (HSE Moscow) and Anke Hilbrenner (University of Göttingen)

16th of June 2021, 18h pm | Panel discussion
Remembering the Second World War:
Perspectives from the Civil Societies in Belarus, Russia and Germany
with Aliaksandr Dalhouski (Historical workshop „Leonid Lewin“, Minsk), Irina Scherbakowa (Memorial Moscow) and Jörg Morré (German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst).

The event series is part of the trilateral summer workshop „E pluribus unum? Possibilities and Limits of a Shared (Eastern) European Collective Memory of the Second World War“, organized by the Professur für Neuere Geschichte Osteuropas at the University of Göttingen.