Since the end of the Cold War, East-European societies have been engaged in what some observers have called ‘a feast of remembering’. The process has proved much more controversial, problematic, and even painful, than this expression suggests. The reassessment of the communist past has taken various forms, from the toppling of monuments through the establishment of museums and commemorative rituals, to changes of legislature.
In a briefer first part, the course will offer an introduction to the trans-disciplinary field of Memory Studies discussing key concepts, such as: collective memory, cultural memory, politics of memory, memory sites, memory cultures. In a more substantial second part, these concepts will be applied to make sense of specific cases related to the memory of communism, national/ist memory, and the current mnemonic regionalization of Europe. We will look into the changing meanings of symbols and memory sites and their appropriation by competing social actors, into wars of interpretations and the redesigning of local and national memoryscapes. We will track down the parallels and entanglements of these processes in several post-communist countries.
