Central European University Department of International Relations Dark legacies: Coming to terms with Europe's twentieth century Lecturer: Dr Thomas Fetzer Course objectives Europe is now often praised as a model case of how to overcome nationalism and war through inter-state cooperation and cultural tolerance. Yet, at the same time, the struggle to come to terms with the legacies of a dark continent (Mark Mazower) has continued to this very day. This course engages with one of the core questions of this struggle: collective memory. The first part of the course introduces a range of key issues in the study of collective memory such as the relationship between individual and collective memory, as well as the debates about memories persistence and change, and the salience of memory politics. In the second and third part of the course, we turn to the empirical patterns of how Europe s dark legacies have left their traces in collective memories across the continent, paying equal attention to fascism and World War II on the one hand, and communism on the other hand. The analysis combines comparisons between countries and European sub-regions with a more detailed focus on specific vectors of memory such as history writing, commemoration practices and film. By the end of the course students will be able to: 1) Appreciate the importance of dark legacies for the development of European societies after 1945 2) Engage with theoretical concepts and debates in the study of collective memory 3) Discuss similarities and differences in how Europe s fascist and communist past has been confronted across the continent Course Requirements 1. Attendance and active participation in class discussions (20 % of final grade). 2. Seminar presentation (20 % of final grade) 3. Two short critiques of readings (30 % of final grade) 4. Final Paper (30 % of final grade).
Course Outline and Readings Seminar 1: Introduction (Overview of course, assignment of seminar presentations) PART I: General issues and concepts Seminar 2: Collective and individual memory Zerubavel, Eviatar (1996), Social memories: steps to a sociology of the past, Qualitative Sociology 19 (3): 283-300 Assmann, Aleida (2006), Memory, Individual and Collective, in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 210-224. Olick, Jeffrey K. (1999), Collective Memory: The Two Cultures, Sociological Theory 17 (3): 333-348. Seminar 3: Persistence and change Schumann, Howard and Jacqueline Scott (1989), Generations and Collective Memories, American Sociological Review 54 (3): 359-381. Schwartz, Barry (1996), Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II, American Sociological Review 61 (5): 908-927. Seminar 4: Collective memory and politics Hobsbawm, Eric (1983), Inventing Traditions, in id. and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-14. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz (1991), The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past, American Journal of Sociology 97 (2): 376-420. Schudson, Michael (1989), The Past in the Present versus the present in the past (extracts), in The Collective Memory Reader, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 287-291. Seminar 5: Collective memory and dark legacies : Amnesia, trauma, denial Alexander, Jeffrey (2012), Trauma: A Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, chapter 1. Hirsch, Marianne (2008), The Generation of Postmemory, Politics Today, 29 (1), pp. 103-128. Seminar 6: Historical Context (I): Fascism and World War II Paxton, Robert (1998), The five stages of Fascism, Journal of Modern History, 70 (1), pp. 1-23.
Seminar 7: Historical Context (II): Communism Norman Naimark, Stalin and Europe in the postwar period, 1945-53: issues and problems, Journal of Modern European History, 2 (1), 2004, pp. 28-57. Jacques Levesque, The East European revolutions of 1989, in Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne, The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 311-332. PART II: Coming to terms with dark legacies in Western and Eastern Europe Seminar 8: World War II and fascism in West European collective memory (I): Germany Kantsteiner, Wulf (2006), Losing the War, Winning the Memory Battle: The Legacy of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany, in Richard Ned Lebow et. al. (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 102-146 Welzer, Harald (2008), Collateral Damage of History Education: National Socialism and the Holocaust in German Family Memory, Social Research 75 (1): 287-314. Seminar 9: World War II and fascism in West European collective memory (II): Italy Fogu, Claudio (2006), Italiani brava gente. The Legacy of Fascist Historical Culture on Italian Politics of Memory, in Richard Ned Lebow et. al. (eds.), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 147-176. Seminar 10: World War II and fascism in West European collective memory (III): France Rousson, Henry (1991), The Vichy Syndrome. History and Memory in France since 1944, Cambridge (Ms): Harvard University Press, pp. 1-11, 272-295 Seminar 11: Communism and West European collective memory Morgan, Kevin (2010, Neither Help nor Pardon? Communist Pasts in Western Europe, in Malgorzata Pakier and Bo Strath (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 260-272 Hobsbawm, Eric (2003), Interesting Times: A twentieth-century life, London: Allen Lane, pp. 127-141, 216-218 (and review by Tony Judt). Seminar 12: Dark legacies in Central Eastern Europe (I)
Shafir, Michael (2002), Between Denial and 'Comparative Trivialization': Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe, Jerusalem: The Vidal Sasoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, ACTA 19. Mark, James (2010), The Unfinished Revolution. Making sense of the Communist past in Central-Eastern Europe, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. xi-xxi, 215-221. Seminar 13: Dark legacies in Central Eastern Europe (II): The case of Hungary Excursion to Terrorhaza museum Seminar 14: Dark legacies in the former Soviet Union Onken, Eva-Clarita (2007), The Baltic States and Moscow s 9 May Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe, Europe-Asia Studies 59 (1): 23-46. Kasianov, Georgiy (2008), Revisiting the Great Famine of 1932-1933. Politics of Memory and Public Consciousness (Ukraine after 1991), in Michal Kopecek (ed.), Past in the Making: Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 197-215. Seminar 15: Dark legacies in the former Soviet Union (cont.) Adler, Nanci (2005), The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Stalinist Symbols amidst the exhumation of mass graves, Europe-Asia Studies 57 (8): 1093-1119. PART III: Coming to terms with Europe s dark legacies: Vectors of memory Seminar 16: Transitional justice Douglas, Lawrence (2006), The Didactic Trial: Filtering History and Memory into the Courtroom, European Review 14 (4): 513-522. Pendas, David (2000), I didn t know what Auschwitz was : The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and the German Press, 1963-1965, Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, 12: 397-446. James McAdams (1996), The Honecker Trial. The East German Past and the German Future, Kellog Institute for International Studies, Working paper #216 Seminar 17: Commemoration (I) Niven, Bill (2002), Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, London/New York: Routledge, chs. 4 & 6. Apor, Peter (2010), Eurocommunism: Commemorating Communism in Contemporary Eastern Europe, in Malgorzata Pakier and Bo Strath (eds.), A European Memory?
Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 233-246. Seminar 18: Commemoration (II): Case study Hungary Excursion to monuments around Szabadsag ter Seminar 19: History writing and teaching (I) Jarausch, Konrad (1988), Removing the Nazi Stain? The Quarrel of the German Historians, German Studies Review 11 (2): 285-301. Seminar 20: History writing and teaching (II) Stevick, E.D. (2007), The politics of the Holocaust in Estonia: Historical memory and social divisions in Estonian education, in id./b. Levison (eds.), Reimagining civic education: How diverse societies form democratic citizens, Lanham: Rowman and Littllefield, pp. 217-244. Stan, Lavinia (2012), Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania: The Politics of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 183-204. Seminar 21: Film Bosworth, Richard (1998), The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, London: Arnold, pp. 162-172. Sarkisova, Oksana, Long Farewells: The Anatomy of the Soviet Past in Contemporary Russian Cinema, in Oksana Sarkisova and Peter Apor (eds.), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, Budapest: CEU Press, pp. 143-180. Seminar 22: Towards Europeanization of Europe s dark legacies? Müller, Jan-Werner (2010), On European memory, in Malgorzata Pakier and Bo Strath (eds.), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York/Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 25-37. Dujisin, Zoltan (2013), Post-communist Europe: On the Path to a regional regime of remembrance? Unpublished paper, CEU Annual Doctoral Conference. Seminar 23: Conclusion