LFU:online

Students are familiar with the historical, natural and cultural foundations of the greater area of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and can critically reflect on culturally or politically determined spatial constructions.

Eastern and South-Eastern Europe are more than uncertain terms. Their exact spatial delimitation is sometimes difficult or even impossible and depends above all on the respective temporal context. 24^th of February 2022 has set things in motion and started to question supposed certainties. While South-Eastern Europe, with the controversial complementary term ‘Balkans’, can already look back on a ‘longer tradition’ in this respect, Eastern Europe has a character that was primarily inscribed in people’s mental map in the 20^th century. When asked - would you rather live in Eastern Central Europe (Ostmitteleuropa) than in western Eastern Europe - people usually prefer to answer with ‘Ostmitteleuropa’. The East, but also the Southeast, often have a bad reputation in the ‘Western’ imagination.

The lecture concentrates on bothareas and aims to provide a historical-geographical and cultural basis for analyzing them and understanding their genesis. Within the possible broad scope, the focus will be on selected longitudinal and cross sections, which should provide an insight into various cultural-historical topics. These include, for example, questions of space and spatial conceptions as well as environmental structures, the role of the church(es) and their relationship to the state, the emergence of state structures, identities, etc. Additionally, the course will discuss movies (at current as older ones) and examples from fiction, each of which reflects these topics in their own way.

The lecture is structured as follows:

Introductory discussion of the collapse of the former Eastern-Bloc and the awakening after 1989/1991 as well as its consequences.

Space and its Geography: structural preconditions and differentiations of Eastern/South-Eastern Europe

Development & contextualisation of individual themes of cultural and structural history in selected temporally and spatially defined longitudinal sections since the Middle Ages;

Lecture, text readings and discussions in class

Written exam at the end of semester

will be announced

Due to the substantially different allocation of ECTS credits in the curriculum BA Slavonic Studies 2015 and in the curriculum BA Slavonic Studies 2024, there are different requirements for this course. You will receive information on this from the course instructor at the beginning of the course.