LFU:online

You will have studied central historical myths of Eastern Europe, will have read the most important theoretical texts on cultural memory and will have critically examined the role of different media (literary texts, paintings, music, monuments, films, graphic novels, computer games, etc.) in conveying past events.

This STEOP course is aimed at first-year students and explores the question of how groups of people or entire societies can remember past events -- in other words, how cultural memory comes into being. The culture and history of Eastern Europe overlap here in a special way: a wide variety of media are used to deal with a nations own past. In Eastern Europe, this often happens in order to consolidate one's own national identity; after all, some of the constituent states of the Soviet Union became independent for the first time in their history in 1989. The respective national identities are correspondingly fragile -- Ukraine and Belarus may be cited as particularly recent examples. This makes it all the more important for these states to build up their own memory culture, which also has effects on literature and culture.

The aim of the course is decidedly not to impart pure factual knowledge about the history of Eastern Europe; rather, a critical examination of the various media constructions of the past is to take place on the basis of selected examples (World War II, Auschwitz/Oświęcim, Jugonostalgija, end of Soviet Union, etc.). Our guiding question is: How can we analyze these examples of cultural memory from the perspective of literary and cultural studies? In what larger cultural, political, and social contexts do we need to think about these examples?

Flipped classroom -- students prepare texts in self-study and work on assignments; attendance times are exclusively for plenary discussions and follow-up questions about the assignments. Theoretical texts and short video lectures are used as preparatory materials; the work assignments are dedicated to the analysis of concrete examples from Eastern European memory cultures.

Written term paper at the end of the semester.

A bibliography will be available in OLAT.