Historical Politics: Debating the Twentieth Century
INSTRUCTORS
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course explores campaigns of historical politics centered on the history of the twentieth century waged by various state and non-state actors in the public sphere with the aim of reaching certain political aims. The emphasis is set on the multiple ways in which the history of World War II, of the Holocaust, and of communist regimes has been represented in local, national, and European museums in the post-1989 period. To this end, the course investigates various primary and secondary sources related to the history of the twentieth century, mainly museums, monuments, documentaries, artworks, political statements, and academic works. Special attention will be paid to the role of Memorial Museums as forums of public education but also as instruments of reconciliation and forms of transnational justice.
The course approach is based on the premise that the remembrance of the recent past is multifaceted, reflecting the multiple and contradictory aspects of various political regimes, their longevity and their peculiar features. The course focuses mostly on patterns of representing the history of fascist and communist regimes in Eastern Europe, but approached from comparative, European-wide, and global perspectives. It points out that, due to the great differences in the outlook of fascist and communist regimes in various Eastern European countries and the numerous stages in their internal evolution, these totalitarian pasts have been displayed in a bewildering number of ways, a situation that resulted in a fragmented and kaleidoscope-like memory landscape. From a methodological point of view, to arrive at a thorough understanding of practices of social remembrance, it is therefore important to understand who is remembering, when s/he is remembering, and for what purpose.
The course treats museums and public monuments as complex public fora in which narratives of historical experiences are continuously shaped and reshaped through the uneven interaction of a variety of state and non-state agents, such as political elites, various institutions, museum curators, and other types of collective actors, at national and local levels. It also emphasizes that historical representations are conveyed through, but also mediated by, a variety of exhibition techniques and methods, employing audio-visual media, historical objects, and images, and textual documents. By focusing on the nexus of institutional, professional, political, and cultural processes at work in the representation of the recent past, the course highlights the relevance of the concrete social-political contexts that shape museums. This approach enables participants to bring out the historical originality of post-communist Eastern Europe, a unique area of the world that experience various forms of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes during the short twentieth-century (1918-1989). While identifying regional patterns of post-communist memory in Eastern Europe, the course also underscores the fact that societies around the world responded to transnational experiences in line with their national traditions and contexts.
LIST OF CLASSES
- Historical politics: Actors, Practices and Debates
- History, Memory, and Public Histories. Case Study: Liberty Square, Budapest
- Public Debates on the Holocaust: Historikerstreit in Germany
- Public Debates on the Holocaust: Jedwabne, Poland
- Public Debates on the Holocaust: Romania
- Public Debates on the Holocaust: Visit to the Holocaust Memorial, Budapest
- Memorial Museums: Visit to the House of Terror, Budapest
- Museums of World War II in Eastern Europe
- Communism and Truth Commissions
- Remembering Communism: Representing Recent History in Museums
- Film Documentaries and Historical Politics
- Conclusions. A Common European Memory: Public History, the Historian, and the Community