Workshop: Remembering 1989: Actors, Approaches and Audiences

04. October 2019 - 11:00
Venue: seminar room, Am Planetarium 7, 07743 Jena
Organizer: Imre Kertész Kolleg

The years 2019 will see a plethora of public events across the former Eastern bloc countries that commemorate the end of communism and the establishment of open, democratic regimes. Previously dominant collectivist narratives are slowly giving way to a more varied and complex picture of the social and cultural changes that occurred during and after the peaceful revolutions. Moreover, new generations of artists, writers, theater and film directors as well as public historians and curators have entered the stage to take active part in the public conversation (and negotiation) of the revolutions.

Workshop Programme

9:00 – 9:30    Welcome & Introduction
9:30 – 11:15     Panel 1: Framing narratives of ‘1989’ through public rituals and literature

• James Krapfl (Montreal) / Andrew Kloiber (Toronto): Is the Past Dead or Alive? Commemorating the Revolutions of 1989 in the DDR and ČSSR
• Natallia Prystupa (Minsk): Remembering 1989 in Social Media Networks: Festival Culture in Czech and Slovak Republics         
• Mónika Dánél (Oslo): 1989 as Local and Liminal Event. The Possibility of the Bildungsroman in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Literature

11:30 – 13:15    Panel 2: Narrating and visualizing ‘1989’ in exhibitions and art    

• Maria Kobielska (Cracow): 1989 Exhibited in Polish ‘New Museums’
• Ksenia Robbe (Groningen): Perestroika on the Mind: Memories of Russia’s Transition in Exhibitions and Visual Art – Between Display and Discussion    
• Lotte Thaa (Berlin): Musealization of a Revolution or The Peaceful Storming of the Bastille   

14:30 – 16:30    Panel 3: Re-imagining ‘1989’ in an era of illiberal populism

• Emily Gioielli (Missouri): Europe Throws a Picnic: 1989 and the End of the Cold War in Europe
• Judith Kretschmar / Rüdiger Steinmetz (Leipzig): Cultural and Political Transformation and its Memories after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Eastern Germany, coagulated in local TV Programmes in the Federal State of Saxony (1990-95)
• Sabine Volk (Dresden): Monday marches, once again: Contemporary usages of the memory of the 1989 ‘Peaceful Revolution’ by PEGIDA in Dresden

16:45 – 18:00    Concluding remarks by Veronika Pehe (Prague) & Final discussion