HU51430a

Post-Cold War Europe and the Phantoms of the Past

Hannes Grandits

Kommentar

The years after 1989 brought spectacular changes to the makeup of the European state system: German unification, the violent collapse of Yugoslavia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union (and Czechoslovakia), and the massive (eastern) expansion of the European Union from 12 (1986) to 28 (2013) member states. In the course of all these developments, many “unsettled” histories resurfaced. Not few of these – often traumatic – histories were not (or not allowed to be) discussed (too) openly (or only within close ideological confines) during the East-West polarisation and/or under socialist rule in the Eastern half of Europe. I think here first and foremost on: 1) the dimensions of the Holocaust as well as the civil wars and crimes during and after the Second World War, 2) the long-lasting colonial orientation of most Western European countries, and 3) the centuries-long (“non-national”) imperial social realities of Eastern, Central Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

This MA seminar will address (often emotionalised) “returns” of long-marginalised/suppressed histories after 1989. Exemplary case studies will be used to examine how the above mentioned three historical fields were and are intertwined with existing ideological polarisations within European societies in East and West before as well as after 1989.

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