H18: Victims, Perpetrators and Implicated Subjects in Central and Eastern Europe
8 July 11-13 (GMT+2)
Many scholars in memory studies have drawn attention to the inadequacy of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy for understanding political violence in various historical situation and even more so in remembering the violence by subsequent generations. Eastern Europe is a case in point here. Soviet repressions in Russia often turned perpetrators of the first wave of repressions into the victims of the next (Etkind 2013). During WWII in East Central Europe, Ukraine and the Baltic states the victims of one occupying regime sometimes became the perpetrators of the next. During the socialist regime in Eastern Europe most of people did not occupy neither of these two positions, but still suffered and/or were complicit with autoritarian regimes. How to describe the convergence of these subject positions in relations to violence?
And what are the forms of implication (Rothberg 2019) of contemporary generations of Eastern Europeans in this past? More often than not we see the national states in the region externalise violence and identify with victims of past violence without bringing up the question of responsibility for collaboration and complicity. How to describe the implicated subjects in Eastern Europe and what are the ways in which they are implicated in the past of the region?
The panel seeks answers to these questions by exploring commemorative practices and aesthetic media of memory that enable to forge subject positions that are resisted and made difficult to imagine or to adopt by the politics of memory in different contexts in Eastern Europe.
Chair:
Eneken Laanes, Tallinn University
Discussant:
Ljiljana Radonić, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History
Speakers:
Margaret Comer, Tallinn University
Portraying Perpetration, Victimhood, and Implication at Sites of Soviet Repression in Moscow
Daria Mattingly, University of Cambridge
Implicated Subjects of the Holodomor
Diana Popa, Tallinn University
Spectacular Provocations: Implicated Spectators in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Historical Films