Matthias Schwartz – författare

Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context takes this situation as a starting point for an examination of generational change, cultural belongings, political activism and everyday practices of young people in different Eastern European countries from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up ‘after memory’. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area’s contested heritage.

Popular media play an important role in reconstructing collective imaginations of history. Dramatic events and ruptures of the 20th century provide the material for playful as well as neo-imperialist and nationalist appropriations of the past. The contributors to the volume investigate this phenomenon using case studies from Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian popular cultures. They show how in mainstream films, TV series, novels, comics and computer games, the reference to Soviet history offers role models, action patterns and even helps to justify current political and military developments. The volume thus presents new insights into the multi-layered and explosive dynamics of popular culture in Eastern Europe.