Michel Mallet – författare

Reconsidering the German tendency to define itself vis-à-vis an eastern "Other" in light of fresh debate regarding the Second World War, this volume and the cultural products it considers expose and question Germany's relationship with its imagined East.Germany has long defined itself in opposition to its eastern neighbors: its ideas around cultural prestige and its expressions of xenophobia seem inevitably to return to an imagined eastern "Other." Central to the consideration of such projections is the legacy of the Second World War, the subject of fresh debate since 1989: after four decades of political antagonism and cultural disjuncture, the events of the war on the Eastern Front have been rediscovered by Western audiences and have come to occupy complex, shifting positions in the memory culture of the postsocialist states. However, German ignorance of Eastern European experiences of war and genocide, enduring stereotypes, and prescriptive ideas about remembrance have been major stumbling blocks to the emergence of a transnational memory culture considered just by all parties.Despite mass immigration to Germany from the east and intensive contact between German speakers and its cultures, German-language cultural production continues largely to represent Eastern Europe as unknown, wild, and inaccessible. By contrast, the writers and filmmakers under discussion in the present volume have worked with and against such tropes to put forward alternative perspectives. Like their works, the contributions to this volume place the conflicts and prejudices of the twentieth century into a wider historical perspective, exposing and questioning the nature of Germany's relationship with its imagined East.Contributors: Deirdre Byrnes, Raluca Cernahoschi, Shivani Chauhan, Enikő Dácz, Olha Flachs, Daniel Harvey, Jakub Kazecki, Amy Leech, Paul Peters, Ernest Schonfield, Karolina Watroba.

Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.

Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.