Recruitment writers’ workshop for the second phase of the project at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Contemporary European History and Public Spheres; Vienna,
14-15 October 2010
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The workshop is made possible by the generous support of the consortium of research institutions for contemporary history EurHistXX, http://www.eurhistxx.eu/
VENUE
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres (LBI EHP)
Nussdorfer Strasse 64, 4th floor.
A-1090 Vienna, Austria
Tel.: +43-1-513 40 68 10
Fax: +43-1-513 40 68 30
http://ehp.lbg.ac.at
The meetings will be held in the conference room on the 5th floor.
PURPOSE AND THEMATIC FOCUS
The purpose of the workshop is to create a network of researchers working on border studies in Central and Eastern Europe with a view of a common publication project that would go to print by late 2011. The publication(s) will bring together the research findings generated
within the project “Border Communities” conducted at LBI EHP since 2006 and other similarly focused projects conducted at other institutions.
The research on “Border Communities” at LBI EHP has produced material covering a broad scope of issues: from memories of WW2 to EU-accession, through perceptions of political events to the minutiae of everyday life at the border, the material and abstract significance of the border, to religious, ethnic, generational and gendered divisions and fusions. This workshop intends to zoom in on some of the issues and develop thematically focused articles/book chapters covering particular aspects of borders and border regimes within local communities. Although an historical perspective is central to the overall direction of the envisioned publication project, approaches from political science, anthropology, sociology, and cultural and gender studies are encouraged.
PROGRAMME OVERVIEW
14 October 2010
12:00-13:30 Arrival and lunch (Banyan)
13:45-14:15 Workshop opening
14:15-15:30 Project presentations I
15:30-16:00 Tea/Coffee break
16:00-17:30 Project presentations II
19:00-21:00 Dinner (Plachutta)
15 October 2010
09:00-10:30 Project presentations III
10:30-11:00 Tea/Coffee break
11:00-13:00 Worskhop conclusions and planning for the future
13:15-14:30 Lunch and end of workshop (Akakiko)
PROGRAMME DETAILS
The presentations marked with * are shorter (10 min.) introductions to projects in progress /under development.
All other project presentations should not exceed 20 minutes.
14 October 2010
12:00-13:30 Arrival and lunch (Banyan)
13:45-14:15 Workshop opening
Thomas Lindenberger, LBI EHP
Welcome notes
Muriel Blaive, LBI EHP
Summary of the first project phase The “Long European Post-War Period” in Communicative Memories and (Trans)National Public Spheres: Case Studies in Border Communities;
Introduction to the objectives of the second phase
Libora Oates-Indruchová, LBI EHP
Introduction to the Border Communities network; Practical information on the workshop programme
14:15-15:30 Project presentations I: Border Regimes and the Politics of Everyday Life
Moderator: Muriel Blaive, LBI EHP
Mark Pittaway, Open University
Dividing Europe on the Austrian-Hungarian Border: from shared borderland to cold war divide, 1938-1960.
*Sagi Schaefer, Columbia University
Division in Practice/Practicing Division: Rural life and the creation of East and West in the Werra Valley
*Barnabás Vajda, János Selye University
Thawing of the Border Regime in Komárom/Komárno.
*Jakub Grygar, independent researcher
Nation, State, and the Colonization of Memory: Ethnography of the Brest fortress
15:30-16:00 Tea/Coffee break
16:00-17:30 Project presentations II: Peripheries and Diasporas
Moderator: Thomas Lindenberger, LBI EHP
Astrid M. Eckert, Emory University
The East of the West: The image problem of the West German
borderlands.
*Libora Oates-Indruchová, LBI EHP
Border Narratives of a Newly Created Periphery (Czech-Slovak
border).
Alena Pfoser, Loughborough University
The Meaning of the Border in Life-story Narratives of Russians
Living in Narva.
*Machteld Venken, Catholic University of Leuven
World War II, Memories, Identities: Case studies on children, border regions and migrants in Europe (1945-1970)
19:00-21:00 Dinner (Plachutta)
15 October 2010
09:00-10:30 Project presentations III: Re-bordering of Memories, Rebordering in Memories.
Moderator: Thomas Lindenberger, LBI EHP
Ulf Brunnbauer, University of Regensburg
Entangled Memories on the Border: [Not] remembering the Cold War on the Bulgarian-Turkish border.
Muriel Blaive, LBI EHP
Changing Generational Identities on the Hungarian-Slovak Border.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko, University of Vienna
Memory Wars and Reconciliation in the Ukrainian-Polish Borderlands: (Geo)politics of memory from a local perspective
10:30-11:00 Tea/Coffee break
11:00-13:00 Workshop conclusions and planning for the future
Moderator: Libora Oates-Indruchová, LBI EHP
Thomas Lindenberger, LBI EHP, Workshop conclusions
Planning: publishing plans and options, time frame, longer-term
outlook
13:15-14:30 Lunch and end of workshop (Akakiko)
PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS
Project presentations I: Border Regimes and the Politics of Everyday Life
Mark Pittaway
Dividing Europe on the Austrian-Hungarian Border: from shared borderland to cold war divide, 1938-1960
This presentation is based on a long-term research project that has examined the intersections between state formation and border communities in what the northern Burgenland region of Austria, and Moson and Sopron counties in western Hungary. The project aims to produce a history of this borderland which interrogates the origins of the cold war in Central Europe from below, while also examining its relationship to the Second World War and its aftermath. The paper argues that a focus on borders allows us to examine how different states and their territorializing and legitimizing ideologies shape or fail to shape discrete populations through the production of borderland space. The paper argues that different states shape discrete regimes for the production of borderland space, and will analyze briefly those regimes and their dynamics. Firstly, it will consider the ultra-national regime for producing borderland space; secondly, the post-war regime; thirdly, the early cold regime; fourthly, a de-Stalinizing regime, and finally a consolidated cold war regime.
*Sagi Schaefer
Division in Practice/Practicing Division: Rural life and the creation of East and West in the
Werra Valley
The inter-German border took especially long to form and solidify in the Werra river valley between the towns of Witzenhausen and Bad Sooden-Allendorf. Several structural and historical factors worked against border formation in this valley, notably the incongruity of topography and political borders, the exchange of territory between the allies and the strong cross-border economic networks. And yet, these factors gradually gave way to the process of the division and separate East and West identifications emerged in the communities of the Werra valley as well. To explain how it happened in the face of unfavorable conditions, I emphasize the importance of economic practices in this rural periphery.
*Barnabás Vajda
Thawing of the border regime in Komárom/Komárno
My introduction would include a presentation on the changes of the border regime in Komárom/Komárno, and the perception of the changes by the people in Komárom, Hungary. The issue of the border regime includes the questions of the guarded zone, the passport control, the checking methods, etc. How has the border regime between two ‘friendly’ states changed throughout the time, and how has peoples’ perception changed from 1945 to 2008? How does peoples’ memory correlate with the historical truth? Which are the factors that influence peoples’ memory on the border regime? The presentation is based on quotations from the interviews made in Komárom in 2008.
*Jakub Grygar
Nation, State, and the Colonization of Memory: Ethnography of the Brest fortress
The mission of the Brest fortress, one of the largest military buildings in Central and Eastern Europe, has never been merely the defense of a state territory, but also the defense of a political, social and world order. This paper will be concerned with the implementation of these political aims in contemporary Belarus via the “management” of memory of the Brest fortress.
The proposed paper will draw on interviews, participant observation of practices, and existing narratives and texts, such as, TV and newspaper coverage, state-propaganda, and “dissident“ texts collected during the field research on cross-border migration and regimes of power at the Polish-Belarusian state border I conducted in 2006-2008.
The presentation of the Brest fortress as a plural and heterogeneous object, a vehicle and a contested territory for the exercise of power by various actors, follows from my ethnographic study of everyday practices and cultural intimacy aimed at a re-ordering of society via a reordering of history. I will be concerned with the following:
1. Power regimes shaping the memory of the Brest fortress;
2. The Brest fortress as a vehicle for the identification of the Belarusian nation and Belarus with Soviet history; and
3. The role of the Brest fortress in the—symbolic and military—defense of the border between Belarus and the West, and/or non-Europe and the EU.
Project presentations II: Peripheries and Diasporas
Astrid M. Eckert
The East of the West: The image problem of the West German borderlands.
When East German authorities first fortified the demarcation line between East and West Germany in 1952, they hastened the emergence of borderlands where none had been before. The West German border regions adjacent to the Iron Curtain were soon defined as an economic calamity zone. The problems in these regions were real. Already in the early 1950s, however, it paid off for county and state officials to paint the picture for Bonn in darker hues than necessary. The borderland location thus quickly became a financial resource during the years of reconstruction.
The paper examines how the so-called Zonenrandgebiet tried to institutionalize a claim to federal subsidies on account of its location. However, long stretches of these borderlands proved beyond help because they had been economically weak even before the imposition of the Iron Curtain. Continuing federal aid contributed much to the borderlands’ image as a patient on life-support, an image the borderland counties could not shed when they tried to reposition themselves during the 1970s and 1980s.
*Libora Oates-Indruchová
Border Narratives of a Newly Created Periphery (Czech-Slovak border)
The purely administrative border between the Czech and the Slovak (Socialist) Republics began to gain on its physicality after the 1 January 1993 when the “Velvet Divorce” proceeding began. The emergence of the border changed the everyday dynamics of people’s daily routines in the border region, including that people in some areas now needed a passport to commute to work from one Slovak village to another, because a part of the road and the bus route passed through a Czech territory. Over the next few years, whatever issues and minor disputes there had been were either resolved or petered out, but one of the permanent changes in these border regions was their transformation to peripheries of their respective countries: the bus and train routes that previously ran through there became sparser or discontinued altogether. Labour and tourist mobility became more difficult, unemployment levels rose, tourist resorts quietened. Although there has been an economic revival in the last few years on both sides of the border, it is so far unexplored what traces this historical and social change left in the social memory of the “common state of Czechs and Slovaks” and in the perception of the neighbours on the other side of the border.
This project will largely follow the format of the case studies conducted at LBI so far: interviews in locations on both sides of the border will provide the core data and be supplemented with local media and secondary sources. A limited-scale archival research is also envisioned. As I intend to approach the data as narratives/stories of the (semi-)periphery, literary texts associated with this border region will also be important references.
Alena Pfoser
The Meaning of the Border in Life-story Narratives of Russians Living in Narva
Scholars of transnationalism have stressed that migration leads to the constitution of alternative social spaces that are not bound on the container of the nation-state and can question the national order. After the Soviet Union fell apart, the newly independent nationstates have problematized the ties that bind migrants to their places of origin. At the same time, they have tried to mobilize their own diasporas in the form of "homeland nationalism" (Brubaker). The paper discusses how the geopolitical restructuring has affected the lives of people living on the Estonian-Russian border and their relationships that reach across borders. The border town of Narva, where I conducted my fieldwork in January 2010, is populated by 95% Russian speakers and has close social ties – and a shared past – with the Russian Ivangorod on the other side of the Narva river. With the breakdown of communist rule, the towns were not only shocked by deindustrialization, but also by the disruption of the existing dense networks by the nationalizing regime: this concerned not only the relationship between the two towns, but also the ties of the migrants living in Narva with their cities of origin. Taking “biography” as an analytical framework opens up a diachronic perspective on the experiences of people and their construction of social spaces. I will show that whether the border drawing is biographically structuring or not, depends on previous experiences in the life-course and social and symbolic ties to the places of origin that have been already established during the Soviet times. But also structural factors play an important role as with the border drawing social spaces became transnational in their character.
*Machteld Venken
World War II, Memories, Identities: Case studies on children, border regions and migrants in Europe (1945-1970)
This project concentrates on children who experienced World War II and uses a European comparative framework to research their collective memories and identities. It highlights children who moved out of border regions or stayed in border territory that has been taken
over by another nation-state. Its aim is to pinpoint similarities and differences in their war experiences, memories and identities in early post-war Europe. Cities in border regions in contemporary Belgium and Poland are in focus. The project believes that a study of literature,
archival sources, and both available and newly gathered interviews can compare:
1) which war experiences child war survivors remembered,
2) how these experiences were formulated,
3) in which way these formulations were identifying,
4) what input (nationalist) youth politics
and youth organisations had on these processes. Such European comparative research is innovative and contributes to the debate on Europeanizing contemporary history, because, for a long time, children, border regions and migrants have received only limited attention from historians, research on local memories can easily slip into anecdote, and unique archives in Central Europe recently opened up.
Project presentations III: Re-bordering of Memories, Re-bordering in Memories
Ulf Brunnbauer
Entangled Memories on the Border: [Not] remembering the Cold War on the Bulgarian-Turkish border. [Verflochtene Erinnerungen an der Grenze: Die (Nicht-) Erinnerung an den Kalten Krieg an der Bulgarisch–Türkischen Grenze.]
The project aims at the investigation of collective and communicative memories in the Bulgarian-Turkish border region, especially in the cities of Svilengrad and Edirne. The research focuses on three main topics:
1. What is the place of the Cold War in memories on both sides of the former Iron Curtain? How and in which narrative frames is life in a militarized border region in authoritarian political systems recalled?
2. In how far are memories grounded in events of national history that relate to the history of the neighboring country and to “nationally” traumatic events? Is the Cold War period incorporated into a memory of life at a sensitive place that borders to a neighbor, who is often demonized in national history?
3. What is the relationship between collective (public) and communicative (private) memory? How do they impact on each other? Do local individuals and families produce narratives which challenge the dominant national(ist) ones? The project should lead to questioning the salience of the Cold War category for the understanding of local memories, which seem to be shaped by a complex mixture of family memory and a collectively commemorated national past, which focuses on events much further in the past than the communist period.
Muriel Blaive
Changing Generational Identities on the Hungarian-Slovak Border
This presentation is concerned with the Hungarian-speaking minority in the Slovak town of Komárno. Since the end of the Second World War and the final defeat of Hungary, this minority has been confronted to the dialectics of integration and exclusion, alternating between forced, legitimate and faked loyalty to the (Czecho)Slovak state – according to circumstances and generations. On the basis of oral history interviews recorded in 2008 in the frame of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres Border
Programme, this paper will try to deconstruct and analyze the generational differences between nowadays Hungarians in their approach to their common life with the Slovaks in their hometown, their loyalty to Slovakia and Hungary, their cultural and linguistic heritage and the ways to preserve it and their relations with Slovaks in general and Hungarians from Hungary. It will emphasize the territorial identity construction which seems to have evolved since 1993 from the communist cultural autonomy which had been acquired at the price of political support or at least tacit acquiescence and question the future.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko
Memory Wars and Reconciliation in the Ukrainian-Polish Borderlands: (Geo)politics of memory from a local perspective
With the collapse of the Habsburg empire the competing Polish and Ukrainian nationalisms in Eastern Galicia culminated in a military conflict over Lviv in November 1918. In 1923 Poland’s annexation of Eastern Galicia was internationally recognized, an outcome that the
Ukrainian nationalists refused to accept. The radical wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) used terror against Polish state officials as an instrument of liberation, while the authoritarian Polish regime denied Ukrainians cultural rights and repressed their activists. It was during WWII that the old hostilities between Ukrainians and Poles escalated into ethnic cleansings. As the territory of Eastern Galicia was integrated into Soviet Ukraine after the war, the memory of the brutal Ukrainian-Polish conflict was suppressed and marginalized on both sides of the (new) border.
The Stalinist policy of resettlements aimed at nationalizing border areas and erasing traumatic memories. Ukrainians and Poles as “socialist nations” were supposed to overcome the old hostilities, for which the “bourgeois nationalists” and “fascist collaborators” were made responsible. While the end of the Cold War re-opened old wounds, political and intellectual elites both in Poland and Ukraine have been pursuing a reconciliation process. Influenced by the émigré magazine Kultura, published in Paris by Jerzy Giedroyc, the Polish political and intellectual elite gave up their historical dream of regaining the kresy and supported Ukrainian independence in 1991. For Ukraine, Poland has become its most committed European partner,
an advocate of Ukraine in the EU and a geopolitical counterbalance to Russia.
However, the reconciliation process is not without complications. In the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands nationalist prejudices towards the neighbours are still strong as they are often based on collective traumas and family memories of suffering. Moreover, the issue is increasingly instrumentalized in the domestic politics of both countries, notably by right wing nationalists and conservatives, such as the Kazcynski brothers. In Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko’s proclaimed pro-European orientation seems to be at odds with his politics of rehabilitation and glorification of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) notorious for its anti-Polish actions. This paper approaches the politics of reconciliation in the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands as a complex multiscalar phenomenon taking place on transnational, national, regional and local levels. Based on field work done by the author in Lviv (Ukraine) and Przemysl (Poland) the paper focuses on memory politics in neighbouring border regions, where different actors (political parties, NGOs, media, cultural associations, academics etc.) pursue changing interests and political aims. The paper is based on personal observations of commemorative events, analyses of regional media and interviews with political actors.
Consulting workshop participants (without presentations):
Lavinia Stan, Babeş Bolyai University
Workshop reporter:
Iris Obernhummer, EHP LBI
Network members not in attendance:
Roger Engelmann, Office of the Federal Commissioner, Germany
Gabriela Ghindea, Babeş Bolyai University
Competing Identities at the Romanian-Hungarian Border
Friederike Kind-Kovács, University of Regensburg
The Historical Ambivalence of "Transfer"- and Border Histories: The movement of people and books in the Bavarian-Bohemian borderland from post-War to Cold War
Sabina Mihelj, Loughborough University
From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Border (Slovenian-Italian border) My idea is to examine the institutional and discursive construction of the Italo-Yugoslav border on the Yugoslav side of the border, roughly from 1947-2004, looking at how the successive changes in Yugoslav foreign policies played out in the local context. To do so I would use a combination of archival sources, interviews and media coverage froms key periods (most likely 1947, 1954, 1968-71, 1990-1, 2004). The relative weight accorded to each would depend on what the overarching theme of the themed issue would be - in principle I could turn this either into a kind of socio-cultural history of the border (in which case I would rely primarily on archival and medi sources) or into an investigation of the memories of the border, e.g. looking at how and to what extent the key tropes that were introduced in different historical periods (e.g. Iron Curtain, ’world’s most open border’ etc.) continue to be used to frame individual narratives of the past.
Daniela Münken, Office of the Federal Commissioner, Germany