< 강연 초록 >
Eastern Europe is dead. With this pronouncement, Berlin historian Jörg Baberowski triggered an intense debate in the 1990s about the state of east European history and research on Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. Today, not only the crises of recent years suggest, however, that Western Europe may also be dead. In contrast to the end of Eastern Europe manifested in the end of the Soviet Union and the ensuing establishment of new nation-states, the erosion of Western Europe has been unfolding in much more subtle ways. Nearly three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern and Western Europe as political-ideological units are a thing of the past. Their history now again appears to be unrestrained; old certainties and the rhetoric of relativization provoke discontent, and the coordinate system of memory and remembrance seem to have shifted. A European memory calls for a confrontation with the European dimension of Stalinist violence and its absence in the Cold War’s cultures of memory. This talk shows that Stalinism is a part of European memory because Stalinist violence occurred here. This violence shaped the continent’s history and its culture of memory, in the East and the West. The European dimension of Stalinism, the confrontation with Stalinist war crimes, and Stalinism’s influence on the ideological trench warfare of the Cold War continue to be, for the most part, absent in historical research. These gaps are derived, on the one hand, from the difficulties in accessing relevant archive documents; on the other hand, they are also the result of the hesitancy of researchers when it comes to exposing themselves to the disturbing dimensions of history.
<저자 약력>
Claudia Weber 교수는 2003년 독일 라이프찌히 대학에서 “In Search of the Nation. Memory-Culture in Bulgaria 1878-1944”라는 제목으로 박사학위를 받았다. 현재 European-University Viadrina의 현대 유럽사 교수로 재직 중이며, 주로 동유럽의 기억 문제를 연구해왔다.