Eurozine news item
Eurozine
2009-03-02
From 1989 to 2009: History of a hope, end of an illusion?
Conference in Berlin
"What came of the hopes and promises for freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall?", asks the international conference "Freedom within sight: Europe 1989/2009. History of a hope, end of an illusion?", co-organized by Eurozine partner Osteuropa on 18 and 19 March in Berlin.
Among others, Adam Michnik, Ales Steger, Ivalyo Ditchev, Mykola Riabchuk, and Carl Henrik Fredriksson will discuss the effects of the political, economic and cultural dynamics of the last two decades.
"Putting freedom into practice triggered hopes and expectations and set in motion a dynamic of enormous proportions in the individual countries and throughout Europe as a whole. A comparison with the status quo will show how the political and cultural spheres in Europe have altered their form", says Osteuropa editor Manfred Sapper.
"Anniversaries or commemorative years are integral parts of national memorial cultures. However within national confines, memory is often selective. Last year's anniversary of '68 demonstrated this clearly. The split consciousness of a divided Europe is still at work. In the '68 commemorative events, protagonists of the Prague Spring, not to mention the 'Polish March', were barely to be found. For the sake of European culture, politics and society, this kind of reductionism and anachronistic national constriction needs to be avoided when looking back on '89. Instead, we need to focus on '89 as an event that affected the whole of central and eastern Europe.
Since 1989, states and cities have returned to the map that had either ceased to exist or been forgotten. Increasingly, eastern Europe is returning to the horizon of European history as a core zone of the age of revolution and war that was the twentieth century. Intellectuals now regularly discuss the tension between unity and diversity in Europe, between minorities and majorities and with it also the question of the identity and the meaning of the nation in the supposedly post-national constellation of Europe."
Osteuropa will also be publishing an issue on the conference's topics.
More information on the conference and how to register on www.goethe.de/freiheit-im-blick