Articles

“A person comes in, protests just like you, then shouts and rants, and then, when finally shown the piece of paper that was signed when they were on military service, they crumple.”

The Czech communist party might be an anachronism, but to ostracize it only prolongs its existence. Whether irrational or calculated, anti-communism in the Czech Republic distracts from more pressing problems, writes Marek Seckar.

Devotion to “historical truth” can become an easy target for political manipulation. Deconstruction of national myths does not equate to destruction, but rather the rethinking and rearranging of the symbolic meaning of history.

Heavily influenced by the Black Wave or dissident Yugoslav cinema of her childhood, artist Nada Prlja considers its unique balancing act between iconoclasm and idealism, individualism and communism to be exemplary. In an interview with Stefan Szczelkun, Prlja talks about the cultural context of communist Yugoslavia and its mutation into a consumer culture – a shift that her artwork pivots on.

In Sweden and Switzerland, complicity in the Holocaust was for a long time ignored. It was only as a result of foreign publicity that national myths of neutrality gave way to admissions of responsibility, writes Arne Ruth.

Even if the West undertakes no obligations vis-à-vis the Rest, the principles upon which it is built suggest some responsibility, writes Mykola Riabchuk. Ukrainians are particularly wary of the Realpolitik that dominates western dealings with Russia. Whatever one thinks about the “centuries old affinity” between Ukraine and Russia, any policy that downplays the issue of values is fundamentally flawed.

After 1989, uncensored editions of many classics of contemporary eastern European literature became available, and numerous authors were discovered for the first time in the West. Meanwhile, a younger generation of writers, their imaginations liberated by events, were quick to respond to the new appetite for understanding the communist past. Katharina Raabe, editor for eastern European literature at Suhrkamp Verlag, surveys some of the most important of these authors and describes German publishers’ role in bringing them to western readers.

“Like the champagne from the bottles in Prague, that’s how the tears came rolling from my eyes! I’m tellin’ ya, if a Czechoslovak had been within reach, I’d’ve licked his ass clean!” A tough-talking Magyar remembers the stirrings of neighbourly affection in ’89.

“Increasing social distance between the poorest and the richest diminishes social cohesion, which in turn means more collective problems and fewer resources for solving all our other collective problems.” Göran Therborn on why inequality matters.

The conference “Challenges of freedom” takes place on 8 and 9 October in Krakow. The event, organized by Villa Decius in partnership with Eurozine, will discuss the essence of ideologies of liberation and the role of ethical values in initiating historical change.

“It is an unnatural but positive development when democracy trains people to believe that, overall, it is better to let the bastard speak.” Former Solidarity activist and journalist Konstanty Gebert talks to Irena Maryniak about censorship post-’89 and anti-Semitism in Poland today.

The controversy around the gender of the South African athlete Caster Semenya is by no means unprecedented. As Nuria Gregori and Silvia Garcia Dauder write, the world of sport is a social microcosm that reveals much about the role of assumptions concerning biological sex in a psychosocial logic in which gender identity, sexual orientation or sexual practice exerts maximum authority.

A museum to Tito at his one-time summer residence glorifying the Yugoslav dictator is in stark contrast to a damning new biography, finds Slavenka Drakulic. Yet between the two extremes is an absence of objective history-writing in the former Yugoslavia.

Two books dealing with the state security apparatus in communist Hungary emphasize the extent to which its members, from informants and their handlers up to high-ranking politicians, were subordinate to the Communist Party hierarchy. Clearly, a much wider circle of people than the network of agents were responsible for the disadvantages, and even vilification, suffered by thousands of people.

Postmodern theory can be pretentious and overblown. But a new series of reissues calls for more than the glib rejection characterizing much of the contemporary Anglo-American humanities, writes Nina Power.