Time of change in Belarus and East Germany – Viadrina guest lecturer invites you to a film evening in Eisenhüttenstadt

The similarities and differences between the experiences of upheaval in Belarus and East Germany will be the subject of a film evening on Friday, May 24, from 5.30 p.m., at the Museum Utopie und Alltag in Eisenhüttenstadt, Erich-Weinert-Allee 3. The film Crystal Swan will be shown, in which director Darya Zhuk sheds light on the history of the Belarusian transition period in the 1990s. Interested parties are cordially invited to attend the film evening and talk about parallels with their East German experiences afterwards.

The film is part of a research project that explores memories of the 1980s and 1990s in Poland and East Germany in dialog formats. One of the researchers involved is literary scholar Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik from the Polish Academy of Sciences, who is teaching and researching as a guest lecturer on the Master of European Studies (MES) course at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) in the current summer semester.

When and where

Friday, May 24, 2024 | 5.30 p.m.
Museum Utopie und Alltag 
Erich-Weinert-Allee 3, 15890 Eisenhüttenstadt

Admission is free.

Background to the research project

The aim of the three-and-a-half-year research project entitled "Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales" is to enable critical practices of remembrance and to promote dialog about transformation experiences after the collapse of the so-called Eastern Bloc. Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik is working with other researchers from the University of Groningen and the Technical University of Dortmund as well as the "Transition Dialogue" network (Austausch e. V.) to develop a method of dialogical remembrance. The group uses approaches from cultural discourse and affect analysis, critical memory research, public history, (digital) ethnography and intersectional gender and generational research.

After Gdansk, Łódź and Berlin, the public film evening and a non-public workshop will now take place in Eisenhüttenstadt. In the workshop format, the day after the film screening, diverse groups will discuss their often very different memories. The researchers deliberately chose Eisenhüttenstadt as a city that has been heavily affected by the transformation
 

"These memories are not a topic of the past, they shape the present for people in Poland and East Germany," says Agnieszka Mrozik, emphasizing the topicality of the research project. "In many European countries, political parties use these issues to push their agenda; we have seen this in Hungary and Poland and it is also happening in Germany. It is important to understand how political actors use transformation memories for their own purposes," continues Agnieszka Mrozik.
For a detailed interview with Agnieszka Mrozik: Link

The project is funded by the Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS) as part of the Constructive Advanced Thinking (CAT) program. The film evening in Eisenhüttenstadt can take place thanks to funding from the Federal Agency for Civic Education.

Background to the film evening

Law student Evelina dreams of leaving her home country of Belarus to pursue a career as a DJ in Chicago. But a mistake is made when she applies for an American visa, prompting her to take a risky step. The film by Belarusian director Darya Zhuk, released in 2018, takes the audience back to the newly independent Belarus of the 1990s, where people are looking for creative ways to survive and reinvent themselves – confronted with existential threats and crises, but also new opportunities. The screening will be followed by a short keynote speech and an audience discussion on Belarusian and German experiences of political change and their memories. The audience is invited to compare their own memories of the 1990s with the reality shown in the film.
Further information: www.utopieundalltag.de