Eneken Laanes

Translating Memories: The Eastern European past in the global arena

How has the memory of the Second World War and the Soviet regime in Eastern Europe been translated for the global arena through literature, cinema, and art? What makes these memories intelligible to the world, and what has been lost in translation? This project offers a new understanding of transnational memory as a process of translation by focusing on post-Soviet Eastern European attempts to make their local histories of the Second World War and the socialist regime known globally. It examines these efforts through aesthetic media of memory that bring local experiences to global audiences, and through the heated public debates that these works of art have provoked in national and transnational contexts. It argues that exploring the arts is vital in untangling the most recalcitrant nodes of confrontational political discourses and addressing the ethical and political complexity of remembering war and state terror.

Result

The project has highlighted the role of literature, film, and art as well as interactive memorial museums in making the histories of the Second World War, the Nazi occupation, and the socialist regimes known globally. It has explored authors writing in different languages, such as Svetlana Alexievich, Jáchym Topol, Katja Petrowskaja, Saša Stanišić, Sofi Oksanen, and films from Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and the Baltic States. It has shown how these art works have contributed to understanding the difficult nodes of local memory both nationally and transnationally. It has also emphasised the role of mass culture such as Polish conspiracy novels or the memoirs of the wives or daughters of famous male politicians in negotiating memories of socialism and transition into liberal societies.

Theoretically, the project has innovated the field of cultural memory studies by integrating ideas and concepts from translation theory and world literature studies. It has proposed translation as a new model for conceptualising the transnational travel of memories through transcultural memorial forms.

Impact

The project contributes to understanding of the processes of public remembering and their relevance to defining the political present. The study has explained how memories travel transnationally and how unfamiliar aspects of Central and Eastern Europe’s past have been brought to the European Union by novels, films, and visual art. In the wake of Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine, the project has explored the link between the ‘warped’ memory of Stalinist repressions in post-Soviet Russia and the new imperialist narratives used to justify the war.

Members of the project team have frequently spoken and published in the media, offering their expert knowledge and advice on understanding and resolving memory conflicts. They have explained how the arts – literature, film, and visual art – can help untangle these conflicts through their unique imaginary and affective capacities.