Page 16 - TLU magazine - The Way to The Top

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TALLINN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE / NO. 14 / SPRING 2020
THE HISTORY OF
EASTERN EUROPE
on the world stage
Watching the same films and reading the same books creates a similar idea of our past for us and makes us feel united. However, literature and films don't always create the images of the past that we would like to relate to. They can also bring up topics we don't want to remember but are still important to talk about.
Tallinn University associate professor of com- parative literature and cultural analysis Eneken Laanes started a project at the beginning of the year in which she and her team study the way Eastern European memories of World War II and the Soviet regime have reached the world stage through literature, film and art.
Why is studying this topic important to Estonia, other Eastern European countries and society in general?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, East-
ern European countries have fought for their history to be recognised internationally at a political level. The fight has often involved com- parisons between Nazis and the Soviet regime, the holocaust and social repressions. This has created a lot of misunderstanding elsewhere in the world. The feeling that our history and its distinctiveness aren't understood is common to many Eastern European countries.
In the past decades, many books and films
have brought the history of Eastern Europe to
a global audience and created great interest. At the same time, it has brought up arguments at the local level about whether the version of this history shown by certain books or films is accu- rate. An example would be Sofi Oksanen's novel Purge, which created a hot debate in Estonia about a decade ago. The same happened with Pawel Pawlikowski's film Ida in Poland and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others in Eastern Germany.
Why are you studying the memory cultures of different countries through film, art and literature?
Our project isn't so much studying local memory cultures, but rather the processes of cultural memory across countries. How Eastern European history reaches other people's aware- ness. Literature, film and art are good research objects because they have a global reach. The images of the past they create reach ordinary people in the rest of the world more effectively than those written in history books or political arguments about the past.
Why translated memory?
We've noticed that literature and films bring lo- cal history to a global audience by "translating" it into a language understood globally. What do you mean by translation? I mean that in order to talk about the past, people often use forms
of memory that have developed elsewhere, in other memory cultures. Most often, these forms of memory originate from the global memory of the holocaust.
For example, in Martti Helde's globally re- nowned film In the Crosswind they dedicated the film to the Soviet holocaust in the closing credits. The holocaust is the genocide of Euro- pean Jews by the Nazis. But what is the Soviet holocaust? By calling it that, Helde "translates" the Soviet deportations as a historical event into a globally understood language. He tells those who don't know much about the deportations