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“La Fabrique de l’Histoire”—A Radio Show on Central Europe at CEFRES

CEFRES is thrilled to welcome the team of the French radio show devoted to history La Fabrique de l’Histoire for a series of four shows (to be broadcast in December 2017 on France Culture radio station) dedicated to East-Central Europe. A roundtable led by radio host Emmanuel Laurentin gathering four historians will tackle East-Central Europe relationship to nostalgia, the past and the future of Europe. The roundtable will follow a workshop on “The Political Uses of the Past and Collective Memory in Central Europe”.

Both the workshop and the roundtable of the Fabrique de l’Histoire are open to the public! 

Where: Kino 35, IFP, Štěpánská 35, Prague 1
Times: 3 pm-6:30 pm for the workshop, 7-8 pm for the roundtable of the Fabrique de l’Histoire
Organizer: CEFRES, with the support of French Institute in Paris (programme “New intellectual scenes”) and of the French Institute in Prague
Language: French

7 pm–8 pm
ROUND TABLE HOSTED BY EMMANNUEL LAURENTIN (France Culture)  

  • Balázs Ablonczy (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)
  • Pauli Bauer (Charles University)
  • Paul Gradvohl (University of Lorraine)
  • Barbora Spalová (Charles University)

3 pm—6:30 pm
WORKSHOP — Utilisations politiques du passé et mémoire collective

Éloïse Adde (Luxemburg University) : Mythe et actualité de Charles IV

Eszter Balázs (János Kodolányi & Kassák Museum) : La révolution de 1956 soixante ans après : comment la politique mémorielle veut façonner à son image la mémoire collective 

Andrzej Leder (Polish Academy of Sciences) : La révolution des somnambules. Les années 1939-1956 en Pologne

Barbora Spalová (Charles University) : L’économie morale des mémoires religieuses en République tchèque

Balázs Ablonczy (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) : Mémoires superposées : guerre, sortie de guerre, paix

Paul Bauer (Charles University) : Nostalgie et mémoires allemandes dans les Pays tchèques

Paul Gradvohl (University of Lorraine) : Nostalgies socialistes, nostalgies du socialisme (Hongrie, Pologne)

Selling Souls: Trafficking German Migrants – Lecture by William O’Reilly

Selling Souls: Trafficking German Migrants, Europe and America, 1648-1780

A lecture by William O’Reilly (Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge)

Time & Venue: 5:30 PM at CEFRES (Na Florenci 3, building C, 3rd floor – conference room)
Language: English
Organizer: Veronika Čapská (FHS UK)

William O’Reilly is a senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge, associate director at the Centre for History and Economics and full-time fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. He has worked on a range of topics in early modern European and Atlantic history, and is particularly interested in the history of European migration, colonialism and imperialism. He serves on the International Advisory Boards of the Historical Journal and Themes in Migrations.

Abstract:

Selling Souls investigates the history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century German emigration to North America and Central and Eastern Europe through the actions of Seelenverkäufer, the ‘soul-selling’ traffickers who recruited and escorted migrants and who bridged divides in geography, in literacy and illiteracy, in economic security and insecurity, in freedom and servitude. As the fashion for emigration grew in Europe after the great depopulation and general upheavals of the Thirty Years’ War, so did the proclivity of recruiters. It was virtually impossible in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe to contemplate emigration without coming under the influence of an agent or advertiser. They were scoundrels and saviours in differing measure and without their actions the entire process of early-modern migration would have been inconceivable. As such, they laid the groundwork for subsequent mass migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Selling Souls considers the role of colonist recruiters in the creation of a complex network of communication that encompassed an expansive Atlantic World, from Pennsylvania to Transylvania. Without the actions of migrant recruiters, informal webs of contact and communication could not have been maintained among migrants and, by extension, further migration might not have taken place.

Critical Actor and Political Critique

Second session of the common epistemological seminar of CEFRES and IMS FSV UK,

Yuliya Moskvina (FSV UK & CEFRES)
Critical Actor and Political Critique

Where: CEFRES library – Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1 (to be confirmed)
When: from 3:30 pm to 5 pm
Language: English

Text:

  • Paul Blokker: European Crisis and Political Critique of Capitalism. in: European Journal of Social Theory, 17 (3) 2014, p. 258-274.

Read more about the seminar!

On the Concept of Scenario in Contemporary Philosophy

First session of the common epistemological seminar of CEFRES and IMS FSV UK, introduces by Clara Royer (CEFRES) and led by Benedetta Zaccarello (CEFRES): On the Concept of Scenario in Contemporary Philosophy

Where: CEFRES library – Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1 (to be confirmed)
When: every second Thursday from 3:30 pm to 5 pm
Language: English

Texts :
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert: “Le scénario cartésien. Recherches sur la formation et la cohérence de l’intention philosophique de Marleau-Ponty”, Paris, Vrin, 2005, p.272

Read more about the seminar!

Large Scale Use of Oral History Accounts in the Historiography of the Shoah – The Case of the Hungarian-Jewish Slave Labourers in Vienna (1944-45)

A lecture by Éva Kovacs (Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies) in the frame of the seminar on Modern Jewish History of the Institute of Contemporary History (AV ČR) and CEFRES in partnership with the Masaryk Institute (AV ČR).

Where: CEFRES library, Na Florenci 3, 110 00 Prague 1
When: from 5 pm to 6:30 pm
Language: English

In the past two decades, thanks to the opening of the digital collections in the United States, Israel, and Europe, the usage of oral history sources became attractive in historical research. These archives hold an enormous number of testimonies, which makes the research easier and faster, but, on the other hand, raises serious methodological questions. Meanwhile, the last survivors who can still give testimonies are passing away – the oral history sources are turning into „normal” archival sources soon. These new developments are challenging the history-writing on the Shoah.

Our case study deals with the everyday life of approximately 15 thousand Hungarian-Jewish deportees who were forced to work in Vienna and its vicinity in 1944-45. The presentation will focus on the Quellenkritik (source criticism) and methodology of using large oral history archives to explore insufficiently documented historical subjects.

Read more about the colloquia!

Acts of Justice, Public Events: World War II Criminals on Trial

This conference originates from the encounter of three projects: a Russian-French project on trials in the USSR (FMSH/RGNF), the micro-project of the Labex Création, Arts, Patrimoines ‘Images de la justice”, and the WW2CRIMESONTRIAL1943-1991 project supported by the French National Research Agency.

Find out more about the ANR project “Nazi War Crimes in Court” here

Partners: CEFRES, March Bloch Center, CERCEC, CEFR, GDR “CEM” and CERHEC
Time & Venue: 12-14 Octobre 2017, CEFRES, Prague
Language: English

Read the call for papers here

Program

Thursday 12 October 

9.00 Opening Remarks

Media narratives and their reception
9.30-11.30 
Panel I: Mediatization As a Turning Point: Attractive Features & Risks 
Discussant: Françoise Mayer

  • Ornella Rovetta: Judging War Criminals in the 1920s: A Pioneering Precedent in Making Post-War Justice Visible?
  • Radu Stancu: Capital Punishment for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity in Romania after World War II
  • Enrico Heitzer: The “Norwegians”: a Nearly Forgotten Group of German and Austrian Nazi and War Criminals in Front of Soviet Courts 1946/47

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel II: Fixed Components of Media Narrative and Its Consequences 
Discussant: Dimitri Astashkin

  • Alexander Epifanov: Information Support to Trials over Hitler’s War Criminals and Accomplices in the USSR in 1941–1956
  • Elena Kokkoken: Pskov Regional Press: The Trials over Russian Collaborators
  • Marie-Bénedicte Vincent: Ernst Kaltenbrunner in the Trial of Nuremberg: Which Reception in the Press Under Military Control of Occupied West Germany?

Lunch Break

Social Mobilisation and Justice
3.00-5.00
Panel III: Sparking off social commitment
Discussant: Audrey Kichelewski

  • Agnieszka Smelkowska: Revenge and justice on display: rehabilitacja in post-war Poland
  • Gabriel Finder: Jews, Poles, and Justice in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
  • Nadège Ragaru: Differentiated Publicity: The Sandglass of the (In-) visibilization of the Trials for Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria (1944-1945)

Friday 13 October
Social Mobilization and Justice 

9.30-11.30
Panel IV: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (1)
Discussant: Vanessa Voisin

  • Natalia Aleksiun: Survivor Networks and the Polish Post-War Trials
  • Giovanni Focardi, Andrea Martini: Shadows and lights in Trials against Fascists: Transitional Justice in Italy (1943-1953)
  • Maxilimian Becker: Victims’ Unions’ Reception of Trials: The Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965

Coffee Break

11.45-1.15
Panel V: Victims and Witnesses: Driving Forces for Justice (2)
Discussant: Emilia Koustova

  • Máté Zombory: Arrow Cross atrocities on trial: the public trajectory of a key witness in Budapest (1945-1949)
  • Birte Klarzyk, Anne Klein: Dynamics and Multiperspectivity of Justice: The “FFDJF” and the “Lischka Trial” of Kurt Lischka, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn in Cologne, 1979/80

Lunch Break

1.50-2.30
Film projection: The Victims Accuse (Moscow/Minsk, 1963). Commented by Jasmin Söhner and Vanessa Voisin

2.40-4.40
Panel VI: The Limits of Social Mobilization
Discussant: Alain Blum

  • Eric Le Bourhis, Irina Tcherneva: Soviet citizens write to the press and to the general prosecutor: the reception of the Kacherovski trial in Riga (1959)
  • Regina Kazyulina: The Contingency of Postwar Justice in the Crimean Countryside
  • Andrea Pető: Post WWII Trials and Perpetrators in Hungarian Cinema. The Missing Composure

Saturday 14 October
Transnational Justice in Postwar Europe

9.30-11.30
Panel VIII: Reception of Propaganda and Political Fallout
Discussant: Clara Royer

  • James Ryan: Ideology on Trial: Ideology on Trial: The Prosecution of Leftists and Pan-Turkists at the Dawn of the Cold War in Turkey, 1944-1947
  • Fabien Théofilakis: The Eichmann Trial (1961) on the Front Page”: How did the Western European Press deal with the Nazi Past?
  • Jasmin Söhner: Presenting unambiguous results: the case of Erwin Schüle

Coffee Break

11.45-1.45
Panel IX: Media Impact on Judicial Procedures
Discussant: Sylvie Lindeperg

  • Steven Remy: The Visual Politics of Infamy: The Malmedy Massacre Trial and its Aftermath
  • Kateřina Králová: In the Shade of Eichmann: Prosecution of Max Merten in Greece and Beyond
  • Vojtěch Kyncl: Judicial scandal in the “Malloth” process

1.45-2.45: Concluding Remarks