Representations of War Crimes and Political Violence in Eastern European Literatures, Films, and Arts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The cruelty of war crimes and extreme political violence transcends the boundaries of the imaginable and destroys scopes and spaces of freedom that are fundamental for being human. At the same time, the documentation of these atrocities is highly challenging: on the one hand, a language must be found that puts the “unspeakable” into words. On the other hand, the chosen words and signs make the described crimes vulnerable to intentional misinterpretation and malicious instrumentalisation.
Literature, film and art can play a key role in solving this problem of language and documentation. With their depragmatising function and the focus on language itself (Jakobson 1960), aesthetic objects resist political claims and open up scopes and spaces that enable to speak about the unspeakable.
Against this background, our panel will look at representations of war crimes and extreme political violence in Eastern European literatures, films and arts. Taking a diachronic perspective we will regard diverse examples from Eastern European cultures, including different media cultures.
Specifically, we want to examine the authors’ aesthetic techniques, symbolic characteristics and poetological hallmarks. We will also discuss to what extent aesthetic representations expose the nature of the committed crimes and if/what conclusions about the perpetrators can be made. In doing so, the panel explores connections of culture with the fields of human rights and criminology, which increasingly leave their traditional domains (Natarajan 2011) and engages with literary theory (McGregor 2024).

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Alexander Wöll, U of Potsdam (Germany)

Papers

• Unmasking Ideology: Depicting Soviet Deportation in the USSR and GULag Internment in Avrom Zaks 'Knekht zenen mir geven' - Eva Hückmann, U of Potsdam (Germany)

• 'The Gift of Reincarnation': Ukrainian Dissidents' Articulations of the Great Terror - Bohdan Tokarskyi, Harvard U

• Documenting a War Crime: Roman Liuby’s Film 'Iron Butterflies' and the Downing of MH17 in Donbas - Fabian Erlenmaier, U of Potsdam (Germany)

Discussants

• Valentyna Kharkhun, Mykola Hohol State U of Nizhyn (Ukraine) / American University (USA)

• Alexander Wöll, U of Potsdam (Germany)