Layers of (Audio)Visual Memory and the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel will examine (audio)visuality related to the Second World War in East-Central Europe, exploring how it intertwines different layers of time and various scales of collective memory. It aims to analyze and discuss selected visual narratives created in relation to the events of the Second World War in Central and Eastern Europe—whether as photographic documentation, postwar artistic interpretation, or imagery from an earlier period repurposed for Second World War propaganda and its aftermath. Visuality of the Second World War, as a focal point, thus connects different temporalities, and the proposed panel will demonstrate how they overlap and build upon one another. This discussion will illuminate the subject while paying attention to visual and audiovisual language, tropes, iconic images, and various modes of perception. It will also explore how meanings emerge, are transferred, or shift within the changing realities of memory politics—from the pre-war period, through the socialist era and the transformation period, up to the first decades of the 21st century. The proposed papers will present case studies analyzing the fluid constructs of (audio)visual memory, their circulation, and their incarnations in the contexts of Poland, Czechoslovakia/Czechia, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Their functioning will be considered at different—yet interconnected—levels of collective memory and imagination: local, national, and transnational

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Petra Hudek, Inst of History SAS (Slovakia)

Papers

• A Hidden Soviet Crime: Nazi Visual Propaganda and the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 - Karolina Koziura, The University of Toronto

• Semiotics of Visual Memory: Photographs by Zbigniew Zielonacki of Poznań at the end of the Second World War and their Afterlife in Postwar Decades - Anna Topolska, Independent Scholar

• Spotting the Epilogue: Post-War Cinematic Image of the Czechoslovak RAF Pilots - Johana Kłusek, Inst of Ethnology CAS (Czech Republic)

Discussant

• Anastasiya Mykolayivna Pshenychnykh, Loughborough U (UK)