Central Europe: Politics and
Society
2023
Requirements
Six written preparation based on the literature — position papers, critical
comments (12 points) HOMEWORK VAULTS
Final test — written exam (30 points) 14.12.2023
Activity — attendance, active participation (8 points)
Czech Republic – The aesthetics of modernisation,
industrialisation and urbanisation
Csaba Szaló
The landscape of meanings
Emotional identi
fi
fication
Symbolic representation
Dreaming ourselves into
existence: utopia, dystopia,
heterotopia
History as a form of modern experience
Folded temporality
Becoming a participant in
ruination
Inhabited ruins
Simmel, Georg (1965). ‘Ruin.’ In Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics. p.266.
„Here, as in the case of the ruin, with its extreme
intensi
fi
fication and ful
fi
filment of the present form of the
past, such profound and comprehensive energies of our
soul are brought into play that there is no longer any sharp
division between perception and thought. Here psychic
wholeness is at work – seizing, in the same way that its
object fuses the contrast of present and past into one
united form.“
Readings
Wong, Yoke-Sum. 2013. “Edith Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: A Story of
Farnsworth House.” Pp. 102–33 in The Inhabited Ruins of Central
Europe: Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory, edited by D. Sayer
and D. Ga
fi
fijczuk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ga
fi
fijczuk, Dariusz. 2013. “Anxious Geographies – Inhabited
Traditions.” Pp. 178–93 in The Inhabited Ru- ins of Central Europe:
Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory, edited by D. Sayer and D.
Ga
fi
fijczuk. Lon- don: Palgrave Macmillan.
Slovakia – State building between national myths and the ethics
of dissent
Csaba Szaló
The struggle of rationality with life
The division between perception
and thought
The division between the past,
the present, and the future
The division between the life and
its form
Modernisation theory (Parsons)
From emotional involvement to emotional neutrality
From collectivity orientation to individual focus
From status based on ascription to status based on achievement
From di
ff
ffuseness to speci
fi
ficity
From particularism to universalism
Readings
Beasley-Murray, Tim. 2013. “Ruins and Representations of 1989:
Exception, Normality, Revolution.” Pp. 16–39 in The Inhabited Ruins
of Central Europe: Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory, edited
by D. Sayer and D. Ga
fi
fijczuk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blokker, Paul. 2013. “The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom
and Cohabitation in Central Europe.” Pp. 40–54 in The Inhabited
Ruins of Central Europe: Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory,
edited by D. Sayer and D. Ga
fi
fijczuk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Poland – Cultural heritage(s): the tragic discourses of
resettlement, expulsion and genocide
Csaba Szaló
Gregor Thum, Uprooted.
“Wrocław is a looking glass through which Europe’s selfdestruction
becomes manifest: nationalism and
provincialization, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the
destructive rage of the Second World War, Nazi fantasies
of Germanization and the murder of European Jewry, the
total collapse in 1945, the shifting of national borders in
Central Europe, the forced resettlements, and,
fi
finally, the
Cold War division of the continent and the intellectual
paralysis inherent in the opposition of East and West.”
Gregor Thum, Uprooted.
“Wrocław, a city that could not keep pace with the
momentum of Western European cities, was less a
ff
ffected
by cultural homogenization than the emerging centers of
economic activity. Here, at Germany’s eastern periphery,
the cultural and ethnic ambivalence of premodern Europe
endured longer.”
Reading
Thum, Gregor. 2017. Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wroclaw during
the Century of Expulsions. pp: xiii-104.
Hungary: Nationalism and the identity politics of cultural
traumas
Csaba Szaló
Reading
D
á
ányi, Endre. 2013. “Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian
Parliament.” Pp. 55–78 in The In- habited Ruins of Central Europe:
Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory, edited by D. Sayer and D.
Ga
fi
fijczuk. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Austria – Cultural contradictions of centralisation and
modernisation
Csaba Szaló
Social transformation
Communication and transport infrastructures
Migrants from both the local countryside and other parts of the
empire
New low-level jobs and literacy
Military conscription
Reading
Judson, Pieter M. 2016. The Habsburg Empire: A New History.
Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press. pp.333-454.