What Do Neighbors Remember About Each Other? Polish-German Experience with Ukraine in the Background
Robert Traba
Center for History Studies of Polish Academy of Sciences, BerlinMay 5, 2017 / 6.00 pm
Center for Urban History, Lviv
The lecture focused on the mechanism of constructing collective memory in bilateral relations. What do nations choose in their past to "discover" and develop their traditions and why? The lecture and the discussion will be based on the results of one of the largest European projects on memory "Polish-German Memorial Sites." In 2007-2015, it engaged 117 scholars from 6 countries, and resulted into a nine volume publication. 90% of shared memorial sites are perceived absolutely differently in Poland and in Germany. Why is it so? Is this a universal experience? Where is the place for Ukraine in the bilateral memorialization of their own past by Poles and Germans?
Discussant: Vasyl Rasevych – a historian, a public intellectual, a researcher at the Center for Urban History.
The event was hold in Polish with simultaneous translation.
Robert Traba
is a historian, a PhD, professor, director of the Center for History Studies of Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin, honorary professor of the Free University of Berlin. He is an expert in the history of Polish-German borderlands, collective memory, and historical policy of Poland and East Central Europe, one of the leading promoters of public history in the present day Poland. Author and editor of several dozens of books in Polish, German, and English, such as “The Past in the Present” (2015), “Polsko-niemieckie miejsca pamięci, t. I-IV” (2012-2015), “Wschodniopruskość. Tożsamość regionalna i narodowa w kulturze politycznej Niemiec” (2003).
