Intellectual Ferment in Socialist Europe (1928-1968) - Instytut Pileckiego

A discussion of two books: Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 by Ivana Perica (Bloomsbury, 2025) and the edited volume Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956–1968: Ideas in Flux (Brill, 2025).

We are looking forward to the first Pariser Platz Seminar in 2026! The discussion will examine two recently published books on intellectual production in East-Central Europe: Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 by Ivana Perica (Bloomsbury 2025) and the edited volume Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956–1968: Ideas in Flux (Brill 2025), edited by Aleksandra Konarzewska, Una Blagojević, and Natalia Borisova. Together, these works challenge the notion of the Iron Curtain as an impermeable barrier.

Focusing in particular on the period between the Thaw and the Prague Spring, the discussion highlights a brief but intense phase of intellectual ferment in Socialist Europe, during which literature, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought grappled with the legacy of Stalinism and the emergence of early postmodernist ideas.

Intellectual Ferment in Socialist Europe (1928-1968)

18.02.2026, 18.00 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin | Registration: https://forms.gle/XY2c9hAkQJHMAJsa7

Panelists

Ivana Perica (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin)
Natalia Borisova (University of Tübingen)
Aleksandra Konarzewska (University of Tübingen)
Bartłomiej Kapica (Pilecki Institute)
Una Blagojević (LMU Munich)

Moderation: Susanne Frank (Humboldt University Berlin)

Blurb: "The book offers an alternate framing of the literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928-1968 in Eastern and Western Europe. Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur combines the transfer of ideas between historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West to address the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928. It deepens scholarly awareness of the transnational spaces of interwar literature and explores their afterlives in the post-World War II period.

The book troubles and corrects Western European theories of 1968 by tracing the post-war afterlives of shared interwar experiences that point towards a socialist third way, or Georg Lukács’ tertium datur, and thus out of the conventionally understood East-West binary. It testifies to the existence of a literature that throughout the last century self-consciously oscillated between the exigencies of organized politics and the aesthetic task of helping to shape the humanity of tomorrow. Examining case studies of works by Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht and August Cesarec among others, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur excavates a series of problems, optics and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes of 20th-century literary history. It shows that the proverbial Iron Curtain was not impenetrable, and that the walls and borders erected in the post-war period could not completely suppress the reverberations and revival of projects that flourished in the political-literary metropolises of the interwar period."

Blurb: "Between the Thaw and the Prague Spring, Socialist Europe experienced a brief yet intense period of intellectual ferment. Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956-1968 explores the shifting landscape of literature, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought in the wake of Stalinism and on the cusp of postmodernism. Bridging cultural analysis and intellectual history, this volume offers fresh insights into a period that shaped Socialist Europe for decades."

Panelists:

Ivana Perica 

Ivana Perica is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL). She works on modern and contemporary literature and intellectual history, with particular interests in literature’s relation to political thought and culture. She is the author of The Private-Public Axis of the Political: The Disagreement Between Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière (2016) and co-editor of The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920–2020 (2024). 

Natalia Borisova

Natalia Borisova is a literary scholar teaching in the Slavic Department of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her expertise includes 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature, literary theory, and the history of literary feeling and economy. Among her publications are monographs on love in Soviet film and literature (With Heart and Eye, 2013) and a forthcoming book on Leo Tolstoy. She is listed as part of the Tübingen Slavisches Seminar academic staff.

Aleksandra Konarzewska 

Dr. Aleksandra Konarzewska is a scholar based at the Slavisches Seminar of the University of Tübingen, where she works as an academic researcher focusing on East-Central European literature, philosophy, and memory studies. Her research spans Polish, Russian, and German literature of the 19th–21st centuries, and she has published several monographs and edited volumes, including work on literature and intellectual history. She is a co-editor of Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956–1968: Ideas in Flux (2025).

Bartłomiej Kapica 

Dr. Bartłomiej Kapica is a historian (PhD in history, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, 2015) and an assistant professor in the Center for Totalitarian Studies at the Pilecki Institute in Warsaw. His research focuses on Polish political and intellectual history, the history of the communist movement in Poland, and biographical studies. He has published on Władysław Bieńkowski and related topics in Polish history and contributed to Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956–1968.

Una Blagojević

Dr. Una Blagojević is a historian whose work focuses on the intellectual history of Marxist humanism and social and cultural histories of East-Central Europe. She earned her PhD from Central European University, has published on phenomenology and existentialism in dialogue with Marxist humanism, and is involved in collaborative academic projects (e.g., ERC and international networks on feminist political thought and East-Central European crisis discourses). She is a co-editor of Intellectual Production in Socialist Europe 1956–1968: Ideas in Flux.

Moderator: Susanne Frank 

Prof. Dr. Susanne Frank is a professor of Eastern Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research and teaching cover Russian and East Slavic literatures, comparative cultural studies, and interdisciplinary perspectives on literature, history, and narrative. She has held positions at various universities and leads projects on Soviet unofficial culture, didactic concepts in Slavic studies, and related research areas.