Orphan Memory: Between Vanishing and Forgetting in Eastern Europe - Instytut Pileckiego

An Exercising Modernity Lecture

Orphan Memory: Between Vanishing and Forgetting in Eastern Europe

An Exercising Modernity lecture by Jacob Mikanowski

19.09.2024, 18.30 | Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin | Registration: https://forms.gle/uvhN5WMjJFpAuZqc6

Ruined graveyards, repurposed temples, toppled monuments, abandoned village – all of these are common sites across Eastern Europe.

A history of imperial upheaval, forced population transfers, mass exterminations and outright genocide has left much of the region’s cultural patrimony figuratively ownerless or disconnected from local communities.

Nationalist narratives which privilege certain ethnic groups and political movements over others have continued this process of alienation to the present day, leading to the excision of entire periods of history from canons of national memory.

As a result of these multiple processes, Eastern Europe has become one of the world’s great homelands of orphaned memory. Drawing on the author’s travels across the region and work as a historian, this talk proposes a tentative taxonomy of the various ways heritage can be erased or forgotten. It also asks what roles contemporary curators and cultural workers should play in reviving or re-housing these lost or vanishing landscapes before they fade from view.

Jacob Mikanowski – Bio

Jacob Mikanowski is a historian and journalist based in Portland, Oregon. He studied European history at Princeton and received his Ph.D. in Eastern European history from the University of California at Berkeley. He has reported on issues related to history, heritage and memory for outlets including Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The New York Times. He is the author of Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, a book-length history of Eastern Europe from pagan times to the present, named one of Spectator’s best books of the year for 2023.

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