Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe Series

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. On the one hand, the analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukraine-wide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning the fate of religious communities during and after socialism, the significance of national projects for religious organizations, and the politics of religious management in a situation in which local religious commitments are relatively strong and religious organizations are relatively weak. The analysis contributes to the ethnography and history of this particular region and of the post-socialist world in general. On the other hand, the changing status of the apparition site over the years allows investigation of the questions concerning authority, legitimacy, and power in religious organizations, especially in relation to management of religious experiences. The analysis aims at clarification of such concepts as religious institutions, organizations but also religious experiences and is relevant to anthropology, sociology and religious studies. It is argued that the important question in analyses of religious apparitions should not be how an individual experience becomes institutionalized and instrumentalized, but how experience becomes a tool for negotiation and transformation in the religious field. Key word: 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint-–Apparitions and miracles–Ukraine–Zakarpats'kaoblast'. 2. Zakarpats'ka oblast' (Ukraine)–Church history.

The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘Underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture. The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht). Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity. 

This collective volume shows how Ukraine can best be understood through its regions and how the regions must be considered against the background of the nation. The overarching objective of the book is to challenge the dominance of the nation-state paradigm in the analyses of Ukraine by illustrating the interrelationship between national and regional dynamics of change. The authors—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, literary critics and linguists from Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Germany and the USA—explicitly go beyond the perspective of an entity defined by traditional political borders and cultural, economic, historical or religious stereotypes. The research project that led to the composition of the book combined quantitative (statistical surveys conducted across Ukraine) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and focus-group discussion) methods. The authors came to the conclusion that regionalism as a defining phenomenon of Ukraine is more prominent than the regions themselves. This approach regards Ukraine as a construct in flux where different discourses intersect, concur and eventually merge through the lenses of various disciplines and methodologies.

The book deals with the expansion and institutionalization of intellectual property norms in the twentieth century, with a European focus. Its thirteen chapters revolve around the transfer, adaptation and the ambivalence of legal transplants in the interface between national and international projects, trends and contexts. The first part discusses the institutionalization of copyright and patent law in the frame- work of the bigger political and economic projects of the twentieth century. The second and third parts of the collection review relevant processes in the communist regimes and the post-communist societies, respectively. The essays point at processes of enculturation, trans-nationalization and universalization of norms, as well as practices of incorporation and resistance. The contributors lay a particular emphasis on the role and activity of social actors in the establishment and validation of intellectual property norms and regimes, from the function of experts and creation of expert cultures to the compelling power of popular street protests.

This book centers on the Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, published in Washington in the early summer of 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The volume was born from the conviction that the full assessment of the significance of the Carnegie Report—one of the first international non-governmental fact-finding missions with the intention to promote peace—requires a deeper exploration of the context of its birth. The authors examine how the countries involved in the wars handled the inquires of the Carnegie Commission and the role of the report in the remembrance of the wars in the respective states. Although the report considered both the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan nation-states insufficiently civilized to wage wars within the limits of the codes of conduct of international law, this orientalist conclusion can in part be explained by the liberal internationalist strategy of the Carnegie Endowment, and of the commission members’ professional, political, and ethnic background. Overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I, the Carnegie Report’s direct impact on international arbitration or international criminal law was limited, yet—in the authors’ opinion—it ultimately contributed to the further juridification of international relations