1968: Myth and Impact (original) (raw)
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Call for Papers: Unsettled 1968, Origins—Myth—Impact
The Slavic Department at University of Tübingen is pleased to announce “Unsettled 1968”, an interdisciplinary international workshop for graduate students. In 2018, we will have the 50th anniversary of “1968” - the year in which the world saw simultaneous revolts, protests, and turmoils all over the world. Not to mention Paris May Revolution and the Prague Spring, or the series of student protests in the United States and elsewhere, we faced the burgeoning of new generations coming into play, and the ending of old hegemonies. Since then, 1968 has not only produced myths that had attracted various authors but also a firm research topic that sociologists, historians, and literary theorists had been investigating. We will take this time of commemoration as the opportunity for opening our discussion on 1968, once again, in order to reevaluate its impact to this day. We will collect opinions from different generations, and revisit the boundary of experiences, testimonies, and reflections in an interdisciplinary manner. The workshop will consist of 3 keynote speeches 4 presentation panels, and a short-tour on the sight of 1968 in Tuebingen, as the city has also its solid memory of the 68 protest. Combining scholarly conversations with a site-specific knowledge, we wish to enhance international cooperation and build the basis for mutual understanding of our recent past in common. Keynote speakers: Irena Grudzinska Gross (Princeton University; Polish Academy of Science) Victoria Harms (the Herder Institute; Leibniz Graduate School) Michał Mrugalski (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
2018
Fifty years after the Prague Spring of 1968 one can notice an interesting contrast between the commemoration of the hopes of the Spring in the West and the priority given to the commemoration of the August 1968 invasion that crushed the project known as ‘socialism with a human face’ in the East. This may be revealing not just of different experiences with 1968 in both parts of then divided Europe as much as of the post-1989 politics of memory in the Czech lands. Looking back fifty years on we note that there is no urgent need of a new history of the 1968 Czechoslovak experiment (the archives have been opened and much has been published) but there may be a case for revisiting the ideas associated with 1968 and their resonance (or lack thereof) in the country itself as well as in a broader European context. Three aspects deserve to be mentioned in this respect: 1. The Prague Spring revived the debate about Czech democratic exceptionalism in the context of European socialism. 2. It was...
The Questions of 1968: Background, Context and Retrospect
2018
The fiftieth anniversary of the May 1968 events in Paris, and of their less spectacular analogies elsewhere in the West, has attracted worldwide comment and re-evaluation. Much less is said about 1968 in the erstwhile communist world. That part of the story was, admittedly, confined in the main to one country, and came to a more brutal end than anything on the other side of the iron curtain. But closer examinations of the Western 1960s and their sequel have increasingly stressed the limits, illusions and paradoxes of these historical experiences. The protest movements were short-lived; if they had an impact, it was of a very different nature than what they had aspired to, and variations from country to country were much more important than they seemed at the time; neither protagonists nor interpreters came anywhere near an adequate grasp of the world-changing processes at work in the wider environment. Explaining the differences of cultural memory in East and West in terms of relati...
2010
This book collects the proceedings of a two-day conference cosponsored by the Cold War International History Project, the University of Maryland, the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Romanian Embassy in Washington DC, and Georgetown University, which took place at the WoodrowWilson Center in November 2008. According to the event’s website, the conference was to “include discussions of the crisis of ’really existing socialism’ and the failure of ’socialism with a human face,’ and postMarxist utopia and the rediscovery of radicalism.”[1] In its published form, the book complements other studies, such as Jeremi Suri’sTheGlobal Revolutions of 1968 (2007) and Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth’s 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977 (2008), in its stated goal to reassess the significance and consequences of the events associated with the year 1968 “beyond the East-West divide” without the claim, however, “to have found a resolution to the dilemmas raised by the to...
2018
“A long march through the institutions”1 was shouted in marches in Germany, “all power to the imagination”2 was chanted in Paris, “USA=SA=SS”3 was graffitied in the walls of Berlin, and “We are all German Jews”4 was heard in France and Italy. What these triumphant mottos represent is what is commonly referred to as ‘the revolution of 1968’, a cluster of rebellions mainly carried out by students in cities around the world that marched against antidemocratic and authoritarian regimes, hierarchical bureaucracies, communist totalitarianism, consumer society and, in general, contemporary culture. It is the culmination of diverse social and cultural processes and changes throughout the 60s. The degree of wide-ranging impact of 1968 is debated, some even argue that it is the “greatest and most dramatic, rapid and universal social transformation in human history”5. Nevertheless, what is most intriguing about 1968 is the intersection of its global, transnational and local components, which produce different experiences – and frustrating results – worldwide, topics we will study in the present essay.