Dienstag, 12. März 2024, 14:00 - 18:00

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, Research Lounge, 1010 Vienna, Rabensteig 3, 3rd Floor

VWI invites Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna

02.00 pm
Constantin Iordachi (VWI Senior Fellow)
Cleansing Ultranationalism: A Comparative History of Fascism in Eastern Europe, 1918–1945
Commented by Michal Kopeček (RECET)

03:00 pm
Mirnes Sokolović (VWI Junior Fellow)
The Construction of Europe by the Yugoslav Literary Right-Wing
Commented by Goran Musić (RECET)

04:00 pm
Mária Bogdán (Fortunoff Research Fellow)
The Representation of the Forgotten-Silenced: Understanding the Social Process of Cultural Trauma of the European Romani Communities
Commented by Lea Feibusch (RECET)

05:00 pm
Katharina Lenski (Gerda Henkel Research Fellow)
"Asociality": Constructing "Underclasses" between 1933 and 1989
Commented by Rasa Navickaitė (RECET)

Abstracts and Short Bios

Constantin Iordachi
Cleansing Ultranationalism: A Comparative History of Fascism in Eastern Europe, 1918–1945

The project compares varieties of fascism in Eastern Europe in order to integrate the fascist movements and regimes in this region more firmly into general fascism research. Special attention is paid to the fascist pursuit of violent "cleansing" and the role that fascists in the region played in the planning and execution of the Holocaust. The aim of the project is to set a new research agenda for the comparative study of fascism and thus to contribute to the fine-tuning or fundamental modification of existing explanatory approaches. The comparative research on fascism should thus – in the sense of an exchange and comparison of scholarly traditions in Eastern and Western Europe – be set on new theoretical and methodological foundations.

Constantin Iordachi is a Professor of history at the Central European University, Budapest; editor-in-chief of CEU Review of Books, co-editor-in-chief of the journal East Central-Europe (Leiden: Brill); and consultant editor of Fascism: Comparative Fascist Studies (Leiden: Brill). He has published widely on comparative history in Central Europe, mostly on citizenship, the history of fascism and the Holocaust, and the collectivisation of agriculture and has (co-)edited over twenty collective volumes. His publications include:  The Fascist Faith of the Legion “Archangel Michael” in Romania, 1927–1941: Martyrdom and National Purification (Routledge,, 2023);  and Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918 (Brill, 2019) Iordachi is also a member of the Academic Committee of the House of European History, Brussels, and a member of the Academia Europaea-The Academic of Europe.

Commented by Michal Kopeček
Michal Kopeček is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and an Associate Fellow at RECET. His research interests include the comparative modern intellectual history of East Central Europe, nationalism studies, the history of communism, and the democratic and liberal transformation after 1989. 

Mirnes Sokolović
The Construction of Europe by the Yugoslav Literary Right-Wing

The project is concerned with war propaganda and ideas about Europe in the Yugoslav literary right of the 1930s and 1940s. It focuses on the construction of a right-wing propaganda style and a discriminatory cultural concept of Europe. The anti-Semitic glossary that helped to remove one of its constituent components from European culture and to construct an "ethnically pure" European culture characterised the mainstream of right-wing propaganda in Serbo-Croatia during the 1930s and 1940s. The project seeks answers to the questions of what led avant-garde writers to radical ideologies, what role the intellectuals and the media played in legitimising crime and genocide and what makes the difference between right-wing and liberal international concepts of Europe.

Mirnes Sokolović, MA studies with a focus on in South Slavic literature at the University of Sarajevo. He is a member of the of the founding team and the editorial of the literary magazine SIC! and worked in the cultural departments of E-novina in Belgrad and Oslobođenje in Sarajevo. He has published a novel, two volumes of essays and prose, essays, satire, literary criticism and articles in magazines.

Commented by Goran Musić
Goran Musić is a social historian of labor in East-Central and Southeast Europe, approaching the field from a broader disciplinary background in Global History, Nationalism Studies and Political Economy. He researched, published and taught on theoretical and methodological aspects of Global Labor History, 20th Century Revolutions, Social Transformations in (Post)Socialism, Workplace Democracy, Global Value Chains and East-South exchanges during the Cold War.

Mária Bogdán
The Representation of the Forgotten-Silenced: Understanding the Social Process of Cultural Trauma of the European Romani Communities

As a VWI Fortunoff Fellow, Maria Bogdan researches testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies related to the Sinti and Roma experience. As part of this work, she – together with the archive's partner, the Milana Šimečku Foundation (MSF) in Bratislava – promotes the use of Slovak-language testimonies of Sinti and Roma survivors. More than a dozen of the testimonies are currently closed to the public due to issues related to privacy and legal regulations. She is working with the MSF to open up the collection and enable its use in teaching and research. At the same time, she is working on her current research project on social processes of cultural traumatisation in European Roma communities.

Maria Bogdan, media researcher and social scientist. PhD in Film, Media and Cultural Theory at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Graduate and first Romani Rose Postdoctoral Researcher fellow at the Antigypsyism Research Center at Heidelberg University. Founding member and managing editor of the Critical Romani Studies journal.

Commented by Lea Feibusch
Lea Feibusch studied Holocaust Communication and Tolerance at Touro College Berlin (M.A.) and Cultural Anthropology at University Tübingen (B.A.). Her PhD is funded by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk. She is part of the Research Center and a member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies since 2022.

Katharina Lenski
"Asociality": Constructing "Underclasses" between 1933 and 1989

"Asociality" is rarely addressed in historiography, although it has been scandalised not only in Germany since the 19th century. Since the proclamation of the welfare state, anyone who did not conform to the common patterns of working and living was under general suspicion of being a "social parasite". The writing of history has constructional nature of "asociality", so that its functions have remained unclear. In the literature, the thesis can be found that "asociality" served to constitute an "underclass" and thereby and thus to define the "inner boundaries" of society. In this context the action samples of the institutions and individuals involved are reconstructed as a social practice. The project spans the period from the beginning of the Nazi regime to the end of the GDR dictatorship.

Katharina Lenski, historian, sociologist and education scientist at the University of Jena. Co-founder and Director of the Thuringian Archive for Contemporary History “Matthias Domaschk”, later Fellow at the Imre-Kertész-Kolleg Jena as well as post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the research training group "The GDR and the Dictatorships after 1945 in European Perspective". She founded the academic network “Stigma Asociality”, which brings together international humanities scholars.

Commented by Rasa Navickaitė
Rasa Navickaitė is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral fellow, working on the project entitled "Modernization of Sexuality and the Construction of Deviance in Soviet Lithuania (MoSeLit)". She is a gender historian with research interests in marginalised sexualities and gender identities, history of Eastern Europe in a transnational perspective, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial theory.

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