Advanced Seminar with Jörg Hackman, Professor of East European History, University of Szczecin, Poland, and guest researcher at CBEES. The seminar is organised in cooperation between CBEES and the School of History and Contemporary Studies.

The end of ‘East Central Europe’ and the return of ‘Europe in-Between’? The changing political implications of two geo-historical concepts, 1915–2020

OBS: only a limited number of seats will be available at the room MB 503. The zoom streaming will be organised, you are welcome to join the seminar online!

Abstract

The presentation starts from the observation that the terms “East Central Europe” and “Central Europe”, which have served as symbols for the democratization and political transformation of former socialist countries, have lost much of their political capital. Instead, one may notice in particular in Poland a renaissance of the term of “Międzymorze” (“Intermarium”). My argument is that this is not an irrelevant replacement of words but displays fundamental changes in the perception of the region in question as well as of Europe.

I shall develop this thesis with an analysis of the history of these terms and try to show that “Intermarium” should be seen in close connection to “Zwischeneuropa” (“Europe in-between”), a term that was used in Germany until the 1940s. The decreasing relevance of "East Central Europe" and the reappearance of competing spatial notions reveal, as I will argue, fundamental differences in the contemporary understanding of Europe.

Bio Note:

Jörg Hackmann is Alfred Döblin Professor of East European History at the Department of History, University of Szczecin, Poland, and is also associated with the University of Greifswald, Germany. He holds a PhD from the Free University Berlin and was afterwards lecturer at the Baltic Academy, Lübeck, Germany, and assistant professor at Greifswald, where he received his habilitation in 2007. From 2008 to 2016 Joerg Hackmann was DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of Szczecin. He has also been a visiting scholar at many universities in the Baltic Sea region, among others in Riga, Stockholm, Tartu und Turku, as well as at the University of Chicago.

Current research interests include the role of history in Baltic Sea region building, the Jewish topography of (German) Szczecin until the Holocaust, and asymmetries in the German-Polish border region.

Recent publications focus on the entangled history of East Central Europe (Verflechtungen in Politik, Kultur und Wirtschaft im östlichen Europa. Transnationalität als Forschungsproblem, Harrassowitz 2018, ed. volume, with Peter Oliver Loew; Deutsch-Polnische Geschichte: 19. Jahrhundert. Nationen in Kontakt und Konflikt. Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen und Verflechtungen 1806–1918, Darmstadt, 2014, with Marta Kopij), memory cultures and history politics (Defending the “Good Name” of the Polish Nation, in Journal of Genocide Research 2018) and on the history of civil society in the Baltic Sea region (Geselligkeit in Nordosteuropa, Harrassowitz, forthcoming in 2020).