Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Marci Shore and Dessy Gavrilova
GUILTY PERPETRATORS, RESPONSIBLE VICTIMS
Can whole nations be judged when their leaders go to war?
Looking at the history of the 20th as we live the 21st, we’re forced to pose an old question anew: How is totalitarian evil possible? How can a totalitarian leader acquire the kind of power that makes it possible to carry out the most gruesome cruelties on a mass scale? Germans faced this question after the Second World War. In time Russians will have to face this question as well. To live as an ordinary person in a totalitarian regime is to be implicated in it, to find oneself in a situation, where the line between victim and oppressor, in Václav Havel’s words, “runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.” What, then, are the meanings of complicity, resistance, responsibility, guilt? Ukrainian art curator Vasyl Cherepanyn recently wrote, “Russian society has become an anti-society as all the civil society institutions and representatives are now labelled ‘foreign agents,’ expelled from the country or imprisoned.” In this situation, what can ordinary people do? What can civil society do? And what must they-and we-do?
Marci Shore is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Yale University. She teaches modern European intellectual history. Her research and her books and articles focus on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.
Dessy Gavrilova is a Vienna-based Bulgarian cultural entrepreneur, curator, cultural consultant, and drama author. In Sofia, Gavrilova directed the socio-cultural centre The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate. In Vienna, she founded the European Network of Houses for Debate Time to Talk. In 2016, Gavrilova initiated and co-founded (together with Vienna Museum and IWM) the Vienna Humanities Festival
Tessa Szyszkowitz is an Austrian journalist and author. She writes for Austrian and German publications such as Falter & Tagesspiegel, she is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London.
(recorded June 29, 2023, at Bruno Kreisky Forum)
4 окт 2024
