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In a recent article in the Times Literary Supplement, Bernard Wasserstein examined Hannah Arendt’s credentials as a historian, focusing in particular in her use of Nazi historians as authorities in her “The Origins of Totalitarianism”. The essay evoked a storm of controversy and reopened the debate over Arendt’s relationship to the Jews and Jewish history that was first ignited a generation ago by the publication of her “Eichmann in Jerusalem”. In this lecture Wasserstein considers some of the latest contributions to the debate and the broader implications of the controversy.

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David R. Marples is Distinguished University Professor, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta. He is author of thirteen single-authored books and two edited books on topics ranging from 20th Century Russia, Stalinism, contemporary Belarus, contemporary Ukraine, and the Chernobyl disaster. His most recent book is entitled Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008). At the University of Alberta, he received a McCalla Professorship in 1998, the Faculty of Arts Prize for Full Professors in 1999, the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research in 2003, a Killam Annual Professorship in 2005-06, and the University Cup, the university’s highest honour, in 2008. He is the current holder of a major award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the topic “History, Memory, and World War II in Belarus.”

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Screening and panel discussion of TARAS BULBA, 2009, director Vladimir Bortko, Russian Federation. Vladimir Bortko made this film inspired by the famous Nikolai Gogol story about love, betrayal, and revenge. Released in Ukraine last April and widely distributed there, this film provoked a small storm among the Ukrainian public by its unapologetic neo-colonialist politics and ideology. It is an interesting document of post-Soviet Russian revanchism made fascinating by an enthusiastic participation of Ukrainian talent in the project, including the actors Bohdan Stupka, Ada Rohovtseva, Les Serdiuk, the artist Serhiy Yakutovych, to name but a few. Notes Russian reviewer Roman Volobuev, “Bortko, known for his pedantic treatment of literary texts, in this case, chopped Gogol up into a salad and made use of only those its pieces that will insult the greatest number of inhabitants of sovereign Ukraine.” Insult or not, but the film reveals quite a lot about present-day Russia and Ukraine.

Panel: Taras Koznarsky (Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages, UofT), Leo Livak (Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages, UofT), Piotr Wrobel (Chair of Polish History, UofT) and Yuri Shevchuk (Columbia University), will discuss the film after the screening.

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The series will screen and discuss the new feature narrative film “Birds of Paradise” 2008, by Roman Balayan. Born in Nagorny Karabakh and educated in Kyiv, Balayan considers himself a student of legendary Serhiy Paradzhanov. However unlike his teacher, Balayan has avoided references to Ukraine in his films and used it instead as a geographical location rather than a cultural destination in his stories. His films represent an influential trend in the culture of a post-Soviet Ukraine deeply rooted in the imperial Russian mentality which denies Ukrainians a voice of their own. “Birds of Paradise” is about a Soviet writer in Kyiv in the early 1980s who challenges the regime in his quest for personal freedom. People can openly voice their thoughts only in private kitchens behind curtained windows. The KGB tapped phones, surveyed the ‘unreliable’ and consistently destroyed all forms of decent. The protagonists challenge the inhumane regime, risk their lives and prove that nobody can stop a person striving for freedom. Roman Balayan explains, “It is important for me to make a picture that confronts and pushes the viewer to face their own feelings and thoughts. It is important that even the most thick-skinned person feel what it means to have no freedom ... so that the times when people could not speak the truth stay for ever in the past.” The film is one of the last roles played by celebrated Russianactor Oleg Yankovsky.

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Serhii Plokhii (Plokhy) is Mykhailo Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the author of several award-winning books on Ukrainian and Russian history, including The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001), The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cambridge, 2006), and Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008). His revisionist account of the 1945 Yalta conference, Yalta: The Price of Peace was released by Viking Press on 4 February 2010, to mark the 65-th anniversary of the start of the Yalta Conference.

The Second World War was still raging when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at a resort town on the Black Sea one step ahead of their rapidly advancing armies. This was February 1945: American and British troops had just emerged from the Battle of the Bulge, and the Red Army was 40 miles outside Berlin. Germany was far from defeated, but the advantage had decisively swung in the Allies’ favor. In the Pacific theater, the Japanese were holding firm.
YALTA tells the story of the eight extraordinary days when the fate of the world was decided by three of the towering figures of the twentieth century, each a legend who transformed his country. The Big Three used every tool in their arsenal, as they all came to the conference with something to lose. Alliances shifted as they partitioned Germany, approved the most aggressive aerial bombing campaign in history, redrew the borders of Eastern Europe and created a new organization to settle future disputes. Two months later, Stalin was strengthening his grip on Eastern Europe, Roosevelt was dead and Churchill on the cusp of a humiliating electoral defeat.

For 65 years, opinion has been bitterly divided on whether FDR and Churchill failed. In America, the conservatives who hated Roosevelt’s New Deal accused him of selling out to the Soviet dictator. Was he too sick? Did he give away too much in exchange for Stalin’s promise to join the war against Japan? Had he played his hand differently, could Poland have escaped Soviet domination? Both Left and Right have argued that Yalta paved the way to the Cold War.

In this groundbreaking book, S. M. Plokhy gives the first comprehensive reassessment of the Yalta Conference since the end of the Cold War. Combing through archives in the US and the UK, he found new documents recording Roosevelt’s exchanges with his advisors, and obtained British internal memos and minutes of cabinet meetings. He is the first historian of Yalta to have made use of previously inaccessible Soviet documents that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He also draws extensively from published and unpublished diaries of secondary players, including Churchill’s doctor and Roosevelt’s daughter, to bring all of the characters to life.

Eight years ago, Margaret MacMillan’s PARIS 1919 redefined our understanding of the path from the First to the Second World War. Plokhy’s YALTA is a riveting successor. It puts us in the room with three of the most fascinating figures of all times and challenges us to imagine what we might have done in their place. Yalta is a word, like Munich, that is bigger than the conference it stands for. It is time to wade through the myth and disinformation surrounding this historic meeting and to reveal what really happened in those eight fateful days on the Black Sea.

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Up until World War II, the Galician town of Buczacz had a mixed population of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. During the German occupation, Nazi units assisted by Ukrainian police murdered the Jewish inhabitants, while Ukrainian nationalists carried out ethnic cleansing of the Poles. Now part of independent Ukraine, Buczacz is inhabited predominantly by Ukrainians. Professor Bartov traces the complexity of interethnic relations in the town, their impact on the events of 1941-44, and how these events have been remembered and commemorated in the postwar period and following the collapse of communist rule.

Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and Oxford, Professor Omer Bartov is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Holocaust, modern European history and genocide. He made his reputation when he showed the German Army to be a deeply Nazified institution that played a key role in the Holocaust, particularly in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. His subsequent research focused on links between the extreme violence of World War I and the German war of annihilation in World War II, and on 20th-century genocides. Currently he is investigating interethnic violence in eastern Galicia during World War II. Professor Bartov is the author of seven books including: Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, Germany’s War and the Holocaust and Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity.

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LOUIS BEGLEY, b. Poland, October 6, 1933. Author of: Wartime Lies (1991), The Man Who Was Late (1993), As Max Saw It (1994), About Schmidt (1996), Mistler’s Exit (1998), Schmidt Delivered (2000), Das Gelobte Land (2001), Venedig unter vier Augen (with Anka Muhlstein, 2003), Shipwreck (2003), Matters of Honor (2007), Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen (2008), The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka (2008), Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (2009), short fiction, and numerous essays and articles. Retired partner, Debevoise & Plimpton. Education: AB (summa cum laude), Harvard, 1954; LL.B. (magna cum laude), Harvard, 1959. Prizes include: The Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, National Book Award Finalist, National Book Critics’ Circle Finalist, PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, Prix Médicis Étranger, Jeanette-Schocken-Preis, Bremerhavener Bürgerpreis für Literatur, American Academy of Letters Award in Literature, Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung Literaturpreis. Past President PEN American Center. Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Ph. D. (h.c.), University of Heidelberg.

In December 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a brilliant French artillery officer and a Jew of Alsatian descent, was court-martialed for selling secrets to the German military attaché in Paris based on perjured testimony and trumped-up evidence. The sentence was military degradation and life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a hellhole off the coast of French Guiana. Five years later, the case was overturned, and eventually Dreyfus was completely exonerated. Meanwhile, the Dreyfus Affair tore France apart, pitting Dreyfusards—committed to restoring freedom and honor to an innocent man convicted of a crime committed by another—against nationalists, anti-Semites, and militarists who preferred having an innocent man rot to exposing the crimes committed by ministers of war and the army’s top brass in order to secure Dreyfus’s conviction.

Was the Dreyfus Affair merely another instance of the rise in France of a virulent form of anti-Semitism? In Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, the acclaimed novelist draws upon his legal expertise to create a riveting account of the famously complex case, and to remind us of the interest each one of us has in the faithful execution of laws as the safeguard of our liberties and honor.

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It is often taken for granted that Dubravka Ugresic, Croatia’s most famous political exile, is a writer of fiction. Throughout the 1990s, with the country at war, Ugresic penned vitriolic critiques of both Croatian and Serbian governments and their respective policies of nationalist homogenization. The social impact of these essays has eclipsed much of her other work – such as The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, first published in 1997. Described by critics as a ‘postmodern scrapbook’, this novel offers a reprieve from the polemical nature of Ugresic’s essays and establishes a platform for an aesthetic treatment of the world of exile at the end of the twentieth century. Ugresic’s chosen idiom for this novel is the city of Berlin as a horizon of imagery shared by a broad public. Two particular sites are foregrounded, both in form and content: the museum and the archive. This talk investigates the formal properties of these spaces foregrounding the novel’s aims – and ethical tensions – through the art of (obsessive) collecting.

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This research focuses on inter-ethnic conflict at the micro-level. We look at how state institutions specifically citizenship and nationality policies can construct t inter-ethnic relationships that mitigate tension and build cooperative relationships. Most explanations of low-level inter-ethnic violence assume inter-group animosity as a starting condition and explain the onset of violence through opportunities, manipulative elites, or psychological mechanisms. This study takes one step back in the causal chain of events to look at how states construct and reconstruct base-line feelings of animosity and goodwill between ethnic groups. We take the example of Bessarabia and Transnistria during WWII as a natural experiment. Both territories were part of Tsarist Russia before 1917, but were divided during the inter-war period: Bessarabia under Romanian administration with exclusivist nationality policies, and Transnistria under Soviet administration with inclusivist nationality policies. During WWII, these territories were once again united but the two local non-Jewish populations responded very differently to the Romanian Holocaust: one broadly participated in pogroms and violent attacks against Jews, while the other broadly aided and supported Jews. Our evidence comes from personal interviews we undertook with Jews and non-Jews from Moldova and Ukraine; a survey we conducted in 2006; written testimonies given by Jewish survivors; and state archival material from Romania and the Soviet Union.

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Belinda Davis, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University,is author of *Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin* (2000), and is completing a book entitled *The Internal Life of Politics: The New Left in West Germany, 1962-1983*. She is co-editor of *Alltag–Erfahrung–Eigensinn: Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen*(2008) and *Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Transnational Identities in 1960s/70s, West Germany and the U.S*(2010).

Sponsors: Canada Research Chair in Modern German History, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, Joint Inititative in
German and European Studies (JIGES), Department of History.

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The talk offers a humanities response to recent work on empathy within the cognitive sciences. Most of these theories assume that the primary scene of empathy involves two people: One who has empathy with another. My hypothesis, however, is that human empathy derives from a scene of three individuals: One individual who observes a conflict between two others. The talk proposes a two-step process: When one person observes a conflict by two others, he or she is likely to mentally choose a side. Empathy is now possible, partly to justify one’s choice of taking a side. The second step after the side taking consists in narrating the fate of the chosen person.
The talk will 1) develop this model and provide some psychological evidence (Stockholm Syndrome), 2) indicate how this work relates to individual literary texts, (I will allude to a work of nineteenth-century fiction) and 3) complicate the notion of narration. The latter will allow me to hint at my new project on the “excuse” as a core structure of narrative.

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Sponsored by the Wolodymyr Dylynsky Fund at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta), the CIUS Toronto Office (University of Toronto), and the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine.

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James Goldgeier is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1994. After receiving his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, he was a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. In 1995-96, he was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow serving at the State Department and on the National Security Council staff. He has held appointments as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Henry A. Kissinger scholar in foreign policy and international relations at the Library of Congress, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Edward Teller National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Goldgeier is the author of Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, 1994), which received the 1995 Edgar Furniss book award in national and international security, and Not Whether But When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Brookings, 1999). He co-authored (with Michael McFaul) Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Brookings, 2003), which received the 2004 Lepgold Prize for the best book on international relations. His most recent book (co-authored with Derek Chollet) is America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11 (PublicAffairs 2008), named “a best book of 2008” by Slate and “a favorite book of 2008” by The Daily Beast.

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Dr Tamás is a well known sociologist, specializing in post-communist transition in East and Central Europe. His talk will discuss the current situation and outlook of the nationalities and majorities in the region, and compare these with the expectations raised by the post communist transformation. His talk is made more timely by the upcoming elections in Hungary.

The talk is sponsored by the Hungarian Research Institute of Canada in its international speakers series in support of Hungarian Studies Program at the University of Toronto.

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Speaker: Jean Yves Haine, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

with commentary by

Jeffrey Kopstein, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

Kathryn Lavelle, Case Western Reserve University, Fullbright Fellow Munk Centre for International Studies

Louis Pauly, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto

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As the U.S. and the West more broadly seek to establish improved relations with Russia, no issue is more sensitive � nor holds more possibilities for upsetting those relations — than policy toward the countries along Russia’s borders. Given the history and former links dating back to the Soviet period (and in some cases even longer), Russian officials have made clear their interest in establishing a sphere of influence (or privileged interests) among Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, the Caucasus, and the states of Central Asia. A number of leading Western officials, President Obama included, have rejected such a notion and made clear that policy toward these states will be determined on its own merits, not through a Russia prism. The possibilities for serious problems between Russia and the West over policy toward this region are real, but not inevitable. What should the West do? What kind of policies are possible?

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10 am -12 pm Panel I: The New Agenda of Russian-Ukrainian Relations? Views from Moscow and Kyiv
Chair: Peter Solomon (University of Toronto)
Panellists: Serhiy Kudelia(Jacyk Post-Doctoral Fellow, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), Sergei Plekhanov ( York University), Oleh Havrylyshyn ( University of Toronto)

12-1:30 pm Working Luncheon with Andrey Veklenko, Consul General of the Russian Federation (invited), and Oleksandr Danyleiko, Consul General of Ukraine (confirmed)

1:30-4 pm Panel II: The US and EU Interests in Russian-Ukrainian Relations
Chair: Jeffrey Kopstein (University of Toronto)
Panellists: David J. Kramer (The German Marshall Fund of the United States), Jakob Hedenskog (Swedish Defence Research Agency), Nikolai Zlobin (World Security Institute)

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Ambassador Konçi has been Albania’s representative to Canada since 2006. He graduated in 1986 with a degree in Nuclear Physics from Tirana University. Mr. Konçi has held assignments with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNDP Mission to Albania, and has served as head of the Albanian diplomatic delegation to Belgrade from 1995-1997. Mr. Konci is a founding member and lecturer of the Albanian Diplomatic Academy since 2001 and administrator of the Albanian Institute of Education on the Information Technology.

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Kyrgyzstan has seen more than its fair share of turbulence in the recent past. In early April 2010, repression and violence, once again,
ushered in something of a regime change, with the Bakiev government apparently falling. This time, will regime change result in substantive political change in the country? In this roundtable, we interpret recent events in light of Kyrgyzstan’s longer political history, broader political trends evident across the Central Asian region, and theories of political change and social mobilization.

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David R. Marples is Distinguished University Professor, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta. He is author of thirteen single-authored books and two edited books on topics ranging from 20th Century Russia, Stalinism, contemporary Belarus, contemporary Ukraine, and the Chernobyl disaster. His most recent book is entitled Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008). At the University of Alberta, he received a McCalla Professorship in 1998, the Faculty of Arts Prize for Full Professors in 1999, the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research in 2003, a Killam Annual Professorship in 2005-06, and the University Cup, the university’s highest honour, in 2008. He is the current holder of a major award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the topic “History, Memory, and World War II in Belarus.”

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Rethinking German Imperialism

Friday, April 16, 2010
Munk Centre for International Studies, Room 108N

Welcome
9:30-9:45

Panel One: Germany as a Global Power
9:45-12:00

“The Quest for ‘World Empire’ and the Transformation of the German Right, 1890-1918”
Dennis Sweeney, University of Alberta

Dennis Sweeney is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) and numerous articles on labor relations, industrial culture, social reform movements and the German state, social democracy, liberalism, radical nationalism, and Pan-German imperialism. He is currently writing a monograph on the German Right, colonial empire, and the invention of the racial state from 1890 to 1923.

Comment: Eric Jennings, University of Toronto

Panel Two: The Debate on Empire
1:30-3:30

“Empire by Land or Sea? Germany’s Imperial Imaginary, 1871-1945”
Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

Geoff Eley is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History. His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and The Peculiarities of German History (German edn. 1980, English 1984) jointly authored with David Blackbourn. His general history of the Left in Europe, Forging Democracy, appeared in 2002, and a study of contemporary historiography, A Crooked Line, in 2005. With Keith Nield, he published The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? In 2007. He is currently finishing Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in Germany, 1860-1945. A volume of essays, Cultures of German Colonialism: Race, Nation, and Globalization, 1884-1945, coedited with Bradley Naranch, will be published by Duke University Press. He joined the Michigan History Department in 1979 and is currently serving as Chair.

Comment: Doris Bergen, University of Toronto

Coffee Break: 3:30—4:00

Panel Three: Keynote Address: Germany’s Colonial Policy
4:00-6:00 pm
Munk Centre for International Studies, Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility

“Germany’s Overseas Imperialism: Colonial Policy in Berlin”
Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, University College, Oxford

Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann is Professor of Modern History at Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford. He was born in Germany and studied there until he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford in 1962. After that he made his career in England. Last year he published in German Imperialismus vom Grünen Tisch. Deutsche Kolonialpolitik zwischen wirtschaftlicher Ausbeutung und “zvilisatorischen” Bemühungen (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2009). An English translation should follow soon.

Comment: Volker Berghahn, Columbia University

Saturday, April 17, 2010
Munk Centre for International Studies, Room 108N

Panel Four: Weltpolitik and Orientpolitik
10:00-12:00

“Germany’s Oriental Question”
Jennifer Jenkins, University of Toronto

Jennifer Jenkins is Associate Professor of German and European History at the University of Toronto, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Modern German History. She is the author of Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siecle Hamburg (Cornell University Press, 2003) and writes on modernism, civil society, transnationalism, orientalism and imperialism in twentieth-century Germany. She is currently working on her book project Excavating Zarathustra: Germany and Iran in the Twentieth Century, an exploration of German globality on the Persian frontier in the age of empire.

Comment: Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

Panel Five
1:00—3:00

Roundtable Discussion

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International academic collaboration prepares educational systems to act effectively in foreign environments and provides global society with educational models that can respond efficiently to current challenges and demands of globalization. The purpose of this workshop is to examine the nature and role of Swedish-Ukrainian university collaborative activities.
The workshop explores the experiences and perspectives of the joint Swedish-Ukrainian internationalization policy development project on the nature and role of international academic joint ventures. The analysis will highlight the specifics of institutional culture and dynamics of joint project management.

Sponsored by the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies,Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, The Office of Teaching Support at the Ontario Institute for Studies in education/OISE, University of Toronto (OTSO) and the Interregional Ukrainian Graduate Student Association of University of Toronto and York University.

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