Translating Memories: The Eastern European Past in the Global Arena

The project offers a new understanding of transnational memory as a process of translation by focusing on the postsocialist Central and Eastern European (CEE) attempts to make their local histories of the Second World War and the socialist regimes known globally. It examines these efforts through aesthetic media of memory – literature, film, art and interactive museums – that circulate globally and bring local experiences to global audiences and through the heated public debates that these works of art have provoked in different national and transnational contexts. The project innovated methodologically by bringing together transnational memory studies, translation theory, world literature studies, transnational film studies and heritage studies to explore the transnational travel of memories via transcultural memorial forms. What memorial forms have been used to make CEE memories intelligible in the global arena? What is gained and what is lost in this translation?
The start of the Russian full-scale aggression war against Ukraine in 2022 radically transformed the political and cultural context of remembering past violence in CEE, as Russia has extensively drawn on the memory of the Second World War in its rhetoric of denazification to secure popular national support to the war. In this context, it is the task of the scholars of cultural memory to study the link between “warped” memory of Stalinist repressions in post-Soviet Russia and its new imperialist narratives that abuse historical memory. What are the acts of memory in aesthetic media and museum landscape that help to uphold the ideal of human rights through the memory of historical violence? In providing the answers to these questions, the project offers a comparative transnational view of CEE attempts to negotiate their entangled histories of twentieth-century authoritarianisms within the global framework.

The theoretical framework of the project, focused on the concepts of translation and transcultural memorial forms that have been used in the post-socialist period in CEE to articulate the memories of the Second World War and of socialism, was laid out in the special issue “Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies 2021, 14.1) co-edited by the PI, including her contribution to the issue. While a lot of research has been done on the problematic use of Holocaust template in CEE to remember the victimhood under socialism, the project innovated by focusing on the memorial forms developed in literature, film and memorial museums to address the histories of perpetration and collaboration in CEE. The results were published as an award-winning special issue in the leading journal of the field SEEJ: Slavic & East European Journal (2023, 67.3). The questions of memory translation and the memorial forms of collaboration and complicity are also central to two monographs written in the framework of the project. Laanes’s Translated Memories of Implication focuses on the literature and film from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States that has transnationalised the reflection on the implication of locals in the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Comer’s The Afterlife of Atrocity: Memorializing Soviet Violence in Moscow and Yekaterinburg analyses various Russian forms of memorialization of Soviet repression in the European and global contexts.
The specific capacities of aesthetic media of memory – literature, film, art, but also interactive museums – in translating memories were explored in the framework of two workshops that resulted in two collective publications: the edited volume Literature and Mnemonic Migration: Remediation, Translation and Reception (De Gruyter, 2025) and the special issue “Reworking the Eastern European Past through Audiovisual Archival Practices” (Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television, Dec 2025). The key innovative approaches were developed in individual articles and chapters by the project members in leading journals such as Memory Studies, SEEJ, Slavic Review, New German Critique, Oxford German Review, Journal of Baltic Studies.
The project team organised a major conference “Post-Socialist Memory Cultures in Transition” in collaboration with Memory Studies Association’s Postsocialist and Comparative Memory Studies Working Group (Sept 2023). To adapt to the situation of the pandemic, the team established Translating Memories Online Speaker Series featuring 13 invited speakers and contributed to the PhD candidates’ research opportunities with the summer school “Translating Memories in Literature, Film, Museums, and Monuments” (July 2022).
The project team run a student project at Tallinn University to create an interactive map application of the Holocaust sites in Estonia to promote the popular knowledge about local Holocaust and enable to visit the specific sites linked to this genocide that are poorly marked on the landscape. The map was launched on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2025 in Vabamu Museum to high school students and widely covered in the mainstream news media.
Throughout the project, the team members reached out to wider public sphere in different capacities, including a) public talks to different stakeholders (high school teachers, mental health professionals); b) roundtable participations in prime time national TV and radio programmes on the burning issues of collective memory; c) op-ed articles and essays in the main news outlets. The project members collaborated with various non-academic organisation such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Film Archive of the Estonian State Archives, Estonian Jewish Museum, Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom.

The project has offered an original idea of the transnational circulation of memories as a process of cultural translation. It has advanced the study of CEE memory cultures by focusing on memorial forms of perpetration, collaboration and implication that are crucial in upholding the ideal of democracy and human rights in the region in the context of new wars and violence.
The key insights of the project in relation to the role of aesthetic media in mediating memories are the following: a) art develops transnational models of remembrance premised on solidarity and understanding through their experimental techniques such as multi- and translingualism; multidirectional juxtaposition of different memories, and self-reflective use of spectacle in film, etc.; b) literary and film genres and devices such as child perspective, celebrity memoir, conspiracy novel, picaresque novel etc., and forms of witness testimony in film and museums function themselves as transcultural memorial forms which help to make distant memories more understandable for their audiences; c) genre literature such as conspiracy novels, female celebrity memoirs and blockbuster films are as effective as high art in mediating memories; d) the study of popular reception of the arts in the online platforms is important in understanding the role of aesthetic media of memory; e) public controversies around images of history put forward by literature, film, art and interactive museums advance public discussion and remembrance of difficult past. Attentive to specific linguistic, cultural and societal contexts of different CEE memory culture, the project offered a rare transnational view of CEE attempts to negotiate their specific historical legacies in a global framework.