5 October 2023

International scientific conference “The Politics and Poetics of Evidence”

On 2023 October 12-13 The Max Weber Foundation and the Branch office Vilnius of the German Historical Institute Warsaw, in cooperation with the Lithuanian Institute of History, invites you to the international scientific conference “The Politics and Poetics of Evidence. The Soviet Documentation of Nazi Crimes, the Myth of the Great Patriotic War, and their Legacies“. The conference will take place at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

The conference seeks to reconstruct the formation and instrumentalization of Soviet knowledge on Nazi crimes. It also aims to understand and to deconstruct the very poetics of the documentary evidence and the politics of its selection, which were deployed to convince the people inside and outside of the post-war USSR. Besides memory studies, research has addressed this powerful link between the documentation of war crimes and the poetics of evidence in a rather unsystematic way. If archives exercise power, if collections of written, photographic, and filmic materials create veracity by virtue of their authenticity, represent a form of ‘inner truth’, the question arises as to what role the archives of knowledge created under Soviet rule played in the constitution of post-war societies and the post-war order in Europe. To explore these questions, the conference wants to engage the different fields of historical research as well as cultural studies in dialogue.

The conference will feature presentations by scientists from Lithuania, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, France, Australia and the USA.

The conference will be held in English in the National Library’s Statehood Space (2nd floor).

For more information, please visit the website of the Institute for German History (English).

Briefly about the conference

Date

October 12-13

Time

October 12th 9:00-18:00
October 13th 9:00-17:00

Place

Statehood Centre, 2nd floor

Attendance

free

Organisers

The Max Weber Foundation, Branch office Vilnius of the German Historical Institute Warsaw, Lithuanian Institute of History

Important

the conference will be held in English

More information

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German Historical Institute website