Figurations of Truth Telling. On the Literary and Cinematic Discourse of Transformation and Dissidence in Germany and Eastern Europe (1989-2022).
As a transregional and global process, the upheaval around 1990 represents a unifying topic of the literatures and films of Eastern Europe. The respective transformation discourse oscillates across national borders between euphoric advocacy and radical rejection of the Western model of democracy. At the same time, it is often enriched with statements that camouflage themselves as acts of truth-telling (parrhesia). With regard to poetics of transformation, the project accordingly inquiries into aesthetic figurations and stagings of a dissidence that imagines a tradition before 1989 only for reasons of prestige. The selected texts and films from the years 1989-2022 will be contextualized in their respective contexts of origin and examined with regard to their constructions of truth immanent to the work – as well as their ambitions towards discourses and culture. The perspective point for this is provided by approaches of the late Foucault to uncover a genealogy of the relationship between truth, discourse, and authorship in various forms of society, some of which go back to contacts with dissidents from the Warsaw Pact states.
The project was supported in 2022 by DAAD funds and the Leibniz Research Network “Value of the Past” and will be continued in the academic year 23/24 at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest.