Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi on "Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production" (CEU Press, 2025)

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Episode Overview

This episode features host Andrea in conversation with Lucy Jeffery and Anna Váradi, editors of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production. The discussion centers on how contemporary cultural production in Central and Eastern Europe continues to grapple with the legacy of the communist era, exploring themes of trauma, nostalgia, memory, intergenerational perspectives, and the ongoing relevance of communist history in shaping current identity and politics.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Backgrounds of the Editors and Motivations

• Anna Váradi:

  • Background in media studies with a focus on television's engagement with history.
  • Personal connection as a Hungarian born and raised post-communism; experienced “post-socialist” childhood activities and artifacts (e.g., a 1962 children’s book, the board game “Gozdako Yokoshan – Spend Wisely” described as “socialist Monopoly”).
  • Academic interest led to televising the socialist era in Hungary and founding the project with Lucy.
  • “I had this rhyming children’s book … but only as an adult did I put two and two together, that one of the other children... is a Korean girl … this connects the communist links between the two countries.” (03:00)

• Lucy Jeffery:

  • Arts and humanities background (literature, theatre, cultural studies).
  • British, but with personal and academic connections in Central and Eastern Europe, including research on Hungarian literature and reflections on lived experiences (e.g., driving a Trabant in Berlin).
  • Interest in how communism affects family dynamics and everyday life.
  • “I have the personal connections from Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. They're making me think about what I was experiencing and seeing through an academic lens.” (05:03)

2. Design and Symbolism of the Book Cover

• The cover features:
  • A bright red background with a Trabant (East German car) centered.
  • EU stars mixed with a hammer and sickle.
  • Cover photo is personal—taken after the editors’ nerve-wracking drive in Berlin.
  • “We wanted those flags to bleed together … the Trabbi to hit us dead on... just to convey the impact, the real impact that the communist era is having on the region today.” (08:55)

3. Genesis and Concept of the Project

• Research grounded in site visits and practitioner interviews:

  • Funded research trips across Central and Eastern Europe (museums, archives, meeting political figures).
  • Website with resources and blog, symposium, and collaborative call for chapters.
  • “We visited archives, museums ... met a lot of practitioners. And that really formed the basis of the project.” (11:35)

• What “Replaying Communism” Means:

  • Not just retelling or repeating the past, but re-engaging, often via contemporary, interactive mediums (board/video games, exhibitions).
  • Example: Younger generations interact with history via games that allow new imaginative relationships to the past.
  • “We use that word because we don't mean repeated; we mean re-engaged with.” (14:54)

4. Themes and Structure of the Volume

• Trauma-Nostalgia Paradigm:

  • Chapters explore coexistence of trauma (collective pain, guilt, repression) and nostalgia (childhood memories, cultural artifacts).
  • “Nostalgia and trauma are best understood as coexisting forces that shape contemporary engagement with the past.” (20:35)
  • Svetlana Alexievich: “The Soviet Union no longer exists, but the Soviet person remains.” (19:11)

• Range of Case Studies:

  • Museum curation (e.g., Lithuania’s Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights and Grutas Park).
  • German radio drama and the interplay of post-memory, silence, and intergenerational transmission (Marianne Hirsch).
  • Comic books, performance art, joke forums, documentaries, and games from various nations.

5. Analysis of Trauma and Nostalgia in Museums and Media

• Museums as Contested Spaces:

  • Blend of traumatic memory sites (e.g., former prisons) and commodified nostalgia (canteens, exhibits).
  • “Nostalgia is much easier to commodify and sell. But the museum itself and its exhibits can't separate the impression of nostalgia from the experience of trauma.” (28:37)

• Media’s Role in Shaping Memory:

  • TV series like “Abechugo” (“The Informant”) and “Deutschland 89” as examples of how media both reflect and shape generational understanding.
  • Challenge of historical accuracy versus emotional/lived truth.
  • “Culture can tell us so much more about the experience of a specific period than historical fact alone.” (47:05)

6. Generational Differences and Intergenerational Memory

• Not Homogenizing Experiences:
  • The book brings together authors native to, or with expertise in, different countries to ensure nuanced takes.
  • Explores transmissions of trauma and nostalgia between generations: old hesitancies and silences vs. young people’s proactive exploration.
  • “Younger generations are almost grasping and trying to get this information to learn from history for their own situation.” (41:59)
  • Online forums, performance art, and graphic novels as arenas of intergenerational dialogue (and sometimes exclusion).

7. Political Context and Ongoing Relevance

• Link to Current Political Divides:

  • The communist past replayed in cultural production is intertwined with present-day populism, illiberal democracy, and far-right politics.
  • Concerns for democratic backsliding, censorship, and press freedom in former communist countries.

• Intellectual Conclusions:

  • Draws on Timothy Garton Ash (stages of European history: post-war, post-wall, post-Western) and Gerard Delanty (plurality, interconnected narratives, “new voices”) to envision a pluralistic pan-European future.
  • “The more of these pasts… are being replayed in contemporary culture, the more opportunities these countries and these societies basically have to articulate the political turmoil, the traumas … as well as during the transition and then even today with this new rise of extremism and far right.” (34:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Nostalgia and Trauma:

  • “The Soviet Union no longer exists, but the Soviet person remains.” – Svetlana Alexievich, quoted by Lucy Jeffrey (19:11)
  • “That notion that trauma and nostalgia are two sides of the same coin is really relevant in each of them.” – Lucy Jeffrey (21:51)

• The Book’s Cover Story:

  • “For anybody who has ever driven a Trabi, they’ll have the smells of that fuel, the cramped interior … it is totally unreliable and tends to generally drive itself.” – Lucy Jeffrey (08:02)

• Why ‘Replaying’ Communism?

  • “We don’t mean repeated; we mean re-engaged with.” – Lucy Jeffrey (14:54)

• On Historical Dramas and Accuracy:

  • “Culture can tell us so much more about the experience of a specific period than historical fact alone.” – Lucy Jeffrey (47:05)
  • “My mum … would always say something like, well, our university dorms weren’t as big and comfortable or we didn’t have as much choice of food in the canteen… she nitpicked the historical accuracy, but she also loved it.” – Anna Váradi (50:04)

• Implication for Today:

  • “We saw that it's based on a premise of being different to rather than allied. But then we thought... we also have all of this cultural production and we didn't want to think of it in only this downbeat tone.” – Lucy Jeffrey (32:12)

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Important Timestamps

• [01:58] Anna and Lucy introduce backgrounds; childhood experience with socialist-era games/books
• [06:25] Discussion of the book’s cover and the symbolism of the Trabant and mixed flags
• [11:09] Description of the origins of the project and title "Replaying Communism"
• [18:17] Brief thematic overview of chapters in the volume
• [19:11] Introduction of “trauma-nostalgia paradigm” and Alexievich’s quote
• [21:51] Book’s structural approach: trauma and nostalgia as coexisting
• [24:41] Analysis of silence and “oral landscapes” in radio drama (Germany)
• [27:44] Reconciling nostalgia and trauma in museum curation
• [29:11] Lithuanian museum chapter and broader trauma/nostalgia interplay
• [35:13] Generational differences in memory and experience
• [41:14] Effects of politics and freedom of expression on memory production
• [46:13] "Replaying" the past through TV and historical inaccuracy vs. engagement (focus on "Abechugo")
• [53:16] Upcoming book tour, conferences, and how listeners can learn more

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Where to Learn More

• Website: Project site with blog and contact form; seeking collaborators.
• Upcoming Appearances: Conference talks in Gdansk, Erlangen, Cardiff, Katowice, and potentially Central European University.
• Email: [e-mail] (confirmed at 54:51)
• Book: Available via CEU Press (link in show notes).

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The conversation is warm, personal, and reflective, blending academic rigor with anecdotes and humor. Anna and Lucy stress the complexity of post-communist memory, the challenges and possibilities of creative engagement with the past, and the importance of plurality and new voices in Europe’s cultural conversation.

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“Nostalgia and trauma are always together and working, coexisting.” – Anna Váradi (21:30)

“We’re always thinking about new questions... related to our main question about the specter of communism across Europe today and its impact on ideas like democracy or its influence on culture.” – Lucy Jeffrey (55:30)

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For listeners and readers alike, this episode provides an enlightening window into how cultural memory is constructed, contested, and re-imagined in today’s Europe.

Transcript

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[Anna Varadi]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Hello and welcome to this episode of the CEU Press podcast. In this episode I'm talking to Lucy Jeffrey and Anna Varadi, the two editors of the volume Replaying Communism, Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to extend debates on the lasting impact of the communist era across Central and Eastern Europe, with chapters thematically threaded through concepts including curation, immersion, interaction, humor, and authenticity. Welcome to the podcast, both of you.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Thank you very much, Andrea. It's great to be here.

[Anna Varadi]

Thanks, Andrea. We're glad to be here.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

And before we dive in to discuss the book and its themes, could you both introduce yourself to our listeners? What is your background and how did you come to edit this volume?

[Anna Varadi]

Absolutely. So I'll start if that's okay. My background is in media studies, specifically how television can effectively engage us with historical subject matter. But I think probably more importantly, I was born and raised in Hungary and I grew up in that sort of post communist environment with many stories about the regime from my parents and my grandmother. And they kind of mixed the traumatic memories of repression with the nostalgic tales of childhood. In the case of my parents in particular, and I think quite notably, at least from my own experience, two of my favorite childhood activities were what I would describe as very post socialist. So I had this rhyming children's book from my mum that she had from 1962, and it's about Zhoka, this girl who goes to kindergarten. And I absolutely loved reading this book, but only as an adult did I put two and two together, that one of the other children in the kindergarten with Joker is a Korean girl. And obviously this actually connects the communist links between the two countries. I mean, I had no clue about this when I was a little one, but I absolutely love this book. And I also really love the board game that you're probably familiar with, Andrea Gozdako Yokoshan I played it all the time. I mean, for the listeners that translates to spend wisely. But I describe it to my British friends as Socialist Monopoly. Even though you don't monopolize anything, so there's not really any capitalist elements to this game. You just go around the board. You don't really own anything in a capitalist sense. There's no tax, there's no rent. You have to land on a specific square where you can get your flat and then you have to land on the shop where you can buy your furniture for your flat, which is pre assigned. So you've got a radio, you've got a washing machine, you've got a bicycle, which is actually pretty lush for socialist times if you ask me. But I love this game as well. So I guess I've got this real personal connection to the subject matter and also had an academic interest in remediating the past. And when I got a chance to devise my own postdoc, I then wanted to focus on televising the socialist era in Hungary specifically. And that in turn led to funding founding this project with Lucy.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Yes, just for listeners, I realized that was Anna talking. I'm Lucy and thanks again for having me, Andrea. My background, like Anna's, is more in the arts side of arts and humanities, so in literature, theatre, cultural studies. And I think I need to take a moment to explain how I ended up editing this book with Anna, centered on the lives and politics of Central and Eastern Europe, because I was actually born in South Wales, but I've been visiting Central and Eastern Europe for about 25 years now because my brother moved to Poland, to Krakow, back then. And then when I was completing my doctoral studies, I made some really good friendships with researchers based at Charles University in Prague who were like me, working on Samuel Beckett on literary modernism. And that was around the time I was publishing my first book. Then, importantly, in 2018, I met Anna and I took a bit of a deep dive into Hungarian literature and culture. And I wrote about Magda Sabo's work and how the Treaty of Trianon is relevant to her literature as well as communism itself, especially linking that with the family dynamic in Hungary and everyday lives of people during that time. So then I have the personal connections from Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. They're making me think about what I was experiencing and seeing through an academic Lens. So it was a next big step, I'd say, for me.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Yeah, thank you.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Yeah.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

I did have the same board game and I really remember actually playing Monopoly for the first time and really not understanding why you had to get all this money for everything. Where in Gazan Kodioko. You really didn't have to. You just as you said, you just had to end up on the right square for things.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Absolutely, yeah. And Monopoly is the source of all family disagreements at Christmas time. So. Yeah.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Actually, before we start talking about the contents of the book, I really wanted to talk to you about the COVID And for our listeners, it is a very red cover with a Trabant car in the middle of it and it's kind of surrounded by the stars from the EU flag, except on the left side there is a hammer and sickle intersecting the stars. And I personally think this is a brilliant cover for a book that deals with the topic of communist nostalgia and trauma. And I would love to hear the story of how this cover happened.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Definitely. And it's great to hear that you love the COVID Anna and I spent a long time thinking about it because people, and I really do judge a book by its cover and end up buying a book because of how it looks before anything else. So we definitely wanted to reflect the key themes of the book that you've just mentioned and for it to be memorable, for it to be something that sticks in someone's mind. We did talk to Anna's grandma about using a piece of barbed wire that she had from when the Pan European picnic took place and that fence was cut between Austria and Hungary. But that got lost to time, we couldn't find it. So then we started thinking, okay, what can we do? What kind of creative cover can we come up with? You're absolutely right. We've got the communists and the European Union flags that's coming together and I suppose highlighting those political debates within the book. That trabby car, the cars that were manufactured in East Germany, was one that we actually drove in Berlin. We did one of the cheesy tourist things and went to Trabiworld, hired that very car and found ourselves on the extremely busy and hectic roads of Berlin, sandwiched between gigantic Audis and BMWs going in and out of, I don't know, definitely not abiding the traffic rules with that little Trabby going in and out of these little streets. So then at the end of that slightly hair raising experience, we took a photo and for us it's a nice sort of personal memory of that And I suppose for anybody who's ever driven a Trabi, they'll have the smells of that fuel, the cramped interior, the fact that it is totally unreliable and tends to generally drive itself. I never really felt that I was in control of the vehicle and there's despair at times. So it really is, I hope, an evocative cover. And then of course we wanted those flags to bleed together. We wanted also that the Trabbi to hit us dead on. It's centrally there in the middle of the COVID just to convey the impact, the real impact that the communist era is having on the region today. So there's a bit of fun behind it, but also some of those really important themes as well.

[Anna Varadi]

All I think I want to add is Lucy was very generous to say we drove the Trabi, she drove the Trubi. I don't have a driver's license at the moment though. Maybe that's not required when you're trying to drive at Robbie.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

You might have been better than me.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Yeah. What the COVID I think that's a brilliant story but like, what the. I don't know whether you've seen this, Anna, but like what did you remind me of? There was this. I actually don't know and I haven't looked it up, but I think it was this East German film series that Go Tropical. Go. This family just gets into that trophy and they just. I mean, I can't. I. I saw these when I was a kid, so I'm not sure whether my recollection is absolutely correct. But they just go on like holiday and get into all kinds of adventures with the Tropi. But this also feeds into this kind of like post communist nostalgia that you discuss in the book.

[Anna Varadi]

That sounds pretty fabulous that. That series. And I think absolutely, you've hit the nail on the head there. It's everyone who has experienced communism. Eastern Europe, Central Eastern Europe in any shape will have their own reaction to seeing a car like that and the European flag and the hammer and sickle. So it's, it's hopefully very evocative.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Just looked it up and apparently the Go Tropical is a 1991 movie that kind of tracks because I must have seen it when I was like 7 or 8 or something like that. So how did, how did the project. I mean, you talked a lot about, you know, your background and your interest in this subject, but how did the project come about? And also I was curious, what do you mean by replaying communism in the title?

[Anna Varadi]

I'll jump in there. So I think out of obviously out of our interest in the first place. But as you'll be very aware, with many academics these days, sort of teaching and research don't really go hand in glove all the time because of funding cuts and other cuts to uni departments. So it was actually when I was looking for a postdoc that we were able to successfully apply for some funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the uk, which a allowed me to do the postdoc and focus on this topic a bit. But more importantly, it allowed us to get travel funding to go around Central and Eastern Europe for a while, where we visited archives, museums, cultural sites and met a lot of practitioners. And that really formed the basis of the project. Lucy, if you don't mind me saying, was also awarded a Vishagrad Fellowship at the Open Society Archives in Budapest for three months. And during that time she was able to look at a lot of underground world of samizda literature and other materials from the Communist period. And we were also able to meet with political figures like Gabor Dembsky, who for the listeners, was the leader of the Hungarian opposition and also the mayor of Budapest for 20 years. We met with museum curators like Judith Holp, who runs Memento park, where all the former Communist statues are kept and preserved just outside Budapest. And for anyone who's going to Budapest and hasn't been, I highly recommend a tour of Memento Park. And we also interviewed the director of the TV series abechugo, the Informant Bali and Seniorji. We might talk about this series later in this. In this podcast, I assume, because one of the chapters in the book is about abechugo, but basically we sort of grounded ourselves in these experiences at cultural sites and with practitioners. And then we set up a website where we still got the website. So we've got blog posts, we've got latest news related to our project on there. We held an online symposium and several people who presented there ended up contributing to the volume. Then we published the call for chapters. So we sort of built bit by bit to get to the point where we had a community of scholars and creatives who were interested in similar themes of communism, culture, European politics, memory, all the things that are in the book. And then now we're at the book coming out in December of this year.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Just to pick up on the bit about replaying and what that means. We were really keen for this not to be just a history of the culture from the Communist era. And we begin the book really with the transition around 1989, and it's centered on and it's rooted in the 21st century. So like we mentioned, there is a trend about for commercializing the past like Chabi World that we went to. There's loads of retro museums where you can see trinket and bric a brac about communist homes and cars and telephone boxes and all sorts of things. There's also a lot of Hollywood slick films like Atomic Blonde comes to mind that depict the Cold War. Milk bars have started popping up in Poland where they are basically quite nice versions of communist era canteens. I mean, there's so many things, and that's a capitalist version, if you like, of the communist era specifically aimed at the tourist market. And that's an interesting idea in itself. But in our book, the case studies take a little bit more of a deliberate and self aware look at understanding the impact of communism on individuals and communities in the region today. So the case studies specifically constitute examples of how communism is replayed. And we use that word because we don't mean repeated, we mean re engaged with. And I think we have a literal example of this in the book. Two of our chapters are on. One is on board games, the other is on video games and they're about the communist era in Hungary board game, Estonia video game. And this is for younger generations to really engage with history and engage with the communist past specifically through immersive and interactive gameplay. And if you think about it, they're not repeating the past because they are playing it and coming up with their own path through that history with their own 21st century context and sensibilities in mind. So it is about or referring to the ways in which contemporary creatives are experimenting with or documenting the recent past. And that is what speaks to our current political climate. Reminded Nigel Swain calls our current political situation one of persistent corruption. And that's where some of the more socio political ideas come into the book. What we are thinking about in terms of the relevance of the communist era to today.

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[Anna Varadi]

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[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Yeah, so you already mentioned the two chapters that you, both of you contributed to the volume, but could you say a bit more about the other chapters? Just a quick overview to our listeners on what's in the volume?

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Absolutely.

[Anna Varadi]

I think I'll give a little overview of the themes and then single out maybe a couple chapters. And Lucy, just feel free to come in anytime. So basically we worked from authors from across Europe, the US and the UK to demonstrate how Central and Eastern Europe remains in a state of transitioning away from communism, but not having secured a kind of fully post communist identity. And we identify, and all the authors really identify, that this is because of the long shadow of the communist era and the rise of so called illiberal democracies, to use the words of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. So basically the corruption that Lucy just.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Alluded to, there's a really interesting quote actually from Svetlana Aleksevich and it's from 2016 and this encapsulates what we're thinking about and the relevance of the book. She says the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the Soviet person remains. And so we are really looking into that idea of what does remain and what are the effects of communism on that person or those people who do remain and different generations that have come after. But anyway, I've interrupted.

[Anna Varadi]

That's absolutely right. I think that is a great quote. I'm glad you brought it in because I think that is the gist of the book is this idea that the state of transitioning away from communism is incomplete and that is reflected in both collective and personal memories of the era. So the authors we've got, they showcase how these memories can expose individual, shared and also intergenerational traumas and traumas which have for the most part not yet been systematically addressed in these countries. So they often then come out through cultural productions and films and games and radio dramas and all sorts. So basically our interest was in the emergence of what we have termed the trauma nostalgia paradigm in the book, in cultural representations of the communist period. And yeah, so basically, chapters look at TV series, documentary films, radio dramas, online comedy forums, museum exhibits, graphic novels, performance art and the board and video games that Lucy already mentioned, a really wide variety of cultural productions. And then we use some work by Lucien Van Leer and Sredhan Szramak to define the trauma nostalgia paradigm. Because Dave suggested recently that nostalgia and trauma are best understood as coexisting forces that shape contemporary engagement with the past. So that's also how we and our authors have understood it, to suggest that cultural productions sort of heighten our sensitivity to different nations, unique challenges with political stability and democracy. So the chapters very much look at different national contexts, but then as they do so, common themes and threads come out of the work. So basically, throughout the book we've got discussions to identify an admixture of trauma, fear, guilt, as well as hope and nostalgia. I think admixture being such an important word there, it's always together and working, coexisting.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Absolutely. Basically, we're suggesting that you can't have one without the other. And working with all of the authors. I mean, we've got 12 chapters and then an introduction and a conclusion. And that notion that trauma and nostalgia are two sides of the same coin is really relevant in each of them in specific ways relating to the countries, relevant to each cultural production. So I don't know if you want to mention a couple of.

[Anna Varadi]

I mean, there's. We could really pick out any of them, because the great thing is that they all speak to this theme in their own context. But I think one of the really interesting ones in this context specifically is a chapter we've got on two museums in Lithuania, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, and the other one's called grutaspark. And this chapter particularly highlights how sort of different attitudes to the communist history can be part of immersive reenactments in museums and in curation of museums. So we've got really commercialized elements, kind of like the nostalgic and capitalist things that Lucy was mentioning previously of these Lithuanian museums. People eating in canteens that are stylized after communist period. And at the same time, both of these museums also feature really traumatic legacies and prison settings. For instance, this chapter really gives us two very different museums, yet both of the museums speak to trauma and nostalgia and how some people who go to these spaces and engage with them can be open to what history they're being shown, and some people can be less open to engaging with these histories. I would say, comparably, we've got a chapter on German radio drama and the sort of traumas of the Stasi and the communist repression in Germany. But again, because it's through radio drama, because it's through the analysis of soundscapes, music, ambient sounds, there's a very, very personal and almost nostalgic element to the way that engagement with the communist history happens in these radio dramas that are being discussed. A particular focus in that chapter is Marianne Hirsch's theories of post memory. So the kind of intergenerational aspect of how younger people receive the memories of something which they did not live through comes to the foreground. And again, that was a common theme amongst some chapters, but it's particularly prominent in the discussion of Germany and radio drama.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

And of course, we have then the museums as one form of cultural production, radio dramas as another. And on radio drama in particular, there's a really interesting section about the use of silence and an oral landscape, if you like, which interests me a lot. So I just wanted to plug that. But I also wanted to add that when we were contextualizing the book and the diverse chapters in the introduction, we wanted to situate it in the various fields to which the book belongs. And memory studies was a key one for us. And thinking about what Anna mentioned about Hirsch and post memory, we quoted from the Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. And in their introduction they say that remembering does not happen within a political vacuum. But it occurs, I suppose, then, with structures of power and inequality. And that is what we were really keen to work with our authors to. To bring out of each chapter that the sociopolitical context of the region in question is central to the analysis of the cultural production. And then the experience of communism, if we think about it, each country that we mention in the book has a different. Has and had a different relationship and take on communism. Hungary and Romania. I'm on a podcast with to Hungarians, so I'm going to mention this as an example. They're neighboring countries, but they had vastly different experiences of. Of communism. I mean, Hungary's Grias communismos. You can correct my pronunciation if it's terrible. On the one hand, in Hungary, relatively is an important word, a communist light experience when considering communism under Ceausescu's reign. So those two different takes were really engaged with carefully in the chapters and throughout the book. I also just want to plug a great novel by Patrick McGuinness called the Last Hundred Days, about the end of Ceausescu's holdover Romania. It's brilliant and it's nice to read that novel. And also the first chapter in our book, which is about the comic books that are designed by younger artists about the horror of everyday life in Communist Romania, and they were exhibited in the National Museum of Brezhov. It's a wonderful chapter that analyzes the artwork within those comic books and suggests what some of the lingering themes are and how this younger generation is dealing with that period and the legacy of it.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

In your research, how do you, I guess, reconcile the difference between nostalgia towards the Communist period, but also the historical trauma that manifests in anti Communist populist mobilization?

[Lucy Jeffrey]

That's a great question. And that question really gets to the heart of the debates in the book, and as Anna mentioned, in relation to our trauma nostalgia paradigm. And these two things cannot be separated. You simply can't have one without the other. So if we take, for example, museums of everyday life doing communism in Poland, there are several of them, which is the focus of one of our chapters. A person visiting may experience nostalgia for life in those communist blocks, for example, in Nova Huta, for example, but there'd also be trauma with the association of life at a time where you were likely to be watched or informed on. I mean, one statistic suggests that in East Germany, one in three persons was an informer, so it's likely you or your neighbor would be one. So that there's just a clear surface level example of the mixture of nostalgia going back and seeing what your home once was, and then, of course, contextualizing what the reality of that home meant when you were living there. And I mean, for the museum directors, nostalgia is much easier to commodify and sell. But the museum itself and its exhibits can't separate the impression of nostalgia from the experience of trauma.

[Anna Varadi]

This is exactly what I was trying to explain about the chapter on Lithuania and the Lithuanian museums.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Definitely. And it's intergenerational too, and links with our political climate. Anu and I contributed a chapter in the book about the television series Deutschland 89, which is the last installment of the three seasons of the show, which I recommend. It's good to watch, and it deals with Deutschland 89, deals with the ongoing struggle of the German reunification, and we're thinking in our chapter and trying to work through ideas of how different generations engaged with the communist period and how there is an intergenerational trauma there. Another one of our contributors to the to the book talks about this intergenerational point in relation to online joke forums in Russia and Ukraine, which is obviously highly relevant in today's political climate. There is a sense of a politicization of the past and an increasing polarization of politics that we suggest is leading to a breakdown of a European idea. And your typical culprits then would be Orban or Fico in Slovakia, Weidel in.

[Anna Varadi]

Germany with the Alternativa for Deutschland.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Exactly. And for us, we interpreted this as a big threat for the unity of the European Union. And when we were thinking about concluding this book, which was obviously with the different regions, to consider the range of culture was quite a task. We landed on two key theorists, one being Timothy Garton Ash, and another being Gerard Delanti.

[Anna Varadi]

If I can interrupt for a second, Gerard Delanti very kindly has read the book and offered an endorsement for us, along with some other fantastic researchers in this field. So huge thanks to Gerard Delante and everyone else has provided an endorsement.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Definitely. Thanks, Gerard, that's very kind of you. If you're listening, we'll come on to your idea in a moment, Gerard, but I first want to just explain how Garten Asch was helpful when concluding these ideas. He talks about there being almost three stages in the history of Europe as we know it. A post war stage, a post wall stage, and a post Western stage. So thinking of the post war, Gartenash says there's a sense of hope, promise, peace with expansion of the eu, NATO, et cetera, moving on to post Western Europe, which he says starts in 2008. And listeners will, I'm sure, be thinking about the moment when Russia invaded the two parts of Georgia, the Eurozone crisis, unemployment in Southern Europe, and of course, now we have the war in Ukraine, just further cementing the fact that that things are not getting better. So we asked then, what does this post Western Europe actually look like, feel like, sound like, act like, and concluded that, yes, it's a little bit less democratic, more divided. And we saw that it's based on a premise of being different to rather than allied. But then we thought, okay, we also have all of this cultural production and we didn't want to think of it in only this downbeat tone. That's not the spirit of creativity. So then we turned to Jared Delanti, his writings after 2016. So after the rise of far right parties across Europe, Brexit, of course, he said that this European idea needs to be based on the idea of plurality, interconnecting narratives. And he says, and I quote this, the inclusion of new voices. So that's what we are interested in. We say that this idea of being allied with is a resistance on it entails a resistance on the part of Western Europe to othering former communist countries, but it also entails a widespread acceptance of multiculturalism. And that is key to keeping the forefront of our minds in light of today's refugee crises. So we really end on that political.

[Anna Varadi]

Note and key for the book because I think this idea of new voices we try to emphasize, and our authors do, that the more of these pasts, this communist past are being replayed in contemporary culture, the more opportunities these countries and these societies basically have to articulate the political turmoil, the traumas that have been experienced in the past as well as during the transition and then even today with this new rise of extremism and far right. So when we Talk about the 21st century Cultural productions that are the focus of the book and re engagement with the communist past, I think what we can see is how this past is sort of fundamentally impactful on our understanding of Central and Eastern Europe today, and particularly the ideas of democracy, like Gerard Delante would say about pluralism and the European idea. And I think that's where we based ourselves when it came to the different national context. But the shared ideas that are in the book.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

I want to pick up on something that both of you mentioned. And these are these generational differences. What differences did you notice between the generations in your research? Because I think a lot of the media that the volume examines, such as the TV series, but also the museums, are very much popular intergenerationally.

[Anna Varadi]

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And again, a very common theme. We already mentioned the chapter that specifically looks at kind of post memory in the German context to radio drama. We also look at that in our chapter on Germany. And then a lot of the other chapters touch on and speak to the intergenerational differences. We were quite careful, I would say, correct me if I'm wrong, Lucy, but I hope we were quite careful when we were putting together the volume to not homogenize Central and Eastern Europe. Neither did geographically know in terms of that content that speaks to the intergenerational differences. So we've got contributors either from the countries that they're writing about or who have worked on those countries for quite a while and whose research can really address the multi generational aspects of remembering communism. With this, we hoped that we can then expose the specific features of post communist society and culture in each country and as well as the shared experiences. And when we edited, I think we were conscious to create those links between chapters and make sure that our authors directly alluded to other work across the volume. So all of these themes kind of come out.

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[Lucy Jeffrey]

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[Anna Varadi]

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[Lucy Jeffrey]

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[Anna Varadi]

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[Anna Varadi]

Absolutely.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

And on the intergenerational notes, some of the chapters really do analyze how this contemporary cultural production can sometimes heighten the difference and distance between two generations or three generations, or bring a shared understanding and therefore make the generational divide seem a little bit smaller, narrower. And there's no saying what effect it will have. There's no clear consensus to be found, but there is this tension always at play through each of the works discussed. And again, thinking of the chapter on online joke forums and how the. The anecdotes that were used in the the communist era are being shared today amongst younger generations, that chapter really deals with. With how these forums are often sites of pulling together and also pushing out a younger generation who have no lived experience. And that's another, again, another key question. What does lived experience give you in terms of a trauma, nostalgia, paradigm? Or what does then a learned experience teach you about the society and the community to which you belong?

[Anna Varadi]

Absolutely. And that ties back to the ideas of democracy in the book. So the chapter on those joke forums Lucy's mentioned, it has a specific section on censorship and older generations needing to explain to younger generations what that truly means. And then of course, under new regimes, younger generations experiencing things like censorship themselves and how those experiences can repeat and connect. And that was certainly a similarity between some of our chapters. I think just the fact that there's a surge of creative productions dealing with these themes and the communist era was another similarity. Of course, we couldn't have done the book if there wasn't such a surge of creative output, and a lot of that output is by younger artists. So Dusi's already mentioned the comic books in Romania that are in one of our chapters that are mostly all done by younger artists. We've mentioned Balin Senjori, who's the writer, director of Abechugo in Hungary. He's of a post socialist generation himself. He was born in the early 90s if I'm correct. So this surge in and of itself was really of interest to us and how younger people then engage with things. Like in another one of our chapters there's mention of sort of post Yugoslav performance art and recreating a sort of physical fitness regime from the Yugoslav period. And again when that's being recreated as performance art, you get people of all generations participating in it. It's so interesting. I was particularly. Yeah, I was particularly interested in when I read that one from our contributor. It sounds like such a fascinating idea. Of course, unfortunately some other similarities are things like the lack of free and unbiased media in a lot of these countries nowadays, which again calls back to the communist period.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

And I will say reporter Saint Frontier was a great source for us for really giving us a barometer to measure the limitations on freedom of expression, freedom of press and so forth. And it's quite shocking to see the decline in these freedoms across former communist countries, a lot of them. So that was an unfortunate similarity, but an important one.

[Anna Varadi]

Yeah, but of course, because that unfortunate decline in freedoms goes hand in hand with the uptick of far right politics that we've already mentioned and anti demo democratic governance. And I think again there's a sort of knife edge moment for intergenerational connection where people who have experienced oppressive regimes and young people who haven't experienced them are now experiencing them. And so the intergenerational trauma and sort of self conscious interest in understanding the communist past, which is, which is also a common theme across our chapters, becomes more charged because of the new traumas that are happening now. And so the documenting of the communist period with the younger generations I think is often they are more interested in it almost because the older generation is reticent to talk about it sometimes in many countries there's still a silence about it. So younger generations are almost grasping and trying to get this information to learn from history for their own situation.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Definitely. And I'm thinking of the pride march in, in Hungary that, that was officially banned and now the, the person who, who led the march is coming under question from the Hungarian government. So that's a really clear example of.

[Anna Varadi]

Of this pride in pitch.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Yes, exactly.

[Anna Varadi]

Yeah.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

But there's. We also found a kind of complexity that was a similarity if you like. So the chapter that we have about Bulgaria's forced labor camp called the Belen, is about how museologists are still pushing for there to be a permanent museum on the island of Berlin to commemorate and preserve the lives of those who were made to suffer under the Bulgarian Communist Party. Similarly, in Germany, the archiving of the Stasi files is ongoing and people are still waiting to, to have those documents about who informed on them and about what and why and what that entails. So there is a sense that we're not out of the muddy waters yet. And that was, that was another strand that, that linked the generations and also linked some of the regions within the book. And then of course, we had a lot of differences.

[Anna Varadi]

We did, and I think we were very fortunate with the contributors and where they were coming from, not just like literally geographically, but academically, because the chapters are sort of bottom up from the country's perspective, but they all open out onto these shared ideas and similarities that what is happening on the European continent, so to speak. And so there were differences. I mean, one of them would be something like, for example, former Yugoslavia's emergence from Tito's communist dictatorship. I mean, that entailed a really traumatic turmoil through the bulk and wars in the region in the 90s. So that's a very different transition experience to the experience in Poland or the Czech Republic. But this, I think our authors were all very sensitive to this because they came from the country perspective and then opened out. I suppose another difference would be the fact that Germany has had to deal with two very specific kind of horrific cultural, social, national traumas. The Holocaust and then the communist period. And also things like how Europe has changed in the recalibration of different alliances after the Ukraine war more recently. So different countries obviously taking different stances and different alliances. You could compare Poland to Hungary, you know, relationships to Russia. So there are these differences, but I think they only make the chapters stronger in the sense that the chapters obviously speak to the unique national context of each region, but within the umbrella of post communist memory, I think.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Anna, you already mentioned Abeugo, which was this Hungarian TV series about. I mean, it basically translates as the Informant and it's not just with Abeugul, but like other TV series films, I guess, that deal with the communist period. They tend to be very entertaining, but a lot of the times they lack a certain kind of historical accuracy. And I mean, I watched A Bashugo when it was on hbo, I think, and I really, really enjoyed it. But as a historian, there were a few Times when I was a bit like, not quite like that. And I think Veronica Herman also mentions this in her chapter on Brashugo. Also, I'm very sad that there's not going to be a second season. So if you talk to Balince and.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Diardi again, we'll nudge him. Yes, definitely.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

But how does this play into your replaying communism idea?

[Lucy Jeffrey]

That is actually a difficult question. But we are engaging with the past through cultural representations of it. And you mentioned tv. We've also, as we've outlined, got performance art and radio and so on. And this is a dialogue between, if you like the past as it happened, think of a historical lens there, and then the past as it's been received and felt and understood by these creatives as individuals, and then by the communities who are engaging with this culture. And that where for us, going back to when we introduced ourselves and our background, I said I'm more arts than humanities, and I mentioned her background in television studies as well. So this is where, for us, culture can tell us so much more about the experience of a specific period than historical fact alone. So we're really interested in that experience question and how that is a trajectory that threaded through these cultural productions across different regions and different generations. One book that isn't mentioned in our book maybe a strange example to give, but I love this book. It's called Kairos by Jenny Oppenbach. And this novel is a good example here because it is an expression of all those tensions and uncertainties that surfaced around the time of German reunification. And there's a part in the book towards the end where we read that there were queues outside West German banks for the gift of 100 Deutsche marks as welcome money for East Germans. That happened as a historical fact. But we also read, or really the passage focuses on all those feelings of damaged pride, of humiliation that surfaced as a result of that. And we come to understand through Kairos, and then this was only published a couple of years ago, we come to understand how and why these events matter and that they matter today. And we can think about then the reasons behind certain imbalances in Germany today through what Upen Beck is doing and situating it in the present. And she. She talks about. About the division between east and West Germany and the complexities of reunification through metaphors of the architecture of the food, not through historical fact and listing archival sources or anything like that. That wouldn't be as entertaining a novel. So that's really how she conveys the impression or the imprint of the past on the present.

[Anna Varadi]

This reminds me of Alison Landsberg's work. And Landsberg scholarship is cited across our book several times by several contributors. And I think Landsberg says at one point when she's writing on sort of tv, film, museums and the past, that what's really important in re engaging with history is I believe the quote is the lived contours of a historical period. So all these emotions, impressions, and I think that's probably true to Abechugo. So to come back to Abecugo, which indeed is the subject matter of one of our chapters, it isn't historically accurate in its entirety. You know, it's just for. If some of the listeners haven't seen it, there's a sort of. The themes are the student uprising against the communist regime in the 1980s, a little bit of a parallel also to the 1956 uprising, but looking at that democratic opposition in Hungary in the later parts of communism. Now, I watched this just anecdotally, if I may, with my mum, who was the right age in the, in the 80s. Not that I, you know, she's young, but I watched it with her and she actually loved it. She. She was very excited about rooting for the student uprising and the democratic opposition. But then she'd always say something like, well, our university dorms weren't as big and comfortable or we didn't have as much choice of food in the canteen. So she definitely nitpicked the historical accuracy, but she also loved it and she really had a great experience re engaging with the music from her youth, but also the idea of striving for freedom from the communist regime. And what I think is interesting is that the series has been criticized for depicting one of one of the main characters as a sort of young Viktor Orban. And I don't know if all the listeners will know this, but Orban did start out as a campaigner for free speech, of all things, during the Democratic.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Opposition and he got funding from George Soros.

[Anna Varadi]

So, yes, just to add that, to study in Oxford. So it's interesting to me that that has been criticized, but at the same time, the series is so entertaining for so many people, and I mean the.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Series, it might not be historically accurate and Roger Hadersan was one of those who experienced life as a leading member of the Democratic Opposition and criticized abechugo for not actually portraying life and the political climate as it was, but also tells us a lot about perhaps why it's not or makes us think about why it's not so historically accurate in terms of what balint Seniorji, the writer director, was negotiating himself. So again, thinking about it from today's authoritarian climate In Hungary, if St Georgi painted it in a more faithful light, would it have been too close to home, as it were? Would he have been marginalized? Would his other creative endeavors have been supported? Or would he have had to leave Hungary to continue his work? So I think there's a very real tension between the experience of, as Anna said earlier, suppression during the time in which the series is set and that in Hungary today. So I think that historical accuracy may have come at a price that St. Georgi wasn't fully not willing to pay, but he didn't know how much that would cost, if that makes sense.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Thank you for talking about the book and I know that you are going to a lot of conferences to present about it. So where can people hear more about the volume and about the project?

[Anna Varadi]

Right. Thank you for having us on the podcast. And yes, we are having a book tour, so to speak. We've already spoken at the NEPCA conference online and also a Memory Studies conference in Florence. We are also going in early December to GDASK to present at the Memory Melancholia and Nostalgia Conference. So anyone who's listening who might be there, be lovely to see. In February we're also presenting at the Historical Fictions Research Network conference in Erlangen in Germany. Again, we'd love to see people there. Then in March we'll be talking at Cardiff University Central and East European Research center. And that will be a longer kind of more in depth discussion focused on the book where Professor David Clark is going to be a discussant for us. So that'll hopefully also be really interesting for everyone who's able to attend. And in April then we've also been invited very fortunately, to deliver the keynote for the history seminar called Communism and Historical Fictions at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. I say at I believe this is a hybrid event. I believe that is open now for submissions. And because it's a hybrid event, lots of people could come along online if they want to. We also are hoping to present at Central European University at some point or to have a book launch or some sort of event like that. Maybe even bring some of the contributors together in a physical space as opposed to online.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Yes, that would be lovely.

[Anna Varadi]

That would be really lovely. And then we've still got our website running, I mentioned earlier. So our website does have a blog slash like updates, latest news element. So if anyone listening is working on Remembering Communism, Post Socialism, similar topics we'd love to hear from you and we might be able to collaborate or post something on the website. There is a contact page and we have a dedicated email address which I think is replaying communismmail.com yes, indeed it is.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

All of this is going in the show notes below the episode, so if anyone's interested, check it out there.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Brilliant. I mean, also, it's Christmas coming, so look no further for your stocking fillers. You'll keep someone busy over the Christmas period and maybe offset any family feuds related to Monopoly or socialist Monopoly if you're. If you're playing in Hungary. So, yeah, that's, that's our where we are and what we're doing bit. We putting a lot of ideas together based on all the discussions we're actually having at these conferences. And by doing things like this, we're always thinking about new questions, almost spin off questions related to our main question about the. The specter of communism across Europe today and its impact on ideas like democracy or its influence on culture. So we are always thinking about that and so many ideas have come to the surface and we've met already some really lovely people at various conferences that we may be just planning an another Replaying Communism conference. So watch this space and get your tickets early.

[Anna Varadi]

I think, like I said, when we go to conferences with the book now, but also through our website, we are, I think, open to more ideas and probably having a second Replaying Communism conference now that the book is done will be a great next step for us because then we can really add to this work as a project because the book is fabulous and we're really, really happy. It's coming out now in December, but it was always envisioned as a research project, a research group, and so if we could have more regular conferences and collaborations, I think that's the end goal.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

Perfect. And thank you for coming on the podcast. Anna's and Lucy's edited volume, Replaying Communism, Trauma and Nostalgia in European Culture Production is available from CEU Press. And all the links to buy the book, buy the website, the email address are all in the show notes below. And again, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Thanks for having us, Andrea. It's been a lot of fun.

[Anna Varadi]

Thank you so much for having us.

[Lucy Jeffrey]

Yeah, it's been great.

[Andrea (Podcast Host)]

And to our listeners, thank you for listening and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any of our new episodes. Thank you and goodbye.