Newsletter des Collegium Carolinum 1/2016

(13.1.2016)

Vortrag

Das Collegium Carolinum vergibt jährlich Gaststipendien an Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen für einen Forschungsaufenthalt in München. In diesem Zusammenhang laden wir herzlich zu einem Werkstattgespräch mit einem der diesjährigen Stipendiaten ein:

Sune Bechmann Pedersen (University of Amsterdam / University of Gothenburg):
"Holiday behind the Iron Curtain: Western Tourism in Cold War Eastern Europe"

am 20.1.2016, 15.00 Uhr, im Seminarraum des Collegium Carolinum
(Hochstr. 8 / 2. Stock, München)

The Czech Lands were popular tourist destinations for the European elites for centuries before the Second World War. When Communists came to power in Central and Eastern Europe after the war they first severed the ties to the West. Soon after Stalin’s death, however, Czechoslovakia and the other states behind the Iron Curtain again began to cater to western tourists and sought to develop modern tourist industries. This presentation will discuss western tourism behind the Iron Curtain in light of the recent studies of Cold War cultural exchange programmes and soft-power diplomacy. It will demonstrate the increasing interest by East European states in using tourism as a tool for cultural diplomacy after the Helsinki Final Act. Finally, it will argue that the study of tourism across the Iron Curtain can improve our understanding of the multifaceted, multilevel contacts between East and West during the Cold War and offer a purchase on its role in international diplomacy.

Sune Bechmann Pedersen is a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoc at the University of Gothenburg working on Scandinavian tourism to Communist Europe during the Cold War. He holds a PhD in history from Lund University and an MA in history with distinction from University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His thesis, "Reel Socialism: Making Sense of History in Czech and German Cinema since 1989" (2015) compared the remembering of the Communist past in Czech and German film cultures after the fall of Communism.

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