Remembering Katyn

In 2010 Russian émigré Alexander Etkind received a grant of one million euros from the EU coffers. He has used it to assemble a team of junior colleagues in order to create and verbalize an interpretation of conflicts in twentieth century Eastern and Central Europe. The project of which he is leader and principal investigator is titled “Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.” The project seems to follow in the footsteps of such scholars as Aleida Assmann whose value-free (yet German-oriented) project of remembering past traumas gained acceptance in much of the Western world. In Professor Etkind’s case, the orientation is Russian rather than German.