Mapping 20th-century Violence: The Case of Kharkiv

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release:

About the lecture: One can read urban landscapes like textures. Looking at European cities as textbooks of human civilization, they tell us a story of rise and fall of urban cultures, of life and death, take-off and devastation. Europe’s history includes, especially in the 20th century, more than one urbicide. In our days Kharkiv, the second capital of Ukraine, has again become the target of disastrous violence, this time by Russian missiles. The talk will attempt to tell the history of a big European city along the traces and on the sites where “history takes place.”

Sponsored by CREECA and the Alice D. Mortenson-Michael B. Petrovich Chair in History, with support from the Center for European Studies and the Center for German and European Studies (CGES)

About the speaker: Karl Schlögel is professor emeritus of Eastern European history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder and a noted journalist. His book The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World was published by Princeton University Press in March 2023. Other books include Moscow 1937 (2012), The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow (2021), and Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland (2022).

For more information on these and other CREECA events: https://creeca.wisc.edu/events/