Lecture format: on site
Room: 2Q-EG-27 (Seminar Room of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2,  Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.2

We are all familiar with the story of political transformation, serial regime change and the remaking of East Central Europe in 1989, with repercussions far beyond the region.  The events of that year saw at once the acceleration of history and the supposed end of it, depending on one's perspective. Such contradictory perceptions of 1989's relationship to historical time have shaped our understanding of the annus mirabilis and its aftermath ever since. This seminar seeks to revisit how participants at the time - from foreign observers to ordinary citizens —  tried to make sense of a world of "broken clocks." Of particular interest here is the extent to which the perception of empty time fuelled increasingly critical attitudes toward 1989 in the following decades.    

Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford's St Antony's College, researches 20th-century German and European cultural history.