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RevDem PodcastAuthor: Review of Democracy
RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture. Language: en Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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From Television Series to Board Games: Replaying Communism’s Afterlife in Culture- A Conversation with Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery
Monday, 13 April, 2026
Today, the afterlife of communism is equally about monuments and half-ironic memes, retro aesthetics, movie series and board games. Far from being confined to archivesor secondary sources, references to socialist period survive throughout everyday cultural forms and reveal a way of processing histories that were never fully resolved. In our conversation with Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery, built around their edited volume Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, thistension comes into focus. Published this year by the Central European University Press/ Amsterdam University Press, the book presents how cultural productions do not simply represent the socialist period but also give newmeanings and emotional textures.Throughout our conversation, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of nostalgia and trauma. Their central claim challenges the familiar binary between nostalgia and opposition. As Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery stated intheir introduction, they follow van Liere and Sremac’sunderstanding of trauma, which is: theremembrance of a painful irrevocable past scatters in different modalities of culture, politics, and religion and contributes to new forms of longing and belonging. In this process, nostalgia is a powerful vehicle to (re)present painful pasts in the present while mobilizing hybrid forms of identity and counter-identity.Instead of opposing nostalgia with trauma, Anna Váradi argues that these concepts should be analyzed together. As she stated in the podcast, “for us, trauma and nostalgia are best understood as coexisting forces that shapecontemporary engagement with the past”. More specifically, nostalgia often carries unresolved trauma, while trauma itself can be reactivated through selective, even comforting narratives about the past. At the same time, traumadoes not disappear. It returns, refracted through stories, images and collective narratives that give new political uses.Their chapter on the film series Deutschland 89 makes this analysis more tangible. Moments that feel nostalgic, music, shared habits, familiar images, are never neutral. Theyare tied to experiences of control, division, and adaptation. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall does not appear as a clean break, but as a moment that leaves lasting confusion and imbalance, still visible in political divides today. Asthe chapter concludes, The Deutschland seriesdepicts differences between life in the DDR as opposed to the BRD and the rootlessness experienced during die Wende through plotlines that trace the inescapability ofpast traumas for East Germans.Across the volume, similar patterns emerge. Museums, online humor or board games do not simply preserve the past. Instead, they reorganize it and turn memory intoa field of negotiations where identities are redefined. Among others, Carmen Levick examines how the Romanian Revolution is curated at the History Museum ofBraşov, while Kateryna Yeremieieva shows how Soviet-era anecdotes are recycled in contemporary Russian online media. Lucia Szemetová, in turn, explores GáborZsigmond Papp’s Retro Series and the cultural afterlife of Hungarian state propaganda films. Across these cases, the past is not simply preserved but actively negotiated, revealing how memory, culture and politics remain tightly intertwined.
