The theoretical framework of the project, focused on the concepts of translation and transcultural memorial forms that have been used in the post-socialist period in CEE to articulate the memories of the Second World War and of socialism, was laid out in the special issue “Memorial Forms” (Memory Studies 2021, 14.1) co-edited by the PI, including her contribution to the issue. While a lot of research has been done on the problematic use of Holocaust template in CEE to remember the victimhood under socialism, the project innovated by focusing on the memorial forms developed in literature, film and memorial museums to address the histories of perpetration and collaboration in CEE. The results were published as an award-winning special issue in the leading journal of the field SEEJ: Slavic & East European Journal (2023, 67.3). The questions of memory translation and the memorial forms of collaboration and complicity are also central to two monographs written in the framework of the project. Laanes’s Translated Memories of Implication focuses on the literature and film from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States that has transnationalised the reflection on the implication of locals in the Soviet and Nazi regimes. Comer’s The Afterlife of Atrocity: Memorializing Soviet Violence in Moscow and Yekaterinburg analyses various Russian forms of memorialization of Soviet repression in the European and global contexts.
The specific capacities of aesthetic media of memory – literature, film, art, but also interactive museums – in translating memories were explored in the framework of two workshops that resulted in two collective publications: the edited volume Literature and Mnemonic Migration: Remediation, Translation and Reception (De Gruyter, 2025) and the special issue “Reworking the Eastern European Past through Audiovisual Archival Practices” (Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television, Dec 2025). The key innovative approaches were developed in individual articles and chapters by the project members in leading journals such as Memory Studies, SEEJ, Slavic Review, New German Critique, Oxford German Review, Journal of Baltic Studies.
The project team organised a major conference “Post-Socialist Memory Cultures in Transition” in collaboration with Memory Studies Association’s Postsocialist and Comparative Memory Studies Working Group (Sept 2023). To adapt to the situation of the pandemic, the team established Translating Memories Online Speaker Series featuring 13 invited speakers and contributed to the PhD candidates’ research opportunities with the summer school “Translating Memories in Literature, Film, Museums, and Monuments” (July 2022).
The project team run a student project at Tallinn University to create an interactive map application of the Holocaust sites in Estonia to promote the popular knowledge about local Holocaust and enable to visit the specific sites linked to this genocide that are poorly marked on the landscape. The map was launched on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 January 2025 in Vabamu Museum to high school students and widely covered in the mainstream news media.
Throughout the project, the team members reached out to wider public sphere in different capacities, including a) public talks to different stakeholders (high school teachers, mental health professionals); b) roundtable participations in prime time national TV and radio programmes on the burning issues of collective memory; c) op-ed articles and essays in the main news outlets. The project members collaborated with various non-academic organisation such as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Film Archive of the Estonian State Archives, Estonian Jewish Museum, Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom.
