Socialist Culture and Modernity

From October 6th to 11th, 2013, the MS Gretha van Holland brought twenty-four conference participants from Berlin to Beeskow, Eisenhüttenstadt, Frankfurt/Oder and back to Berlin. The aim of this on-board boat conference, organised by Art Archive Beeskow and Utrecht University in collaboration with Marlene Heidel, Claudia Jansen and Ursula Lücke, was to cross borders – national and disciplinary – by connecting parallel and divergent European histories of the Cold War period, both on a conceptual and on a practical level. A selected group of historians, art historians, architectural historians, cultural anthropologists and visual artists discussed the various ways in which socialist cultural history has been presented over the past decades and put new perspectives to the test. This conference has resulted in the present issue of HCM

Introduction. Socialist Culture and Modernity

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/HCM2014.2.SEG

Shaping the Discourse on Modernity

In this opening article, the editors of International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity provide an overview of recent debates relating to “modernity”, inviting prospective authors to participate in a reflexive conversation on this contested concept, which is, at the same time, a practical reality. Modernity is on endless trial, suggesting evaluation and permanent criticism. The most disputed aspects of modernity range from its supposedly secular character and its strong connection to western science. Responses to these and other conspicuous features of modernity include Romanticism and various critiques of Enlightenment rationality, but also artistic modernism and the postcolonial attack on Eurocentrism. New approaches to the study of modernity try to accept its ambiguity, rather than reaffirm the conventional binary approach, and pay more attention to global and experiential aspects. A cultural history of modernity can help to expand such new approaches.