Experiences from the recent surge of right-wing politics in the US, Europe and Russia, confirm a familiar pattern where right-wing intellectuals help authoritarian mobilization by the staging of “culture wars”. The interwar years offer an irresistible field of comparison for commentators reflecting on the challenges and dangers to democracy in the contemporary world.
Indeed, in Scandinavian intellectual historiography, the 1930s have long been known as “the age of the culture wars”, when writers and intellectuals of the right and left fought it out in aggressive debates over gender, religion, race, sexuality and immigration. Major topics were censorship and the freedom of speech, with right-wing intellectuals routinely claiming that they were being denied a platform by mainstream liberal media. Meanwhile, democracy seemed to be on the defensive internationally, with authoritarianism and autocracy spreading and war looming.
The renewed threat of authoritarianism makes it especially important to generate knowledge on how intellectual and civic freedoms were defended, lost, and regained in the 1930s and ‘40s, on the way from culture wars to real wars.
The conference is arranged by OsloMet and the Words and Violence research consortium (site.nord.no), cofounded by Nord University, The Norwegian Research Council and partners.
Program
Tuesday May 26th
- 10:15: Registration + coffee and tea
- 10:30: Welcome by Kjetil A. Jakobsen (Professor at Nord university and project leader for “Words and Violence”)
- 10:45: Jeroen Dewulf (Queen Beatrix Professor, UC Berkeley): “Literature as Resistance. Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation (1940-1945)”
- 11:45: Jan Mervart (Head of the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science): “The Written Word as a Weapon: Anti-Nazi Resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Formation of Modern Czech National Identity”
- 12:30: Lunch break
- 13:00: Anika Seeman (Associate Professor, University of Bergen): "Transitional justice and the Quislings. Comparative perspectives on the legal and moral reckoning in Norway"
- 13:45: Pål C. Halvorsen (Associate Professor, Oslo Metropolitan University): "Literary Treason: On the investigation of writers in the purges after WWII in Norway"
- 14:30: Karine Le Bail (Research Fellow, The École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, CNRS): "Speaking Is Acting: Voice, Radio, and Responsibility in the French Purge Trials"
- 15:15: Coffee/tea and fruit
- 15:30: Christine Lombez (Professor, Département Lettres Modernes, Nantes university): "Authoritarianism and Resistance in Translation: German Poetry, French Mediators, and Anthologies Under the German Occupation (1940–1944)"
- 16:15: Narve Fulsås (Professor, University of Tromsø): "Literary exchange between Norway and Germany under National Socialism: Publishers, agents, and translators"
- 17:00: Eirik Vassenden (Professor, University of Bergen): "The memeification of Knut Hamsun: Online right-wing appropriations of the Norwegian Nazi Nobel laureate"
- 17:45: End of day
Wednesday May 27th
- 09:30: Kjetil A. Jakobsen (Professor, Nord university and project leader for “Words and Violence”): "Occupying art: Fascists, resistants and “degenerates” in the Norwegian field of fine art 1940-45"
- 10:30: Johs. Hjellbrekke (Professor, University of Bergen): "Literary debutants in the Norwegian cultural elite: generations, oppositions, social origins and political position takings in the 1930s and 1940s"
- 11:15: Lars Johnsen and Sofie Arneberg (National Library of Norway): “Protagonists of Polarization: The Cognitive Tropes of "Culture Wars" in Interwar Fiction”
- 12:00 Lunch break
- 13:00: Christopher Messelt (Associate Professor, Østfold University College): "Cancel culture? W.A.S.P. and David Irving in the Norwegian Public Sphere"
- 13:45: Håkon Larsen (Professor, Oslo Metropolitan University): “Can the civil sphere grow too big? On civil sphere intrusion and aesthetic repair”
- 14:30: Eve Gianoncelli (Postdoctoral Researcher, Nord university): “Merging politics and religion. A genealogy of integralism”
- 15:15: Break (Coffee/tea and fruit)
- 15:30: Tanja Ellingsen (Associate Professor, Nord university): "Trump 2.0, Julius Evola and the Return of Western Christianity"
- 16:15: Janicke S. Kaasa (Associate Professor, University of Oslo): "Politics, religion, gender: Ideologies in the reception of Sigrid Undset’s Return to the Future”
- 17:00: Guri Hjeltnes (professor emerita, The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies): “Norwegian Writers Swaying American Opinion. Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset as a Spearhead to Protect the Reputation of the Fighting Ally Norway, 1940-1942.”
- 17:30: End
- 19:30: Conference Dinner at Brasserie Blanche (participants pay for themselves)
Thursday May 28th
- 09:30: Ivana Perica (Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin) and Mario Kikas (PhD Candidate, Nord university): "Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Yugoslavia, 1928–1968"
- 10:30: Fredrik Forrai Ørskov (MSCA fellow at the University of Southern Denmark): ”The Writers and the Totalitarians: Scandinavian-speaking professional writers’ associations in the Nordic countries”
- 11.15–15:00: Parallel sessions. Lunch 12:15–13:00.
- 15:00–15:30: Plenary discussion – Summary
Parallel session 1 – Room: TBA
- Jennifer Harvey (University of Lille): "The Static Field: Poetic Production in Times of War (1917–1989)"
- Lynn Dolman (UC Berkeley): “A Person Without Politics Is Like a Sleepwalker”: Care, Culture Wars, and Ethical Awakening in Grete Weil’s Der Weg zur Grenze/The Way to the Border
- Johannes Eske Andersen (Univerzity Karlovy, Prague): "The Ragnarok motif and subterranean beings in Dennis Gade Kofod’s Nancy (2015)"
- Thomas Simenink (UC Berkeley): "A higher European world? Goethe, Zweig, Menasse"
- Fridtjof Willem Leemhuis (Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society): "Bound to be British – The Rebinding of Codex Sinaiticus at the British Museum in 1935"
Parallel session 2 – Room: TBA
- Camilo Soto Suárez (Complutense University of Madrid): "Nazism, socialism and the contemporary historical revisionism. A study in political theory"
- Ksenia Fiaduta (Autonomous University of Barcelona): "Literature as Resistance: The Anti-totalitarian Potential of Narratives in Svetlana Alexievich’s Poetics"
- Diana Gor (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute): "Ukrainian Displaced People’s publications in the American zone post-1945"
- Richard Gramanich Štromajer (Matej Bel University, Slovakia): "Losing the Thread of Reality in Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill"
- Šimon Wikstrøm Svěrák (The Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences): "The Psychic Grip of Authority: Effenberger on Transforming the Superego’s Cathexis"
Further insights into the conference theme and call for contributions
This transdisciplinary conference will examine the relation of writers and intellectuals to extreme politics, historically and today. It actually takes a certain type of intellectual firmness to bring democracy down, which is why “populism” finds its most dangerous forms when it is voiced by eloquent intellectuals.
Censorship, freedom of speech and “cancel culture”
We invite contributions dealing with censorship, freedom of speech and “cancel culture”, especially from a historical perspective.
The conference encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration between intellectual historians, scholars of literature, philosophers and social scientists concerning the dynamics of rhetoric and political thought in modern society.
Bringing ideology back in means to study it in new ways, focusing not only on the lone professor or artist, but on the cognitive powers of tropes of speech and the spread of new rhetoric between various domains in society, the role of think tanks or various media platforms. Intellectuals exercise influence in specific technological and institutional contexts.
Conspiracy theory and media change
We invite contributions on conspiracy theory and media change. Today there is much research on the social media, the internet, and the conspiracy mindset. But the interwar years were also an age when conspiracy theories influenced politics, in a rapidly changing media environment. The antisemitic fantasies of Hitlerism and the paranoia of Stalinism were not more anchored in reality than the fantasies of QAnon, and they were in some cases spread by intellectuals.
The controversies concerning the trustworthiness of professional journalism invites historical comparison. Thus, the contemporary concept of “fake news” is eerily similar to the way in which interwar right-wingers would deride journalism as “Lügenpresse”.
Transitory justice in the cultural domain
A final theme of the meeting is transitory justice in the cultural domain. Cultural autonomy is essential to liberal democracy; how did the transition from dictatorship and occupation to cultural autonomy and liberal democracy take place? What purges, trials, and tribunals among intellectuals occurred and did they help the transition from wartime occupation and dictatorship back to liberal democracy?
Program committee
- Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen: kjetil.jakobsen@nord.no
- Pål Csaszni Halvorsen
