Authoritarianism and culture conference – Historical perspectives on culture wars, literature, and the vulnerability and resilience of democratic institutions

• 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 at Festsalen, Pilestredet 52, Studenthuset
• 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, 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): "Nazi Literature for the Occupied: German Literature in Norwegian Translation , 1941-1945"
• 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

• 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 (National Library of Norway): “Protagonists of Polarization: The Cognitive Tropes of "Culture Wars" in Interwar Fiction”
• 12:00 Lunch break at Festsalen, Pilestredet 52, Studenthuset
• 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: Break (Coffee/tea and fruit)
• 14:45: Tanja Ellingsen (Associate Professor, Nord university): "Trump 2.0, Julius Evola and the Return of Western Christianity"
• 15:30: Janicke S. Kaasa (Associate Professor, University of Oslo): "Politics, religion, gender: Ideologies in the reception of Sigrid Undset’s Return to the Future”
• 16:15 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.”
• 16:45: End
• 19:30: Conference Dinner at Brasserie Blanche

• 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 at Festsalen, Pilestredet 52, Studenthuset
• 15:00–15:30: Plenary discussion – Summary

Parallel session 1 – Room: 311, Pilestredet 46

• 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): "From post-politics to anti-political revolt in contemporary Danish literature" 
• Thomas Siemerink (UC Berkeley): "A higher European world? Goethe, Zweig, Menasse"

Parallel session 2 – Room: 314, Pilestredet 46

• 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"
• 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"
• 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"

Title: “Literature as Resistance. Dutch Clandestine Literature during the Nazi Occupation (1940-1945)”

Clandestine literature was published in all countries under Nazi occupation, but nowhere else did it flourish as it did in the Netherlands. This raises important questions: what were the risks of writing, printing, selling, and buying clandestine literature during the Second World War? What was the content of this literature? And why the Netherlands in particular? 

International studies on the Netherlands under Nazi rule have focused mainly on the political situation, and paid little attention to the local underground press other than considering its political message. This omission of cultural perspective led to an incomplete and sometimes distorted image of the Dutch wartime attitude vis-à-vis the German occupiers. It also hindered the understanding of postwar Dutch society. 

In this lecture, Dewulf shows that, in all its complexity, clandestine literature offers a unique perspective on Dutch society under German occupation and on the postwar debates about heroism, resistance, collaboration, and victimization.

Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor at UC Berkeley.
 

Title: “The Written Word as a Weapon: Anti-Nazi Resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Formation of Modern Czech National Identity”

The paper examines the principal forms of resistance to the Nazi occupation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In contrast to contexts such as Yugoslavia and Poland, where organized partisan movements were highly developed, resistance in the Czech lands was characterized primarily by written and clandestine activity, with the typewriter serving as a central weapon. 

The paper introduces the phenomenon of underground publications and periodicals, with particular attention to their programmatic and ideological dimensions. It further considers the structural factors underlying this distinctive form of Anti-Nazi resistance, especially in relation to the development of modern Czech national identity. From this perspective, the paper also identifies broader continuities in Czech written resistance across the twentieth century.

Jan Mervart is Head of the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science.

Title: "Transitional justice and the Quislings. Comparative perspectives on the legal and moral reckoning in Norway"

After the Second World War, countries liberated from German occupation across Europe undertook extensive legal and administrative measures against their own citizens for wartime collaboration. These processes, often centred on the criminal offence of “treason”, sought to address the phenomenon of mass collaboration and to sanction those deemed to have forfeited their place in the national community. Beyond punishment, they functioned as crucial instruments through which postwar states asserted authority, delineated moral boundaries, and produced powerful and enduring normative narratives of the occupation years. At the same time, professional, cultural, and economic organisations conducted internal purges through so-called honour courts, sometimes complementing and sometimes contradicting state-directed practices.

The Norwegian “treason trials” stand out as the most extensive postwar reckoning with collaboration in Europe. Tens of thousands of individuals were prosecuted for wartime actions, including Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the collaborationist Nasjonal Samling. Several characteristics distinguished the Norwegian process from parallel reckonings elsewhere: the criminalisation of formal party membership – unparalleled in Europe – the relative absence of extrajudicial violence, and the strong emphasis on legality and legal doctrine in contemporary debates.

At a more fundamental level, however, the Norwegian trials shared many core features with postwar reckonings across Europe. These included the painful confrontation with the reality of collaboration, the difficulties of adapting concepts of treason to diverse wartime behaviours, tensions between retribution and rule-of-law standards, and conflicts over who held definitional authority over the recent past. These tensions were further complicated by non state mechanisms of reckoning—most notably honour courts—which developed their own procedures, definitions, and narratives.

This keynote situates the Norwegian experience within a broader European framework and examines both parallels and divergences, with particular attention to political leaders, party members more generally, and intellectuals. In doing so, it illuminates how transitional justice shaped postwar political cultures and intellectual milieus, as well as enduring understandings of guilt, responsibility, and national belonging.

Anika Seeman is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Bergen.

Title: "Literary Treason: On the investigation of writers in the purges after WWII in Norway"

The writers as such are often described as a “guild” who were on “the right side” during the German occupation of Norway (1940-1945), writing poems and texts distributed “underground” as a part of the resistance movement. However, there are examples of writers in important official positions during the war who did not take part in any acts of resistance, but rather the opposite, but who were they?

This talk is based on the newly published book Litterært landssvik [Literary treason] which documents who the writers in the legal purges in Norway were, what they were charged with and how they were convicted. What was the role of writers under authoritarian rule and what did literary treason entail? In what way were their position or activity as a writer a part of their cases? Being considered especially gifted in guiding the public through propaganda by the courts, how did they articulate the duty of a writer?

Through an analysis based on close reading of 38 investigation files – landssviksaker, literally meaning “cases of treason against the country”- on the authors who were charged in the legal purges by formal courts I find different groups of cases, ranging from diverse forms of propaganda to volunteering in the SS and participating as soldiers. As a part of the research project “Words and violence” with a dataset with information on about 345 writers who were active from 1933-1953, the findings are compared to the rest of the population.

Pål C. Halvorsen is a cultural sociologist, and Associate Professor at the Institute for Archivistics, Library and Information Science, Oslo Metropolitan University.

Title: "Speaking Is Acting: Voice, Radio, and Responsibility in the French Purge Trials"

While postwar purge trials in France treated the writings of journalists and intellectuals as acts, this paper shows that the radio voice led to a redefinition of responsibility by bringing to light the performative and embodied dimension of speech. When words are no longer written but spoken, they no longer circulate as texts alone, but as voiced events—intoned, addressed, and received within the intimacy of the home.

Focusing on comedians involved in Radio-Paris propaganda broadcasts, this paper shows how performers consistently sought to neutralize the political force of their speech by presenting themselves as mere interpreters, reducing their role to that of technical execution. In doing so, they attempted to detach utterance from agency, voice from action.

Yet the courts resisted this dissociation. By mobilizing new forms of material evidence—scripts of propaganda broadcasts, payment records, and sound recordings seized by the Resistance at the Liberation of Paris—judges and prosecutors treated the broadcast voice not as a neutral medium but as a site of efficacy. Speech, in this context, was not simply delivered—it acted.
This shift reveals a broader transformation: the emergence, within the purge trials, of the mediated voice as a political act, and of listening itself as a judicial practice through which responsibility could be assigned.

Karine Le Bail Research Fellow, CNRS, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.  
 

TItle: "Authoritarianism and Resistance in Translation: German Poetry, French Mediators, and Anthologies Under the German Occupation (1940–1944)"

This paper will explore how the German occupation of France began with the assertion of linguistic control and how poetry translation became a central tool in the Occupier’s cultural strategy. From 1940 onward, German agencies sought to “reorganise” the French literary field by promoting translated German works. Poetry was considered particularly effective for (re)shaping sensibilities, and anthologies presenting a curated, ideologically suitable canon were encouraged to foster a shared cultural space aligned with Nazi objectives.

Yet translation under constraint remains unpredictable. Through two case studies – Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke – this paper will analyse the tensions between propaganda, dissidence and resistance. Hölderlin, frequently appropriated by the Nazi regime for his supposed heroic and national mystique, was promoted in translation. Nonetheless, French translators often reinterpreted his poetic voice in less overtly ideological ways, subtly resisting the propagandistic framing. Rilke presents an even more paradoxical case. Viewed with suspicion by German propaganda officials for his individualism, cosmopolitism and apolitical stance, he was not considered a desirable ambassador of “German culture.” However, his works were very officially translated and vividly discussed in France throughout the period. Anthologies of German poetry in translation also became contested sites where ideological control, aesthetic mediation, subversion and resistance coexisted. 

This paper argues that poetry translation in Occupied France reveals the inherent instability of cultural policies under authoritarian regimes, where even state-sponsored initiatives can generate unintended spaces of intellectual freedom. 

Christine Lombez, Professor of Comparative Literature at Nantes University is currently the PI of the ERC Advanced Grant program « TranslAtWar – Translations at War: Mapping WW2 in Europe ». Her research focuses on translation history, poetry translation, politics and translation (especially in wartime). She has co-edited (with Yves Chevrel and Lieven D’hulst) the History of translations in French 19th century volume (HTLF 19, 2012), co-directed the chapter "Poetry" of the HTLF 20 volume (2019) and is the author of several books and articles on poetry translation as well as on the history of translation and translators in France and in Europe. Among them: Traduire, collaborer, résister. Traducteurs et traductrices sous l’Occupation (2019) and Circulations littéraires, transferts et traductions dans l’Europe en guerre (1939-45) (2021). Her two last books, Quand les Muses prennent les armes. Poésie et traduction poétique en France sous l’Occupation (1940-1944) and Portraits de traducteurs/-trices européens durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale are currently in press with De Gruyter.

Title: "Nazi Literature for the Occupied: German literature in Norwegian translation, 1941–1945.”  

The German occupation of Norway in 1940 caused the “traditional system” of publishers to wind down import from Germany. At the same time, a group of National Socialist publishers opened a new channel of import. Norwegian NS publishers in cooperation with the occupation authorities launched a program of idealist, “positive”, and “unpolitical” contemporary German literature for Norwegian readers. How did this version of NS literature look like, how did it differ from literature in Germany, and who translated it?

Narve Fulsås is Professor emeritus at the University of Tromsø.

Title: "The memeification of Knut Hamsun: Online right-wing appropriations of the Norwegian Nazi Nobel laureate"

Nationalists, racists, neo-Nazis, antisemites and eco-fascists have long subsisted on Knut Hamsun. They have organized themselves in a plethora of blogs and outlets, and prior to the digital shift also in fanzines and more conventional periodicals. I these, he is framed as “Knut Hamsun: Aryan Nationalist”, his novels are read as ideological manifestos, and his polemical, civilization-critical texts circulate in questionable translations, commented upon by a range of well-known figures.

A line can be traced from Julius Evola, via Alain de Benoist, to Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor, Andrew Anglin, and Curtis Yarvin. All share an interest in the Norwegian Nobel laureate, whom they regard either as a kindred spirit or as a convenient instrument for the articulation and dissemination of their own ideas. However, the dissemination of ideology in the 21st century does not primarily take the form of argumentative texts, and the far-right mediation of Hamsun is no exception, as the presentation intends to show. 

This is evident in the abundance of online commentary that adopt the new genres of the internet and social media: the meme, often making use of Hamsun’s own «meme-esque» bonmots and characterizations. Following the awarding—and subsequent «regifting»—of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, however, a wave of counter-memes have appeared, in which Hamsun’s donation of his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels in 1943 is cast in a new and ironic light.

Eirik Vassenden is Professor at the University of Bergen.

Title: "Occupying art: Fascists, resistants and “degenerates” in the Norwegian field of fine art 1940-45"

Aesthetics are not a side show to authoritarian regimes, and especially not to the far right. In the famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin observed that fascism/Nazism seeks to give the masses a voice while protecting injustices of property, which meant the introduction of aesthetics into politics. Aesthetic expression substituted social justice.

As a cult of power, fascism is a cult of the eye. Regimes of the extreme right tend to cultivate easily recognizable visual identities and to seek to control the visual order.  

Occupied Norway seems to have been the only occupied country where the National Socialists organized l“Entartede Kunst” art exhibitions on the German model. Stigmitized as “Ukunst” and gathered in “the chamber of horror”, works by Pablo Picasso, George Braque and the Norwegian and Nordic 20th century modernists were transported from town to town in wartime Norway 1942-43, where they were exposed, in order to ridicule the artists and make the public conscient that the nation had finally been liberated from the malicious influence of the “Montparnasse Jewry”.

In his lecture professor Jakobsen will put the art policies and visual rhetoric of the Norwegian fascist party (NS) into European context. What was similar and what was different compared to other Germain occupied countries at the time?  What explains the differences, and the similarities?

What made artistic resistance possible? In order to better understand how the art field reacted to dictatorship, the fine arts will be compared to that of other artistic fields, like literature, music or theater. Were visual artists more or less prone to collaboration? Why? 

The lecture is based on a forthcoming book cowritten with art historian Kathrine Lund.  

Kjetil A. Jakobsen is Professor at Nord university and project leader for “Words and Violence”.

Title: "Literary debutants in the Norwegian cultural elite: generations, oppositions, social origins and political position takings in the 1930s and 1940s"

Written by Johs. Hjellbrekke & Olav Korsnes.

Previous analyses have found that the global Norwegian space of literary practices in the 1930s and 1940s were structured along three dimensions: Non-Fiction vs. Fiction, Traditional vs Modern literature and Popular vs. Other literature. These oppositions were structured along hierarchies of personal and inherited cultural capital, and of economic capital.

The associations between literary and political orientations were clear. Urban, modern-oriented writers with upper-class backgrounds had higher probabilities of being active in the resistance, while more marginal, tradition-oriented writers with a lower-class origin had higher probabilities of supporting the occupation; during WWII, the literary elite thus faced both an external shock and a challenge “from below” (see Hjellbrekke, Halvorsen, Jakobsen & Arneberg 2025).

But how did this play out in the younger generation of writers, defined as the ones who made their literary debut in the years from 1933 to 1942? To what degree did the internal oppositions in this literary generation mirror those found in the global space? Did the cleavages indicate a reproduction or a reconfiguration of the Norwegian space of literary practices?

Inspired by Karl Mannheim’s sociology of generations and generation units (Mannheim 1928), and his emphasis on formative events and experiences, and by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and theory of the social space (Bourdieu 1979, 1993), these questions will be addressed by way of Class Specific MCA (CSA) (Le Roux & Rouanet 2010, Hjellbrekke 2018):

How were the associations between the literary oppositions, political position takings, social origins and the volumes of institutionalized cultural capital in the subspace of the literary debutants? Did the structural oppositions, the associations and the subgroups reproduce from one generation to the next, or were these generation specific?

Johs. Hjellbrekke is professor of sociology at the University of Bergen.

Title: “Protagonists of Polarization: The Cognitive Tropes of "Culture Wars" in Interwar Fiction”

The "Word and Violence" conference calls for a renewed focus on "the cognitive powers of tropes of speech" and their role in the slide from culture wars to real wars. This paper responds by examining the interwar novel using the corpus described in Hjelbrekke et.al 2025. We present a comparative analysis of 600 novels taken as a subset from this corpus, all published between 1920 and 1940, authored by writers who would subsequently face "transitory justice" on opposite sides: those purged for collaboration and those celebrated for resistance.

Moving beyond the study of the "lone author", we employ a digital hermeneutic method using the luminon which extracts features of phrases such as proper names in a local context or fragment of text up to 25 words. These features are used to identify systemic rhetorical patterns across the corpus. First, Named Entity Recognition identifies the characters of a novel and frequency analysis helps us identify protagonists. Second, Large Language Models (LLMs) act as "micro-readers" of thousands of text fragments, annotating how these characters navigate conflict, conceptualize violence, and respond to authority.

This scalable approach allows us to map the "spread of new rhetoric" across the literary field. Did the future collaborators construct protagonists or villains using specific tropes of victimization or authoritarian resolve? Did the resistance authors embed distinct cognitive schemas of civic defense? By aggregating these structured interpretations, the study exposes the latent ideological infrastructure of the interwar imagination, demonstrating how the "culture wars" could be found in the syntax of fiction before they materialized on the battlefield.

Lars Johnsen is research professor at the National Library of Norway.

Title. "Cancel culture? W.A.S.P. and David Irving in the Norwegian Public Sphere" 

“Cancel culture” is a catch-all term that has circulated since around 2019 to designate a perceived tendency within contemporary public culture. The practices commonly grouped under “cancelling” – including no-platforming, the use of sensitivity readers, organized campaigns, and boycotts – are, however, in no way new phenomena. This presentation asks whether “cancel culture” can serve as a productive analytical lens for examining the lead-up to two events in Norwegian cultural history.

Taking the concept of cancel culture as its point of departure, the presentation analyzes the refusal to allow the American heavy metal band W.A.S.P. to perform a scheduled concert in Drammen in 1986, and the protests that resulted in the withdrawal of the British author David Irving’s invitation to participate in the Lillehammer Literature Festival in 2009. Both W.A.S.P. and Irving entered the Norwegian public sphere from the outside, provoked public controversy, and were, on different grounds, deemed unacceptable.

One central aim of the analysis is to situate contemporary “cancel culture” in a longer historical perspective and, by creating distance to the present, to shed new light on past cultural conflicts and debates.

Christopher Messelt (PhD in Comparative Literature) is Associate Professor at Østfold University of Applied Sciences. His book Litterære kontroverser og norsk offentlighet will be published at Cappelen Damm Akademisk ultimo 2026. 

Title: “Can the civil sphere grow too big? On civil sphere intrusion and aesthetic repair”

According to the populist right, the civil sphere has grown too big, and they want to retract the boundaries of solidarity established by successful frontlash movements. Rather than investigating how backlash movements engage in activities to reverse the success of frontlash movements, I will in this paper discuss how and whether the civil sphere itself can be viewed as a force capable of delivering destructive intrusions in another sphere, namely that of aesthetics. 

The discussion will be based around recent controversies in Norway over art objects and artists being evaluated with references to civil sphere values and codes rather than aesthetic sphere values and codes. When such evaluations are expressed by actors connected to arts organizations and they have been brought into the public sphere by journalists, it has led to public controversies and legitimation crisis for the organizations involved. Public critics claim that social justice agendas, which in the language of the culture wars gets labeled as woke, identity politics, and cancel culture, are trumping art history, artistic freedom or aesthetic autonomy in evaluations of aesthetic objects and their creators. 

The critics would rather have the aesthetic objects evaluated with reference to aesthetic codes and values, giving them a contextual rather than a contemporary social reading. In efforts to resolve the controversies, art world actors engage in repair activities seeking to re-establish the objects as aesthetic objects and regain legitimacy to the organizations involved in the controversies.    

Håkon Larsen is a sociologist and professor at the Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science at OsloMet. He is currently researching the challenges of cultural management amidst culture war pressures. He has published extensively on issues related to legitimacy in the cultural sector, and heated public debates related to culture organizations.  

Title: “Merging politics and religion. A genealogy of integralism” 

Integralism has gained renewed visibility in the United States since the 2010s, especially in debates around postliberal thought and among figures sometimes associated - rightly or loosely - with that milieu, such as JD Vance. In this context, it is often framed as a critique of liberalism and as a call for a stronger integration of religion into civic and political life, in some cases extending to the idea of a confessional and Catholic state. But integralism has taken shape in different national contexts and historical moments, and in some cases has been connected to authoritarianim and fascism. It is this complex relationship to fascism that I would like to explore by focusing on the ways in which integralism has been part of French intellectual life in the 1930s.

This presentation shows how personalism and “integral humanism”, despite their ultimate incompatibility with fascism, have been caught in a complex Maurrassian and reactionary genealogy. Although the story of integralism may have been associated with admirable worldviews and visions of humanity, it has also and mainly been part of a story which has found ways of re-signifying inequality, whatever specific forms they might take. Maurras certainly has had a central place in this history. But, without him, it has also found ways to revive reaction. 

I show how integralism’s totalizing ambitions - spanning political, social, and spiritual life - have at times aligned it with authoritarian or totalitarian projects. Personalism navigated a fraught position between critique of fascism and partial ideological proximity, revealing a dynamic better described as one of “fascination” rather than full “fascization,”. But it is no coincidence that the non-conformists of the 1930s serve as a reference for those who, like Alain de Benoist, the leader of the intellectual “New Right” for more than 50 years, have drawn on them in their vision of a conservative revolution in France and in the revival of the idea of a hierarchically structured, authentically sovereign Europe.

Eve Gianoncelli is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Words and Violence project.

Title: "Trump 2.0, Julius Evola and the Return of Western Christianity"

This paper contends that Julius Evola’s Traditionalist critique of modernity—anchored in hierarchy, civilizational decay, and the mythic restoration of a lost Golden Age/Kali Yuga reversal—offers a clarifying framework for reading key motifs in MAGA era political rhetoric and contemporary U.S. national security discourse. Although Donald Trump did not engage directly with Evola, the diffusion of Evolian ideas through U.S. right wing networks, notably via Steve Bannon’s public references, injected Traditionalist themes of decadence, national “reawakening,” and civilizational struggle into the MAGA narrative ecosystem, further helped by Christian-conservative voices both within academia and big-tech, reaching a world-wide audience through algorithms and various social media platforms.Names like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin and Charlie Kirk are just to mention a few.

This is evident in the 2017 National Security Strategy which cemented “America First,” emphasizing sovereignty, borders, economic nationalism, and great power competition—echoing broader civilizational, anti universalist themes despite its distinctly American populist framing. MAGA’s sacralization of “Western Christian” identity continues to reinforce this civilizational lens in U.S. politics, further intensified by The Project 2025 as well as The 2025 National Security Strategy.

While the first lays out a plan to concentrate executive power, vet loyalists, and realign agencies with biblical or Christian nationalist normative goals, the second emphasize “hard sovereignty,” hemispheric focus, and a stark depiction of Europe as facing “civilizational erasure”, (while casting the United States as the presumed guardian of Western Christian identity). In all cases, immigration becomes the front line administrative project: re drawing the cultural body politic through order restoration in domestic space—projecting who “belongs” in the western civilization.

Make America Great Again and a return to the Golden Age thus involves a return to religious belief, conservative Christianity, family values, hierarchy - all core aspects of Julius Evola intellectual legacy - and where modernism, science, democracy and liberal values (including multiculturalism) are considered the main threats to this. 

Tanja Ellingsen is associate professor at Nord university.

Title: Politics, religion, gender: Ideologies in the reception of Sigrid Undset’s Return to the Future

In her travelogue Return to the Future (1942, Norwegian title: Tilbake til fremtiden), Sigrid Undset recounts her escape from Norway in April 1940 and her journey across Sweden, the Soviet Union and Japan to the United States, where she remained her return to Norway in May 1945. The travelogue was originally written in Norwegian while Undset was exiled in the United States, but it first appeared in English translation in 1942; later that year it was published in Portuguese, followed by Swedish and Danish editions in 1943 and German, French and Icelandic editions in 1944.

Aschehoug intended to publish a Norwegian edition in December 1945, but the plan was abandoned when the Soviet embassy, displeased with Undset’s depiction of the Soviet Union, threatened to boycott Norwegian publishers. The book therefore remained unavailable in Norway until the fall of 1949, even though the final chapter was published in Samtiden in 1946. 

From 1942 onward, the Norwegian reception was shaped by resistance to National Socialism, by both Communism and anti Communism and by anti Catholicism – ideological positions that also drew on Undset’s public role during the interwar years. In this paper I examine how these positions are manifested in the complex reception of Undset’s travelogue and argue that Return to the Future both illustrates Undset’s contested status and exposes the political, religious and gendered rhetorics that shaped the Norwegian cultural sphere during and after the Second World War.

Janicke S. Kaasa (b. 1983) is Associate Professor of Nordic literature at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo. She holds a PhD in comparative literature and is a member of the NRC project “Made Abroad: Producing Norwegian World Literature in a Time of Rupture, 1900-50” (MAP), hosted by the National Library of Norway. Her research interests include book history, reception studies and the sociology of literature. Recent book publications: Å lese Ibsen (2026, co-authors A.M.B. Bjørkøy & M.B. Claudi), Collecting the North (2026, co-eds L.L. Delsett & U. Spring) and Literary Citizenship in Scandinavia in the Long Eighteenth Century (2023, co-eds R. Hemstad, E. Krefting & A. Nøding). Email: j.s.kaasa@iln.uio.no.

Title: “Norwegian Writers Swaying American Opinion. Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset as a Spearhead to Protect the Reputation of the Fighting Ally Norway, 1940-1942.”

On 24 October 1940, Sigrid Undset wrote to her sister Ragnhild: “I have also spoken in Washington, and the Crown Princess was there listening to me, and I talked a bit with her… Our minister (Morgenstierne) was there as well… They all believe – the minister and Princess Märtha and all the Norwegians over here – that I am of great use traveling around and speaking. One of my lectures is called ‘Scandinavia and the War’, and I get the opportunity to refute some of the rumors that have circulated over here, thanks to the foolish chatter of some correspondents about Norwegians giving up far too quickly…”

On April 9 1940, the American foreign reporter Leland Stowe made the scoop of his life. He was in Norway when the Germans invaded Norway, watched the nazi troops march into the capital of Norway and reported back home “How Norway was Betrayed by Traitors and Nazi Spies”. He described the Norwegians as passive and ignorant, accepting the Nazi regime. The reporter from the Chicago Daily News’ reports from April 1940 threatened Norway’s reputation in the USA.
Stowe’s series of articles was a shock to the Norwegian-American areas of the USA, and triggered a massive information campaign by a high profile group of Norwegians in exile. Amongst them the Norwegian combative minister Wilhelm Morgenstierne in Washington D.C., and in due course a number of prominent Norwegians joined the campaign as they arrived in the USA – amongst them the president of the Norwegian Parliament C.J. Hambro and the Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset. They wrote articles, gave speeches, and spoke on the radio.

Sigrid Undset worked hard travelling and lecturing. Undset’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, was frustrated that there was so little literary production. “I cannot see what an author of your caliber can gain by taking part in such a publication,” Knopf wrote when Undset worked on an article about “Hitler and the Ten Commandments.” Sigrid Undset excused herself by saying that she had obligations to “Norwegian Officialdom.” She had become an information soldier. The lecture presents and discusses Undset’s activities and impact in the years 1940-1942.

Guri Hjeltnes is professor emerita, historian, writer. She has been professor and provost at The Norwegian Business School and for 12 years director of The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies. She has published several books on Second World War, on everyday life, on the press, on children, on the Norwegian war sailors on the merchant marine. She has received several prizes for her academic work and writing.

Title: "Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Yugoslavia, 1928–1968"

This dialogue will center on Ivana Perica’s recent book, Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968, and its theoretical examination of the relationship between politics and literature, grounded in a specific spatio-temporal empirical context: a transnational network of socialist literary intellectuals organized around several Central European cultural centers—Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Zagreb and Belgrade—from the now largely forgotten interwar period to the celebrated moment of 1968.

Through a reading of the heterogeneous literary production of Central European socialist writers as a “rich container of positions, questions, and solutions,” the book aims not only to move beyond the often monochromatic depiction of Central European socialisms and their cultures, but also to historicize the relationship between politics and literature, as well as the theoretical apparatus through which literary studies and literary history address the “entanglements between political action and literary writing,” especially in the “second” and “third” worlds.

By invoking György Lukács’s call for tertium datur, the book explicitly explores a third path to socialism in literature that emerges through the negotiation between commitment and autonomy, revolution and evolution, realism and modernism. In this dialogue, we will focus in particular on how tertium datur was epitomized in the specific case of Yugoslavia’s continuum—from interwar debates on social literature to the aesthetic liberalization of the 1950s following the Tito–Stalin split—resulting in a cultural model that seeks not to mediate between East and West, but to articulate a new, post-imperial position: a Yugoslav socialist modernism rooted in continuity rather than rupture.

Ivana Perica is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL). She works on modern and contemporary literature and intellectual history, with particular interests in literature’s relation to political thought and culture. She is the author of The Private-Public Axis of the Political: The Disagreement Between Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière (2016, in German) and co-editor of The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920–2020 (2024)?

Mario Kikaš is a PhD fellow in sociology at Nord University and a member of the project Words and Violence: Literary Intellectuals between Democracy and Dictatorships, 1933–1952. His research focuses on the formation of literary institutions in socialist Yugoslavia. His most recent publication is a chapter on the socialist autonomy of literature in the edited volume The Routledge Handbook of Red World Literature (eds. Hunter Bivens and Anna Björk Einarsdóttir).

Title: ”The Writers and the Totalitarians: Scandinavian-speaking professional writers’ associations in the Nordic countries”

How did Nordic writers respond to cultural diplomatic ouvertures from the Third Reich and the Soviet Union during the 1930s and into the Second World War? And did they rely on a common Nordic framework and the appearance of a Nordic literary field in doing so? These are the main questions I aim to investigate in my new project, The Writers and the Totalitarians (WatTs) that I start up in May 2026. I do so by focusing on the Scandinavian-speaking professional writers’ associations in the Nordic countries—Dansk forfatterforening, Sveriges författareförening, Den norske forfatterforening, and Finlands svenska författareförening. 

While they represented the majority of Scandinavian-speaking writers and became important fora for shaping, legitimizing, and discussing the attitudes and actions of Scandinavian-speaking writers towards totalitarian regimes, historical research has paid little attention to the writers’ associations. Following the writers’ associations’ histories from 1933 to 1953, WatTs will pay close attention to transnational and intra-regional dynamics, and how writers and writers’ associations across the Scandinavian-speaking cultural space were forced to contemplate the same challenges. 

Tentatively, the project argues that in responding to these challenges the national writers’ associations and their memberships relied on a common Nordic framework and understanding created through frequent transnational and transregional interactions, strong democratically grounded regional bonds, and a common Nordic public sphere. In this presentaiton, I will introduce WatTs, present some of its historiographical starting points, and offer a few working hypotheses. 

Frederik Forrai Ørskov is currently an MSCA fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, with a project exploring how Scandinavian-speaking writers engaged cultural diplomatic initiatives from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from 1933 through the Second World War. He has recently published National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy: Culture, Politics, and Comradeship at the German-Nordic Writers’ House, 1934-1939 on Routledge (2025). Other publications include ‘Three Settings for German-Nordic Cultural Diplomacy: Nordic Writers, the deutch-nordische Schriftstellerhaus, and National Socialist Internationalism’ in Diplomatica, ‘National Socialist Cultural Diplomacy in Interwar Scandinavia. The German-Nordic Writers’ House in Popular Culture,’ with Stefan Nygård in National Identities, and ‘Editorial Introduction: Approaches to Transnational and International Fascism: Actors, Networks, and Ideas, 1919–1945’ in Fascism with Martin Kristoffer Hamre and Sabrina Proschmann.

Title: "The Static Field: Poetic Production in Times of War (1917–1989)"

Across the twentieth century, the U.S. wartime propaganda agencies mobilised poetry. Following the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, the Committee on Public Information published Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry of the World War (1917), a collection of speeches, poems, and lyrics assembled to justify U.S. participation in the conflict to domestic and international readerships (Creel, 1919; Van Wienen, 1997; Fischer, 2016). 

During the Second World War, the establishment of the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services began to conceal and consolidate the role of literary production within official information campaigns. Both agencies partially funded and relied upon the Writers’ War Board, a non-governmental agency that coordinated pro-war editorial content with newspapers and magazines, distributed writing prompts to thousands of affiliated writers, and commissioned specific writers in its network to produce material consistent with government messaging (Howell, 1971; Howell, 2019). 

In the early Cold War period, these practices were extended and refined through the covert involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in little magazines, cultural journals, private foundations, and creative writing programs (Saunders, 2013; Barnishel, 2015; Bennett, 2018; Spahr, 2018). These practices positioned poets within broader political agendas, demonstrating how cultural production could be mobilised to shape public opinion, reinforce state authority, and constrain literary autonomy. Poets were not directly coerced, but the CIA’s selective funding and commissioning of work limited the independence of poetic expression. 

This limitation raises three interrelated questions about freedom of speech and poetic autonomy during wartime: (1) why poetry was central to the State Department’s wartime information strategies; (2) how these strategies impacted poetic production in each conflict; and (3) the extent to which poets and readers may have been unwittingly conscripted into governmental projects without direct coercion. 

This paper seeks to address these questions by examining poetic production within what it conceives of as the static field: a sphere of poetical production and circulation where editorial and institutional choices, though appearing random, were shaped by political and institutional influence. In dialogue with the poetics of the open field, this analysis suggests that both poets and readers were positioned within an ongoing governance of meaning. From the First World War through the late Cold War, poetry emerges not outside state power, but within its often subtle and undetectable constraints. 

Bibliography 

• Barnhisel, G. (2015). Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. Columbia University Press. 
• Barnhisel, G. (2007). Perspectives USA and the Cultural Cold War: Modernism in Service of the State. Modernism/Modernity, 14(4). 
• Bennett, E. (2015). Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War. University of Iowa Press. 
• Creel, G., Ford, G. S., & Lane, F. K. (Eds.). (1917). Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry of the World War. Committee on Public Information, Government Printing Office.
• Creel, G. (1920). How We Advertised America. New York Harper & Brothers. Duncan, R. (1960). The Opening of the Field. New Directions. 
• Fischer, N. (2016). The Committee on Public Information and the Birth of US State Propaganda. Australasian Journal of American Studies, 35(1), 51–78. 
• Howell, R. T. (1971). The Writers’ War Board: Writers and World War II (Doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College). 
• Howell, R. T. (1997). “The Writers’ War Board: U.S. Domestic Propaganda in World War II.” The Historian, 59(4), 795–813. 
• Howell, T. (2019). Soldiers of the pen: The Writers' War Board in World War II. University of Massachusetts Press. 
• Olson, C. (1950; 2009, October 13). “Projective Verse.” Poetry Foundation. https:// www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse 
• Saunders, F. S. (2013). The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New Press. 
• Spahr, J. (2018). Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. Harvard University Press. 
• Van Wienen, M. (1997). Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War. Cambridge University Press. 
• Williams, W. C. (2009, October 13). “The Poem as a Field of Action” [Lecture, University of Washington]. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69393/the-poem-as-a-field-of-action

Jennifer Harvey is a PhD student at the University of Lille and at the University of St Andrews, where she is working on the American war poem.

Title: “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

Grete Weil’s German-language exile novel Der Weg zur Grenze (written 1944, published 2022) offers a striking literary laboratory for examining how culture wars pave the way for authoritarianism. Written in hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam - under conditions reminiscent of Anne Frank - Weil’s text dramatizes how political indifference, aesthetic inwardness, and cultivated carelessness allow authoritarian ideologies to take root long before violence becomes visible. The novel exposes how intellectuals and artists become entangled in mobilization not only through ideological conviction but through withdrawal: through the aestheticized fantasy that culture, art, and private life can remain untouched by politics.

Drawing on care ethics and the “Words and Violence” framework, this paper argues that Weil conceptualizes care as a volatile moral and political force. Care can anchor civic responsibility, attentiveness, and solidarity - but it can just as easily be distorted into paternalistic “protection,” nostalgic denial, or complicity through silence. The protagonist Monika Merton’s movement from private passivity to ethical awakening charts a gendered model of how civic consciousness forms under authoritarian pressure. By contrast, the poet Andreas von Cornides embodies the dangers of aesthetic retreat, ultimately recognizing that artistic practice cannot remain autonomous when democracy collapses.

By situating Weil’s German-Dutch narrative alongside debates on free speech and intellectual responsibility that resonate with the Scandinavian context of the 1930s, the paper shows how culture wars across Europe created fertile ground for authoritarian encroachment. Weil’s novel thus illuminates a broader historical pattern: the perilous ease with which cultural actors can become agents - or resisters - of democratic erosion. Her work speaks urgently to our present moment, in which renewed culture wars continue to test the resilience of liberal democracy.

Anna Lynn Dolman is a PhD candidate in German Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with Designated Emphases in Dutch Studies and Gender Studies. Her research explores the intersections of care ethics, exile literature, and translation in twentieth-century German- and Dutch-language writing. Her current dissertation project examines how narratives of care, responsibility, and cultural labor shape literary responses to political crisis, with particular attention to contexts of displacement in both the German and Dutch traditions.

She has presented her work at international conferences in the United States and Europe and collaborates with scholars in Berkeley and Cologne on projects related to exile studies, gender, psychoanalysis, and intellectual responsibility. Her recent and forthcoming work spans authorship and poetics, gender and psychoanalysis, translation studies, and cultural resistance across literature and film. She teaches courses on German language and literature, narratives of care ethics, and the poetics of exile writing.

Title: "The Ragnarok motif and subterranean beings in Dennis Gade Kofod’s Nancy (2015)"

This presentation examines how the Ragnarok motif and subterranean beings in Dennis Gade Kofod’s Nancy (2015) function as a literary re-enchantment of the post-political condition, while also being part of a broader movement in contemporary literature from post-politics to anti-politics. Drawing on Anton Jäger’s theory of the transition from post- to anti- and hyper-politics, I analyze how the novel reflects a time marked by global and violent protests against neoliberal hegemony—from Occupy and Indignados to left- and right-wing populist anti-institutional movements.

Nancy stages the small Danish island of Bornholm as emptied of resonance and political conflict: a late-capitalist “Airspace” where place spirit and social bonds have dissolved. In this vacuum, the subterranean beings emerge as a mythical and conspiratorial counterforce that combines purification fantasies, local primal power, and network logics. The novel thus articulates a rhetorical trope system that is recognizable from today's extreme political narratives: notions of hidden knowledge, corruption, antiliberal fantasies of catharsis.

By reading Nancy as both a local dystopia and a global diagnosis - and by relating it to Kofod's other writings and related developments in, among others, Houellebecq - it is shown how literature today not only comments on extreme politics, but itself participates in shaping the intellectual and affective structures that make anti-democratic impulses resonant in society and culture. The dissolution of place and the disorientation of classes become driving forces for anti-political violence, mythical thinking and the longing for collapse as a political solution.

Johannes Eske Andersen is a lecturer at Univerzity Karlovy, Prague.

Title: "A higher European world? Goethe, Zweig, Menasse"

My paper traces a genealogy of the “European world” from Goethe’s reflections on Weltliteratur to Stefan Zweig’s ideal of European fraternity and Robert Menasse’s post-national vision of a unified Europe. The point of departure is Goethe’s rarely foregrounded understanding of world literature as an argument for tolerance and peace among European nations during his lifetime. His reflections open a temporally and normatively charged conception of Europe—an emerging “higher world” of intellectuals devoted to the moral and cultural progress of humanity—which in turn allows one to imagine Europe as a moral horizon rather than merely a geographical or political entity.

This normative telos resurfaces in Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (“The World of Yesterday”; 1942), written during the Second World War and reflecting on a threatened Occidental humanism at a time when transnational exchange was increasingly undermined by nationalism and extremist ideologies. Zweig’s belief in a European community of writers and thinkers functions as a counter-imaginary to the renewed centrality of borders and national belonging. Yet his vision is ultimately overshadowed by the political collapse he witnesses, exposing both the aspirations and fragility of intellectual cosmopolitanism.

Robert Menasse, writing in a contemporary landscape marked by renewed skepticism toward supranational institutions and the resurgence of national sovereignty, reactivates and transforms this lineage. In Der Europäische Landbote (“The European Messenger”; 2012) and Die Welt von Morgen (“The World of Tomorrow”; 2022), he reframes the European telos as a post-national project of peace, justice, and human rights, explicitly grounded in the moral imperatives arising from the atrocities of the twentieth century. For Menasse, the project of Europe—much like Goethe’s and Zweig’s visions—remains an elite, future-oriented endeavor sustained by intellectual labour even when political conditions grow hostile to transnational solidarity.

By connecting these three configurations, the paper demonstrates how German-language literary intellectuals repeatedly turn to Europe as a normative counter-concept precisely at those historical junctures when nationalist and exclusionary politics regain strength.

Thomas Siemerink is a PhD student at the Department of German & Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He previously studied German and Intercultural Communication at Utrecht University, as well as Modern German Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests focus on European identity, migration and interculturality in both 20th-century and contemporary German and Dutch literature and media.

Title: "Bound to be British – The Rebinding of Codex Sinaiticus at the British Museum in 1935"

In the 1930s, a public debate about what it meant to be English also led to a definition of “typically English” aesthetics, art, and design. In a nostalgic reinvigoration of the Arts and Crafts movement, politicians and intellectuals idealized the rolling hills and rural workshops of the medieval vernacular and their products, setting them against the backdrop of industrialized cities that were producing a culture deemed too “Jewish” and “modern.”

In 1933, the world’s most famous ancient bible, the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, was acquired by the British Museum and set to be rebound by Arts and Crafts bookbinder Douglas Cockerell. In the midst of this cultural shift of English nationalism, the museum executives, amongst them the philologists and biblical scholars at the Department of Manuscripts and the museum trustees, a pool of culturally conservative politicians and intellectuals, discussed the rebinding of the codex for nearly two years. 

The institutional binding documentation reveals that the rebinding became a means to make an ancient codex appear less “Eastern Mediterranean,” less heterogeneous, and instead to represent “medieval Englishness,” modern Protestantism, and elite decorum to the broader public. Binding elements, such as the wooden book boards, the leather for the book spine, and the tooled decoration, became hotly debated issues. Repeatedly, the museum executives racialized binding components as too foreign, not “Ancient Christian” enough, or too Celtic. 

This paper will demonstrate how the rebinding of this iconic manuscript became a means to negotiate English national identity in the Interwar Period. Furthermore, the assertion of “Englishness” upon an ancient Christian codex is a fascinating example of the interconnectedness of museum culture and how intellectuals at cultural institutions use history and religion to shape national identity.

Fridtjof Leemhuis is a PhD student in Book History at MF – Vitenskaplig høyskole, Oslo. He is interested in bookbinding, the nostalgia and aesthetics of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Interwar Period, and the ways that ancient Christian manuscripts are used to negotiate modern national identities.

Title: "Nazism, socialism and the contemporary historical revisionism. A study in political theory

Over the last few decades, there have been many historical revisionisms regarding Nazism, the vast majority of which been socially ignored. However, one of the most influential in recent years is the view that Nazism, however anti-Marxist it may have been, still possessed a number of fundamental characteristics that made it a form of socialism and, therefore, a left-wing ideology. Although for a long time this had been a minority social opinion, the truth is that in recent years this opinion has become considerably more widespread in society –above all in the Spanish-speaking countries-, largely due to the massive diffusion of fake news through social media and, also, by the rise of Think Tanks that promote it.

Based on this, the present paper suggests that this particular historical revisionism arises due to the existence of a social conceptual void regarding basic concepts such as ‘socialism’ or ‘left-wing’, which is further deepened by the lack of an adequate systematically explicit argument that denies this link. All of this would create a space of ambiguity that would be exploited by far-right intellectuals for political gain. 

For this reason, the following research will use the methods of political theory to provide, first, a minimal definition of socialism -as Norberto Bobbio understood it- that will serve as a criterion for analysis and, second, a systematically explicit argument that reasonably establishes the incompatibility between Nazism and socialism, based on the following three differences: the conception of the State, of the society and of the economy.

Camilo Soto Suárez is a pre-doctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Society at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he is developing a thesis on the political philosophy of liberal socialism in the political thought of Norberto Bobbio and John Rawls. He graduated in History from Diego Portales University, Chile (2021), and Master’s Degree in Political Theory and Democratic Culture from Complutense University of Madrid (2022). He was a teaching assistant at Diego Portales University (2018-2021) and a member of the Observatory of Recent History of Chile and Latin America (2020-2023). 

His lines of research are modern and contemporary political theory and philosophy, focusing mainly on the contractualism and neo-contractualism of Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Rawls; theories of democracy (specifically, Norberto Bobbio’s democratic theory); and liberal thought in the history of political ideas.

Title: "Literature as Resistance: The Anti-totalitarian Potential of Narratives in Svetlana Alexievich’s Poetics"

For several decades, Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich has been giving voice to the voiceless, to women and men who lived through the Soviet-era repression and whose histories and experiences have been continuously silenced, marginalized, and obscured by the official master narratives and hegemonic memory scripts. By chronicling “what might not otherwise be heard”, Alexievich’s cycle Voices of Utopia reflects on the multiple, ongoing legacies of Soviet totalitarianism, as well as on the complex potential of narratives to perpetuate and challenge totalitarian discourses and practices. 

In dialogue with the narrative hermeneutics approach (Meretoja, 2018), in this presentation I will explore how Alexievich’s oeuvre articulates anti-totalitarian potential of literature and narratives. I will  focus specifically on the narratives’ capacities to a) perpetuate mechanisms of systemic violence and repression; b) expand and constrict agency,  space of experience and horizon of expectation (Koselleck, 2004; Meretoja, 2018); c) provide nuanced accounts of widespread complicity and  forms of “impure” resistance (Mihai, 2022); d) expand and constrict narrative in-betweens; e) create spaces of “mnemonic care” (Mihai, 2022) , in which societies can engage in open-ended reflection on their past, present, and future possibilities.

By drawing attention to narratives’ potential for complicity and resistance, Alevievich's novels testify to the ethical potential of literature, its capacity to resist totalitarianism and disclose alternative forms of remembrance and being-in-the-world with others. 

Kseniya Fiaduta is a doctoral researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain). Her PhD dissertation examines the relationship between literature, ethics and history in Svetlana Alexievich’s cycle Voices of Utopia. Her research interests include narrative hermeneutics, memory studies, the ethical potential of literature, and memories of totalitarianism. 

Title: "Losing the Thread of Reality in Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill"

The paper explores Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill (2020) as a literary exploration of contemporary disorientation under conditions of media saturation, internal instability, and competing frameworks of explanation. The novel follows a writer in residency in Berlin, where different forms of suspicion may destabilise his sense of orientation.

The paper proposes reading the novel as a formal and affective experiment in losing interpretive ground. Its focus is on how the novel makes disorientation its method because it tends to draw both narrator and reader into an increasingly unstable field of perception. The novel’s structure and a sophisticated network of historical and cultural references create an interesting interpretive field in which meaning is repeatedly distorted. These formal strategies encourage a mode of reading marked by uncertainty and over-interpretation which mirrors broader cultural conditions in which truth claims circulate alongside conspiratorial logic. For instance, Berlin functions as an archive that amplifies these pressures, effectively linking personal anxiety to broader historical and medial frameworks. 

Attention is given to the narrator’s encounters with media-saturated forms of rhetoric, which foreground contemporary techniques of persuasion, provocation, and visibility. The paper argues that Red Pill is most insightful when it shows how the desire for explanation strengthens into a narrative reflex. The novel poses an unsettled yet productive question about how reading and narration proceed when coherence is no longer easily secured.

Richard Gramanich Štromajer is a third-year PhD candidate at Matej Bel University in Slovakia and is currently completing his dissertation. His research centres on how readers make meaning from literary texts, with a particular focus on pragmatic interpretation and the multidimensional effects of understatement. Alongside this, he is interested in narrative techniques in dystopian and politically inflected fiction, especially works that draw on historical events, cultural, and social tensions. During his doctoral studies, he has published internationally and presented his work at conferences in Slovakia and abroad. His broader objective is to bring together close reading with pragmatic and discourse-orientated approaches to describe how literary texts guide interpretation, manage ambiguity, and shape what can be said indirectly as much as directly.

Title: "The Psychic Grip of Authority: Effenberger on Transforming the Superego’s Cathexis"

In the late 1960s, the Czech surrealist poet and philosopher Vratislav Effenberger developed a theoretical project centered on “transforming the cathexis of the superego.” The project reactivates interwar surrealist critiques of fascism and Stalinism and draws on Freud’s group psychology, while responding to the political and cultural conjuncture of the 1960s and to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. Effenberger examines how a non-repressive social order could become thinkable and sustainable not only through institutional change, but also through a transformation of the subject’s intrapsychic relation to internalized authority. His key claim is that imagination, understood in a specifically surrealist sense, must decisively enter this relation; imagination as an analogical, image-based, “poetic” mode of thinking.

A central contribution of Effenberger’s surrealist approach is his insistence on imagination’s critical dimension. Imagination can be mobilized manipulatively, intensifying the persuasive power of fantasies, tropes, and images and amplifying what we would today describe as conspiratorial narratives or “fake news.” Yet, according to Effenberger, imagination is also a critical force. By cultivating poetic thinking and play, it can loosen the superego’s repressive function. Rather than changing the superego itself, Effenberger proposes transforming the subject’s relation to it. This shift, which he calls a “transformation of the superego’s cathexis,” is meant to loosen authority’s psychic “grip” and deprive authoritarian tendencies of phantasmatic and affective support.
The paper will reconstruct Effenberger’s proposal and suggest how it can help account for the emotional and imaginative appeal of contemporary authoritarian tendencies.

Mgr. Šimon Wikstrøm Svěrák, Ph.D. (*1985; sverak@flu.cas.cz) is an affiliated fellow at the Department for the Study of Modern Czech Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, CAS. His research focuses on (post)avant-garde theory, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. His recent publications include a critical edition of Vratislav Effenberger’s previously unpublished book Models and Methods. On the Dialectics of the Creation of Idea Models and Epistemic Methods [Modely a metody. K dialektice tvorby ideových modelů a poznávacích metod] (2024), the co-editorship (with F. Dryje and L. Šerý) of Arguments in the Compass: Surrealist Inquiries 1951–1986 [Hádky v kompasu: Surrealistické ankety 1951–1986] (2023), as well as articles such as “Vratislav Effenberger's Conception of the Role of Imagination in Ideological Thought” (Studies in East European Thought, 2024) and “Vratislav Effenberger’s Theory of Idea Models” [Teorie ideových modelů Vratislava Effenbergera] (Philosophical Magazine [Filosofický časopis], 2025).