Against the Stream: The Danube, the Video, and the Non-biodegradables of Europe

Dragan Kujundžić

Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies

3.12.2025, 18:30

Conference Room of the Center for Urban History

In 1942 Martin Heidegger held a seminar on Hölderlin’s poem The Ister (the Greek name of the river Danube). In 2004 two Australian filmmakers and philosophers, David Barison, and Daniel Ross, made a film about this seminar and interviewed a number of leading philosophers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Bernard Stiegler, on the topic of the Danube and the history of Europe, taking into account the historical year 1942 when the seminar was written which coincided with the project of "the Final Solution" of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

In 2001, Dragan Kujundžić made his own film, Frozen Time, Liquid Memories, about the Racija in Novi Sad in 1942, a pogrom of some 1500 Jews and Serbs. During the event, we will watch excerpts from this film, which includes an interpretation and visual quotes from The Ister. We will also discuss the implications of both films for thinking about the Danube, the ontology of Europe, and the ethics of geopolitics and topography. We will also look at the works of Samuel Weber, Aleksandar Tišma (specifically the novels The Use of Man and The Book About Blam), the Holocaust historian Pavle Šosberger, (Šosberger is featured in the film about the Racija) against some nationalist implications of Heidegger's seminar (as well as his recently published Black Notebooks), against both old and more recent nationalist appropriation and use of the Danube as a site of war crime ad genocide. Finally, we will turn to the construction and invention of national and European topography in philosophy and literature written “after” the Holocaust.

The lecturer will also invite us to reflect on Russia's current war against Ukraine and how Ukraine, as a Danube country, goes against the tide of Heidegger's interpretation of the Danube and the Black Sea. The image of ostriv Zmiinyi, located at the mouth of the Danube, will be the final figure in this conversation.

post picture — Dragan Kujundžić
Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies
Professor in the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida, with teaching affiliations in Film and Media Studies, Germanic and Slavic Studies, European Studies, as well as Religion. He is the author of numerous edited volumes such as *Baktinsky sbornik 1 and 2* (1991, 1993), on Jacques Derrida (2000, 2009) and J. Hillis Miller (2005) and a documentary film about round up of Vel d’Hiv and the racija pogrom in Novi Sad. His latest essay, “vEmpire 2.0. How to Teach Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” was published by the MLA (2025). He is the editor of a forthcoming issue on “Ukraine and Jews,” East European Jewish Affairs, Rutledge, 2026.

Credits

Cover Image: Screenshot, Dragan Kujundžić, Frozen Time, Liquid Memories, (2012), Danube at Novi Sad, Serbia, Monument to the Racija Pogrom in 1942.