Black Sea Region in War and under Occupation: Diversifying Sources for Teaching and Research

The workshop focuses on individual experiences of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath on the northern Black Sea coast. The main emphasis will be on visual sources and ego-documents, and on their potential for teaching and research. These still undervalued types of sources can help not only to fill in the gaps in the reconstruction of the course of historical events, but also in exploring agency and subjectivities, mechanisms of social interaction, processes of decision-making, biographical trajectories, histories of emotions, bodily aspects, impacts of climate and weather, everyday life dimensions, and many more. Furthermore, such sources can also bring to light the actors previously understudied in wartime contexts: families, professions and corporations, friendly circles, and informal networks of solidarity. Fragmentary and decontextualized, ego-documents and visual sources are often dispersed and marginalized in the funds of big state archives. On the other hand, in the case of private possession, these sources are threatened by a lack of expertise and attention, loss of meaning in the event of intergenerational splits, and a focus on commercial gain—often leading to the loss of metadata and limited access for researchers. Especially when the ego-documents tell about the wartime and extreme violence, their preservation, and circulation depended on socially constructed (and legally defined) issues of guilt and im/morality, belonging and marginality, honor, disgrace, and patriotism. We aim to explore the potential of lesser-known, censored, marginalized, or undervalued sources and to enhance their use in teaching and research on the Second World War in a special region of the Black Sea.

The Black Sea region is especially relevant in this sense because the research and teaching of the context with multiplicity of languages, cultures, and ethnicities, as well as different experiences of proximity to the frontline and occupation power centers, and multiple temporalities of occupations and genocidal practices, require joint efforts of translation, discussion, and confrontation of diverse sources. Multiple practices of social and political re/bordering, migrations, and deportations taking place during and in the wake of WWII impacted personal narrations, documentations, and witnessing. A combination of ego-documents and visual sources can provide a productive match when, for example, silenced and erased aspects can be "accidentally" present in the source as unintended "background objects" or "blurted out" in the personal narration. Focus on the northern part of the Black Sea region can be productive for further development of relatively young disciplines, such as environmental history or borderlands studies, as well as for creative comparisons and entangled histories beyond the existing political borders and established macro-regional divisions (for example, going beyond "post-Soviet space", "Balkans", or "Eastern and Southern Europe").    

This one-day, practically oriented workshop aims to bridge research and educational agendas by inviting scholars to share primary sources from their research archives, while also invigorating methodological discussions centered on the specificity of the chosen sources. We ask participants to prepare a short 15-minute presentation on selected primary source/s. It can be a single source or several. The list of sources from all the participants will be made available beforehand, so that we can prepare for a fruitful discussion.

Particular attention is invited to be paid to the following categories of sources:

• photographs (documenting crimes and post-war justice, perpetrator photography, trophy photography);
• artistic (creative) works;
• visual components in press and propaganda;
• personal official documents (ID cards, ownership documents, wills, personal financial documents, etc);
• ego-documents (diaries, letters, memoirs, essays, etc);
• testimonies (courts' statements and transcripts, oral history interviews, etc).

The workshop is a part of the project "Digital Resources for Teaching the Black Sea Region", supported by the University of St. Gallen. It aims to develop an open compendium of educational materials for teaching the modern history of the region in a format of primary sources and research modules, published online on the educational platform REESOURCES.

The workshop's working language will be English. 

The organizers are covering the participants' travel and accommodation expenses. 

Contacts: 

• Nadia Skokova, Center for Urban History, n.skokova@lvivcenter.org.ua 
• Ivanna Cherchovych, Center for Urban History, i.cherchovych@lvivcenter.org.ua

Co-organizers: 

• Center for Urban History (Lviv, Ukraine)
• Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust (Bucharest, Romania)
• Center for Crimean Studies of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine)
• The Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation (Lviv, Ukraine)
• CERCEC (Paris, France)

The workshop is organized with the support of the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe of St Gallen University.

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Credits

Cover Image: Draft of Oleksa Tykhyi's complaint to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, January 12, 1973 / collection of Yevhen Fialko / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History