Confronting Racism, Authoritarianism & Anti-Democratic Forces: Lessons from Russia, Germany, Europe

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Poisoned Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny, currently lying in a Berlin hospital for treatment, provides only the latest image of the nexus of Germany and Russia in matters relating to authoritarian oppression of minorities and opposition groups. Yet their intertwined history of racism, authoritarianism, and persecution of ethnic minorities has been the object of intellectual study for decades: Hannah Arendt, Ernst Nolte, Jurgen Habermas, and more recently, Timothy Snyder are some of the leading scholars who have elucidated the ways in which these cultures intersect in both promoting and confronting mono-ethnic authoritarianism. Part cautionary tale, part success story, this course examines select case studies from the polities of Russia and Germany (with shorter units on Poland, Hungary, and Belarus) in their ongoing struggles with authoritarian, racist, and anti-democratic legacies. Given notorious histories of oppression and persecution of ethnic, religious, and other minorities--haunting images of Soviet gulags, German concentration camps, and of the KGB and the Gestapo spring all too readily to mind--these countries provide potentially valuable lessons in thinking about racism and police brutality in our own time. In the postwar and post-Unification/post-Soviet periods, these countries continue to face these issues in stark and sometimes creative ways--with varying degrees of success. We will be concerned to respect both the historical and cultural particularity of these cultures, and to draw upon this material to enrich our thinking about anti-racist reform in the contemporary world. We draw upon a variety of materials: historical documents, constitutional studies, film and television, literature, political and sociological data, journalistic interventions, including social media.