The great historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlögel offers with his new book Das sowjetische Jahrhundert: Archäologie einer untergegangenen Welt (The Soviet Century: Archeology of a Lost World, German) a new perspective. We have always known a lot about how “the system” works, far less about the routines of life in extraordinary times. But every empire has its sound, its fragrance, its rhythm, which survives even when the empire has ceased to exist.

Thus, a hundred years after the 1917 Revolution and a quarter of a century after the end of the Soviet Union, the panorama of a unique empire emerges without which we can not understand “the time after” in which we live today. On 24 September 2017, the talk was led by the longtime ORF correspondent Susanne Scholl. Watch the full debate in German:

Cover picture: A Soviet star with cycle and hammer – once the symbol of the Soviet Union – hangs on the wall of the so-called “red barracks” in Frankfurt Oder, 12 July 2003. No investors have been found for the location. When the Soviet Union withdrew forces from East Germany, they left behind barracks, military bases and training grounds and swathes of land that were once restricted areas. In Brandenburg, there are more than 40,000 hectares of land, 15,000 of which has been contaminated with munition or is forest. Photo: Patrick Pleul / dpa / picturedesk.com

Vienna Humanities Festival

The Vienna Humanities Festival, organised by the IWM, Wien Museum and Time to Talk, is a series of around 40 Events (in German and English) which took place from 22 till 24 September 2017 for the second time at the Wien Museum, TU Wien, Evangelische Volksschule and Radiokulturhaus.

The topic of 2017 “Revolution!” ranged from Russia in 1917, the 1968 movement and the Fall in 1989, to the most recent upheavals in the Arab countries and in the Ukraine.