Abstract

Abstract: The paper will examine how popular culture appeals to the senses of its consumers in order to achieve specific memory effects. The context for this exploration are cities in east-central Europe that experienced large-scale population loss and transfer after World War II, such as L’viv, Wrocław, Kraków or Kaliningrad. The paper will look at how popular cultural forms, from detective novels and guidebooks to festivals and restaurants, allow the present inhabitants of these cities to access the lost, multicultural pasts of their cities through the recreation of the sensory experience of inhabiting those cities, and also of the mnemonic effects that are linked to that sensory experience.

Bio:Uilleam Blacker is Lecturer in Comparative East European Culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His main research interests lie in cultural memory and contemporary culture in Poland, Ukraine and Russia. He is currently completing a book, entitled Memory, Forgetting and the Legacy of post-1945 Displacement in Eastern Europe, which deals with contemporary cultural memory processes in cities that experienced drastic population losses and resettlement as a result of World War II.