Looking at the history of the 20th as we live the 21st, we're forced to pose an old question anew: How is totalitarian evil possible<\/em>? How can a totalitarian leader acquire the kind of power that makes it possible to carry out the most gruesome cruelties on a mass scale? Germans faced this question after the Second World War. In time Russians will have to face this question as well. To live as an ordinary person in a totalitarian regime is to be implicated in it, to find oneself in a situation where the line between victim and oppressor, in V\u00e1clav Havel's words, \u201cruns de facto <\/em>through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.\u201d What, then, are the meanings of complicity, resistance, responsibility, guilt? Ukrainian art curator Vasyl Cherepanyn recently wrote, \u201cRussian society has become an anti-society as all the civil society institutions and representatives are now labelled \u2018foreign agents,\u2019 expelled from the country or imprisoned.\u201d In this situation, what can ordinary people do? What can civil society do? And what must<\/em> they-and we-do?<\/p>\n Marci Shore<\/strong> is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Yale University. She teaches modern European intellectual history. Her research and her books and articles focus on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is a regular visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.<\/p>\n Dessy Gavrilova <\/strong>is a Vienna-based Bulgarian cultural entrepreneur, curator, cultural consultant, and drama author. In Sofia, Gavrilova directed the socio-cultural centre The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate. In Vienna, she founded the European Network of Houses for Debate Time to Talk. In 2016, Gavrilova initiated and co-founded (together with Vienna Museum and IWM) the Vienna Humanities Festival<\/p>\n Tessa Szyszkowitz <\/strong>is an Austrian journalist and author. She writes for Austrian and German publications such as Falter & Tagesspiegel, she is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Marci Shore and Dessy Gavrilova GUILTY PERPETRATORS, RESPONSIBLE VICTIMS Can whole nations be judged when their leaders go to war? Looking at the history of the 20th as we live the 21st, we\u2019re forced to pose an old question anew: How is totalitarian evil possible? How can a totalitarian leader […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":4904,"template":"","format":[29],"meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"schwerpunkt":[43],"class_list":["post-4903","kreisky_event","type-kreisky_event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","schwerpunkt-internationale-politik-europa-und-sicherheit","format-podiumsdiskussion"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n