The concept of “region branding” originates from marketing studies and has recently entered cultural history. Approaches investigating the “branding” of places have been applied to cities, landscapes, and regions in the framework of the history of state- and nation-formation, tourism, urban spheres, and landscapes, which build on visual and spatial turns. At the prospective conference, we aim to explore the concept in a broader comparative framework focusing on East-Central Europe. We suggest considering “region branding” as a set of knowledge-making and knowledge-circulating practices which attempt to construct and disseminate the “identity” of a certain space and people related to it. These practices were integral parts of state and nation-building strategies, especially when directed at contested regions.
The re-ordering of East-Central Europe’s political maps after World Wars I and II did not lead to smooth transformations into new political entities, nor to a seamless integration of newly annexed territories into certain states. Shifts in state ideologies and therefore territorial imaginations evoked challenges to legitimize rule, but also to bring the state and a respective region closer together in a period of transition. Regions were therefore “(re-)branded” after territorial annexations and regime changes. Specifically, this concerns nationally and ethnically diverse borderlands which experienced frequent geopolitical shifts in the course of World Wars I and II and their aftermath.
We propose to systematically examine practices of “branding” and (multiple) “re-branding” of micro and macroregional spaces after redrawing state borders. Such a focus will allow us to discuss how political epistemologies were translated into top-down and bottom-up actions in different spheres, from political and economical to social and cultural ones, and at various levels, from state to regional and local ones. To “(re-)brand” places, with special considerations of regions, the new regimes invented and applied new tools according to the ideologies of the larger state and nation-building projects. The conference is an invitation to reflect on the variety of such tools which served the production and circulation of knowledge and embraced different types of media, including those considered particularly “modern” in the first half of the 20th century such as photographic surveys, touring, regional festivals, museums, exhibitions, radio broadcasting, and films.
We want to direct our attention to regions of East-Central Europe that were “(re-)branded” in the course of the transitions occurring after World Wars I and II. The East-Central European regions are understood broadly and diversely here. They include micro- and macroregions of both real and imagined character as well as their quasi-colonial extensions, ideas, or notional equivalents, all of them replete with ideological and emotional meanings of positive and negative connotation.
Thursday, 13 February
10:00–10:15
Introduction
10:15–12:00
Panel 1: Re-Branding "Authenticity"
Chair: Piotr Szlanta (PAN Vienna)
Christopher Wendt (ELTE Budapest/EUI Florence): Reinforcing the Region: Reinvesting (German) Tyrolean Particularity in Post-Habsburg Austria
Martin Rohde (University of Vienna): Negotiating "Authenticity". Polish and Ukrainian Re-Branding of the Eastern Carpathians in the Interwar Period
Stefanie Eisenhuth (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam/University of Greifswald): Inventing East Germany. Narratives of the GDR in Travel Literature
12:15–14:00
Panel 2: Re-Branding Modernity
Chair: Magdalena Baran-Szołtys (University of Vienna)
Maciej Czerwiński (JU Kraków) – A Sea Oriented Nation. Dalmatia in the Cultural and Political Imagination after World War I (The Publications of the Adriatic Guard and New Europe)
Jagoda Wierzejska (University of Warsaw): “Poles to the sea!” Rebranding Pomerania in the Dominant Polish Discourse of the Interwar Period
Matthew D. Pauly (Michigan State University): Out of the Tempest: Post-Revolutionary Odesa, Soviet Ukraine, and the Refashioning of Children
15:00–16:45
Panel 3: Visualizing Regional Differences
Chair: Christoph Augustynowicz (University of Vienna)
Klaus-Jürgen Hermanik (University of Graz): (Re-)Branding of 'Swabian Turkey'
Elisa-Maria Hiemer (Freie Universität Berlin) & Tamás Székely (Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg): Crafting Nations Through Regions: Gender and Space in the 1921 Plebiscite Propaganda of Burgenland and Silesia
Melinda Harlov-Csortán (Apor Vilmos Katolikus Főiskola): Burgenland and Its Hungarian Counterpart After WWII, and Especially After Mid-1950s
17.15–18.45
Keynote I: (Re-)Branding Mountain Regions: The Promotion of Carpathian “Nativeness” in Interwar Poland
Speaker: Patrice Dabrowski (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute)
Chair: Dietlind Hüchtker (University of Vienna)
Friday, 14 February
9.45–10.45
Keynote II: Yalta as a Russian Pleasure Periphery. The Branding of Crimea’s Southern Coast Through Tourism (19th/20th Century)
Speaker: Kerstin S. Jobst (University of Vienna)
Chair: Alois Woldan (University of Vienna)
11:15–13:00
Panel 4: Hierarchies (Of Power, Officialdom, and Spatiality) in Re-Branding
Chair: Börries Kuzmany (University of Vienna)
Marty Manor Mullins (Flathead Valley Community College): Rebranding from Above & Below: Eastern Slovakia’s Hungarian & Greek Catholic Minorities
Jaroslav Ira (Charles University Prague): Branding the Regions of National Preeminence: Chodsko/South Bohemia in Czechoslovakia and Góry Świętokrzyskie/Sandomierskie in Poland (1918-1939)
Felix Brucker (Zentrum Erinnerungskultur, University of Regensburg): Dogheads. The Chodsko as a Special Case in the Rebranding of the Czechoslovak Borderlands After the Second World War
13:45–15:15
Panel 5: Mnemotechnics of Re-Branding
Chair: Mariia Shynkarenko (IWM Vienna)
Duygu Yayla Eldem (Istanbul Esenyurt University) & A. Emre Eldem (Istanbul Esenyurt University): Old Names, New Lands: Mnemonic Continuity in the Renaming of Greek Refugee Settlements
Anthony Hoyte-West (Independent scholar): From Habsburg Bukovina to Romanian Bucovina: Literary Perspectives on Spatial Rebranding in Selected Works by Gregor von Rezzori
Miroslav Malinović (University of Banja Luka): Reimagining Banja Luka: Architectural Transformation and Spatial Rebranding of a Former Austro-Hungarian Provincial City in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
15:15–15:45
Concluding Discussion
