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Paper short abstract

In this paper I juxtapose the recreation of socialist rituals in eastern Germany as critique and the failed attempt to tame ethnic tensions through a "traditional" dance house organised by a Catholic NGO in Hungary to explore the potential of critique and its cooptation.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I juxtapose two very different forms of heritage. First, I look at the recreation of old socialist rituals in eastern Germany as an expression of political critique staged amid a political climate of devaluation. As such the festivities produced membership in a collective of eastern Germans that could be read as a political critique, but as polysemic symbols also become adhesive for new forms of critique. In the second part of the paper; I turn to a táncház event organised in a school in Hungary amid of ethnic tensions. Despite its integrative intention, and efforts the atmosphere remained rather shallow and segregated. Originally táncház events were popularised in the 1970s and 80s as a tolerated alternative to – or even critique of – state socialist culture. Drawing mainly on Hungarian minority traditions in Romania, the events celebrated an imagined past of a happy peasantry. At first this movement’s political future remained open; however, by the 1980s the fusion of peasant ideology and irredentist nationalism became ever more obvious Despite this orientation the event was not enough to draw in the majority residents. This failing expressed the lingering of ethnic tension or even thickening atmosphere of segregation. In my talk I offer the notion of political atmospheres to understand these processes that do not not fit into a straightforward narrative or neat categories of democratic and authoritarian, liberal and conservative, or good and bad.