Columbia University in the City of New York

Harriman Institute

Events

Date

Location

Book Talk. Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism by Slavenka Drakulic
Register for Zoom Webinar Watch on YouTube

 

Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a book talk with Slavenka Drakulić, author of Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism (Penguin Books, 2021), an evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. This event is part of the Collective Memory and Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe series organized by Harriman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Čarna Pištan, and will be introduced by Aleksandar Bošković co-director of the East Central European Center.

An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism, takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection.

Totalitarianism did not die overnight and democracy did not completely transform Eastern European societies. Looking closely at artefacts and day to day life, from the health insurance cards to national monuments, and popular films to cultural habits, alongside pieces of growing nationalism and Brexit, these pieces of political reportage dive into the reality of a Europe still deeply divided.

 

Slavenka Drakulić was born in Croatia in 1949. The author of fourteen books of fiction and non-fiction translated in many languages, she has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and numerous publications around the world.

 

 

 

Event Video

logo