Irina Scherbakova

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Moscow, 2019

Irina Lasarewna Scherbakowa ( Russian Ирина Лазаревна Щербакова , German transcription Irina Lasarewna Shtscherbakowa , scientific transliteration Irina Lazarevna Ščerbakova ; * 1949 in Moscow ) is a Russian German philologist and cultural scientist .

Life

Irina Scherbakowa was born to Jewish parents. She studied history and German and received her doctorate in German in 1972 . In the following years she mainly worked as a translator for German fiction and as a freelance journalist . In addition, she worked as an editor for the literary magazines Sowjetliteratur and Literaturnaja gaseta and the daily newspaper Nesawisimaja Gazeta .

From 1996 to 2006 she was a lecturer at the Center for Narrated History and Visual Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow (RGGU) ( Russian Росси́йский государственный гуманитарный университет ). Scherbakowa is the coordinator of the Russian history competition for young people, which has been organized annually by the human rights society Memorial since 1999. Memorial was founded in 1987, Scherbakowa was one of the initiators of what is now the most important human rights organization in Russia and has been campaigning for the crimes of Stalinism in the former Soviet Union ever since .

Scherbakowa's research areas include oral history , totalitarianism , Stalinism , Gulag and Soviet special camps on German soil after 1945, questions of cultural memory in Russia and the politics of memory. Scherbakowa began a collection of tape interviews with victims of Stalinism in the late 1970s, and since 1991 she has been researching the archives of the KGB . For her film Alexander Men . Driven Hunt for Sunlight (WDR 1993) she was awarded the German Catholic Journalism Prize in 1994.

With her project "Human fates under totalitarianism - Russia and Germany 1925–1955", Scherbakowa was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1994/1995 . The theme of their colloquium in March 1995 was: “Memory and Document. Problems with the historical sources in Stalinism research ”. She has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Buchenwald Memorial in Weimar since 1999 . She is a member of the international advisory board of the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin, of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and a board member of the Marion Dönhoff Foundation . In 2004 she was invited to the Berlin International Literature Festival. She was also a Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, visiting professor at the University of Salzburg and at the Jena Center for the History of the 20th Century. Scherbakowa has been an honorary member of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL) since 2010, and has been on the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) since 2012 . In an interview in June 2013, Scherbakowa told about her grandparents and what her mother experienced in her childhood. She said of herself that she grew up asking her grandmother: What spared us?

Irina Scherbakowa (2015)

At the invitation of the Körber Foundation , Scherbakowa and the Eastern European historian Karl Schlögel met in spring 2015 for a long conversation about the history of Russia . The conversation was recorded and later published as a book entitled "The Russia Reflex". In it, Scherbakova criticizes the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union there was no reappraisal of the past in Russia and that Russia has been rewriting its history in a propaganda way since 2000. For example, the German-Soviet War - referred to in Russia as the “Great Patriotic War” - is glorified as a glorious victory, while the horrors of the war are hidden. The Soviet era is viewed very positively by young Russians and the history of Soviet terror is suppressed. With the annexation of Crimea by Russia , it became clear to Scherbakova that the enlightening and democratic forces could not prevail. "It felt as if the very long epoch of the Enlightenment in Russia had come to a temporary end. (...) Our propaganda is preventing the Enlightenment, that's really tragic."

Honors

Fonts (selection in German translation)

  • Only a miracle could save us. Life and survival under Stalin's terror . Translated from the Russian by Susanne Scholl. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
  • (Ed.): Russia's memory. Young people discover forgotten life stories . Preface by Fritz Pleitgen . Edition Körber Foundation, Hamburg 2003.
  • (Ed.): Troubled times. Life stories from Russia and Germany . Preface by Wolfgang Büscher . Hamburg 2006.
  • Torn memory: dealing with Stalinism and World War II in today's Russia . Göttingen 2010.
  • with Volkhard Knigge (Ed.) Gulag. Traces and evidence 1929–1956 . Wallstein, Göttingen, Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-1050-6 .
  • Prisons and camps in the Soviet system of rule . In: German Bundestag (ed.): Materials of the Enquete Commission “Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity”, Vol. VI: All-German forms of remembrance of the two German dictatorships and their victims. Forms of Memory - Archive , Nomos-Verl.-Ges., Frankfurt am Main, Baden-Baden, 1999, pp. 567–622.
  • Our sixties. In: J. John, D. v. Laak, Joachim von Puttkamer (Ed.): Zeitgeschichten. Miniatures in Lutz Niethammer's manner. Essen 2005, pp. 226-237.
  • Chechnya’s memory. In: Memorial, Heinrich Böll Foundation (ed.): To know that you are still alive. Children from Chechnya tell stories. Berlin 2006, pp. 13–24.
  • Memory on the defensive. Students in Russia about the gulag and repression. In: Eastern Europe. Write the camp. Volume 57, No. 6, 2007, pp. 409-420.
  • Continuity or return? Images of Stalinism. In: H.-J. Czech (Ed.): Art and Propaganda in the Controversy of Nations 1930–1945. Dresden 2007, pp. 450–456.
  • 1917-1937-2007. The legacy of Stalinism. In: N. Schreiber (Ed.): Russia. The Caucasian vicious circle or flawless democracy . Klagenfurt 2008, pp. 339–353.
  • My father's hands. A Russian family story. Droemer, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-426-27710-2 .
  • Post Comment. In: Vasily Grossman : The Hell of Treblinka , Vienna 2020 (= VWI -Studienreihe Volume 5), ISBN 978-3-7003-2177-4 , pp 57-69.

Web links

Commons : Irina Scherbakowa  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Russian journalist Scherbakowa receives Ossietzky Prize , at Deutsche Welle . Journal for the Franco-German Dialogue Documents-Documents , autumn 2014. ISSN  0012-5172 p. 104.
  2. ↑ Irina Scherbakowa in conversation with Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Norbert Frei about Russia and human rights. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group Human Rights in the 20th Century, June 23, 2016, accessed on December 19, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Irina Scherbakowa in conversation with Susanne Buckley-Zistel and Norbert Frei about Russia and human rights. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group Human Rights in the 20th Century, June 23, 2016, accessed on January 3, 2017 .
  4. ^ Entry on Irina Scherbakowa at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
  5. ↑ Irina Scherbakowa in conversation with Gregor Papsch , SWR , on June 22, 2013.
  6. ↑ The Russia Reflex: By Irina Scherbakowa and Karl Schlögel . In: ORF , October 9, 2015.
  7. ↑ Review: “The Russia Reflex”: Overcoming perplexity . In: WDR , November 2, 2015. ( Memento from May 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ Irina Scherbakowa, Karl Schlögel: Putin's fantasy people “the Russians” do not exist . In: Welt Online , October 5, 2015.
  9. ^ Karl Schlögel, Irina Scherbakowa: Der Russland-Reflex: Insights into a Relationship Crisis Verlag edition Körber Foundation, 2015, ISBN 9783896844927 , section title: "Disillusionment"
  10. ↑ Goethe medals awarded in Weimar / Three women honored for their commitment to human rights / boersenblatt.net. Retrieved August 29, 2017, from https://www.boersenblatt.net/artikel-goethe-medalis_in_weimar_verliehen.1360713.html .
personal data
SURNAME Scherbakova, Irina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shcherbakova, Irina Lazarevna (full name); Scherbakowa, Irina Lasarewna; Щербакова, Ирина Лазаревна (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian German studies scholar and cultural scientist
DATE OF BIRTH 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow