PRESENTATION IN BUDAPEST, JUNE 2012

»The Advent And Development Of A Serbian We-Discourse In the Habsburg Monarchy«

Presentation held in German at the conference

Kanon – Zäsur – Wissenschaft. Das historische Erzählen in Österreich/Ungarn – und anderswo. German Department, Eötvös-Loránd University, Budapest, April 19, 2012.

Abstract: In this presentation I ask what it was what made a discourse of memory possible in the first place: the existance of a memorizing subject. In the case of Serbian discourses such a We in the sense of a modern public sphere came about in the form of collective communication in the late 18th century Habsburg Monarchy. This case is so intriguing because it it shows  the actual mechanisms of a We discourse in an exemplary manner. It is about a collective process of communication that tries to make a dsiticntion toward another discourse in a different language (Hungarian). Given the cultural-poliutical situation of the Serb minority in the Monarchy, this was especially difficult, and furtehrmore a question of resources. At the end of the 19. century another pecularity of the Serb public sphere in Austria-Hungary added to this: the export of the We-discourse across the Atlantic shows that the public sphere is basically mobile. Finally, the transformation of Ser We-discourses in Austria, Hungary and the USA reminds us of another feature of the public sphere: its finiteness.