ZfL INFO 41/2025: Common Resentments, Diverging Plots
Common Resentments, Diverging Plots: On the Forms and Functions of Popular Conspiracy Culture in Eastern Europe
Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Ilse-Zimmermann-Saal, Pariser Str. 1, 10719 Berlin
In the 1970s, a popular saying in left-wing alternative cultures warned: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” The line between anxious speculations and actual secret operations is sometimes difficult to draw. Conspiracy theories thrive on the suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong with the world—a mistrust that easily turns into resentment and hostility. The targets that such resentment evokes are often strikingly similar: sinister foreign forces, their malevolent domestic agents, or even vaster schemes orchestrated by a shadowy global cabal of evil elites. Especially in times of crisis, upheaval, or war, such narratives become powerful tools in the hands of populist politicians. Easily amplified through participatory social media and viral online trends, they have become a ubiquitous tool to mobilize supporters and delegitimize opponents.
Popular culture first breeds, disseminates, and normalizes such conspiracy theories, but also subverts and ridicules them. Here, they go viral, turn into memes or melodramatic fiction, spawn endless television series, become the butt of jokes and appear in cryptic murals. It is also where they facilitate the formation of close-knit communities and spark political movements. Through popular culture, conspiracy theories take shape as they produce identifiable figures, themes, narratives, and images that cross boundaries between genres, media, and platforms and other political and social fields. Sometimes, conspiracy plots persist for centuries. They straddle ideological divides and become common knowledge. Thus, popular culture not only articulates and comments on a climate of paranoia and resentment, but may even pave its way. At the same time, it attracts both reactionary culture warriors and their resentful followers as well as seemingly informed intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists.
The workshop explores the interplay between conspiracy theories, popular culture, and resentment with a specific focus on current cases from Eastern Europe. By bringing together researchers with diverse expertise, we will critically assess how popular conspiracy cultures shape contemporary political imaginaries.
Program
Wednesday, 18 June 2025
Eberhard-Lämmert-Saal, Meierottostraße 8
18.30
Wednesday lecture
- Eliot Borenstein (NYU): Speak of the Devil. The Putinist Crusade against Satan at Home and Abroad
Thursday, 19 June 2025
Ilse-Zimmermann-Saal, Pariser Straße 1
11.00
Welcome
11.15
Conspiratorial Temporalities
Chair: Boris Noordenbos
- Todor Hristov (University of Sofia): Believing to Know: Popular Representations of a Bulgarian Seer
- Thomas Maier (University of Basel): Forward to the Past: Pavel Zarifullin’s Neo-Nationalist Futurity and Resentful Revisionism
14.15
Official and Subcultural Narratives
Chair: Nina Weller
- Gundula Pohl (FernUniversität in Hagen): Parallel Narratives: On the Staging of Conspiracy Fantasies in State-Sponsored Film Productions in Belarus
- Gleb Koran (Gothenburg University/ZfL): Post-soviet “Structure of Feeling” – Reactivation of “Ressentiment” in Russian Left YouTube in Times 2014–2022
16.15
Melodrama and Comedy Plots
Chair: Matthias Schwartz
- Boris Noordenbos (University of Amsterdam): Nuclear Melodrama: Popular (Conspiracy) Culture on “Chernobyl”
- Daria Ganzenko (ZZF): The Good, the Bad and the Funny: The FSB Agent as a Stand-Up Comedy Character
Friday, 20 June 2025
Ilse-Zimmermann-Saal, Pariser Straße 1
10.00
Affective Conspiracies
Chair: Eliot Borenstein
- Matthias Schwartz (ZfL): Post-Communist Phantoms: Resentment and Escapism in Recent Eastern European Popular Culture
- Lesia Kulchinska (University of Amsterdam): Vicious Images: Fears and Fantasies of Conspiracy Behind Iconoclastic Violence in Ukraine
12.00
Alternative and Fantastic Emplotments
Chair: Aleksandra Szczepan
- Svitlana Pidoprygora (University of Innsbruck/University of Mykolaiv): Clones, Robots, Aliens: Conspiracy-Laden Narratives in Vadym Nazarov’s Comic “Patriot: Attack of the Clones”
- Agnieszka Haska (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): “Warsaw De-Judified”: Antisemitic Tropes in Polish Science-Fiction Literature
15.00
Roundtable: Closing discussion with Eliot Borenstein (New York University)
https://www.zfl-berlin.org/event/common-resentments-diverging-plots.html