Dr. Irina Scherbakowa

29 Jun 2017 – 07 Jul 2017 guest at the ZfL

Honorary member of the ZfL, head of the Russia-wide student competition »Man in History. Russia in the 20th Century« at the International Historical-Enlightenment Human Rights and Humanitarian Society MEMORIAL (Moscow)

CV

Irina Scherbakowa is a journalist, historian, and translator. She currently works for the International Historical-Enlightenment Human Rights and Humanitarian Society MEMORIAL (Moscow) and has managed the Russia-wide student competition »Man in History. Russia in the 20th Century« since 1999. Scherbakowa is a member of the Buchenwald Memorial board of trustees in Weimar, and the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace. She is also a member of the executive committee at the Marion Dönhoff Foundation. In 1994 she won the German Catholic Journalism Prize In 2005 she was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit and in 2014 the Carl von Ossietzky Prize. Scherbakowa has been an honorary member of the ZfL since 2010.

Research Interests

Irina Scherbakowa’s research interests include oral history, totalitarianism, Stalinism, the gulag and the Soviet special camps on German land after 1945, questions of cultural memory in Russia, and the politics of remembrance. In the late 1970s, Scherbakowa began recording interviews with victims of Stalinism. In 1991 she began studying the KGB archives. Following her years of work for journals such as Sowjetliteratur, Literaturnaja gaseta, and Nesawissimaja gaseta, she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin as well as at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. She was a guest professor at the University of Salzburg and a lecturer at the Center for Oral History at the Russian State University for Humanities in Moscow from 1996 to 2006.

Publications

Selection (in German):

  • Der Russland Reflex (zus. mit Karl Schlögel), Edition Koerber-Stiftung 2015
  • Gulag. Texte und Dokumente 1929–1956, (Mithg.), Göttingen 2014
  • Zerrissene Erinnerung: der Umgang mit Stalinismus und Zweitem Weltkrieg im heutigen Russland, Göttingen 2010
  • »1917–1937–2007. Das Erbe des Stalinismus«, in: N. Schreiber (Hg.): Russland. Der Kaukasische Teufelskreis oder die lupenreine Demokratie, Klagenfurt 2008, S. 339–353
  • »Kontinuität oder Rückkehr? Bildzeugnisse des Stalinismus«, in: H.-J. Czech (Hg.): Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945, Dresden 2007, S. 450–456
  • »Erinnerung in der Defensive. Schüler in Russland über Gulag und Repression«, in: Osteuropa. Das Lager schreiben 57, 6 (2007), S. 409–420
  • »Tschetscheniens Gedächtnis«, in: Memorial/Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Hg.): Zu wissen, dass du noch lebst. Kinder aus Tschetschenien erzählen, Berlin 2006, S. 13–24
  • Hg.: Unruhige Zeiten : Lebensgeschichten aus Russland und Deutschland, Hamburg 2006
  • »Unsere Sechziger«, in: J. John/D. v. Laak/Joachim von Puttkamer (Hg): Zeitgeschichten. Miniaturen in Lutz Niethammers Manier, Essen 2005, S. 226–237
  • Hg.: Russlands Gedächtnis. Jugendliche entdecken vergessene Lebensgeschichten, Hamburg 2003
  • Nur ein Wunder konnte uns retten. Leben und Überleben unter Stalins Terror, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2000

Photo © Matthias Stief