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The 14/14 Experience – New Perspectives for Youth ..
The 14/14 Experience – New Perspectives for Youth in Europe
Start date: Aug 1, 2014,
End date: Jan 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
The multinational work camp „The 14/14 Experience – New Perspectives for Youth in Europe” was a bipartite youth encounter in September 2014 that first took place from 09/13/2014 to 09/18/2014 in Magdeburg and from 09/23/2014 to 09/28/2014 in Sarajevo.
The 20 participants which were between 19 and 28 years old and the youth workers which were between 26 and 30 years old came from Poland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Germany. Each group of countries has been accompanied by an educational fasciliator that each partner organization had sent. The main theme of the meeting was the 100th start of World War I, which was caused by the assassination of the Austrian successor Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 06/23/1914 and is considered as the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century. Through the city partnership of Sarajevo and Magdeburg the action was created as an encounter and a reunion.
At original localities of World War I, with the addition of local historical documents and including current researches, the multinational group of youth pursued the question of the existence of a common European culture of remembrance and commemorative culture. Not only the extraordinary role of Magdeburg for the mobilization and militarization of civil society at the time of World War I has been considered in more detail, but also the role of Sarajevo in current conflicts such as for example the Yugoslav civil war. The multinational support team designed a series of workshops which dealt with the previous topics, as well as the basics of human rights education, international law, cultures of remembrance and commemorative cultures in comparison, forms of remembrance and commemoration.
In addition to guest lecturers, which expounded the confrontation of history from an artistic and cultural point of view in a workshop like the "Peace Monument Floris Pax"-workshop or which expounded methods and strategies of interviewing witnesses in workshops like the „Oral History“- workshop, it was the participants themselves who worked creatively in the program. While the German group showed the participants, which has been previously divided into smaller groups, the historic city Magdeburg while geocaching, it were mainly participants of the Bosnian group which presented the "Fußspuren Gavrilo Princips" in Sarajevo. This group also enabled an annotated and very emotional visit of the memorial "Potocari” which remembers the Muslims in Srebrenica that were killed in 1995 by Serbian army.
The big challenge of the encounter was to present the participants the history not as a closed and final fact, but as a continuous dynamic process. At first, participants fell in heated discussion about the veracity of some statements. Interesting aspects were the comparison of respective history books and the possible existence of countless narrations that lead to the same result. Different content indications enabled the participants to approach from different point of view to the "european remembrance culture".
By mixing methods of historical and political as well as cultural education, each participant was able to make its own contributions to the project. It just needed a little input from the pedagogues and the participants began to develop their own questions and even to discuss apart from the actual program. Joint visits as to the Potocari Memorial were very emotional and strengthened the team spirit. Empathy and sympathy that were awakened especially when theming recent conflicts such as the war in Yugoslavia, create an atmosphere marked by mutual attention and respect
The classification in the historical context happened by the supervising pedagogues, but because of previous knowledge of the participants also independently context was given in dialogue with each another. During the project, not only young people from different backgrounds, but also from different ethnic groups and religious affiliations met. Cultural differences proved to be a catalyst of a increasing motivation of the group dynamics and encouraged from the beginning a great exchange of the participants. Even prejudices and assumptions, with which some participants had to fight, have been overcome. Real friendships were created. Dialogue and encounter took a high priority. Structured offers for debate on topics such as religion, politics and history were made, but also the informal exchange during the rides was planned. English was spoken and should have been missing the matching vocabulary, was helped out indulgent and respectful.