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Paper short abstract

This paper explores narratives of the “lost” Bohemian Forest through the former German-speaking woodcutters’ settlements of Bučina and Knížecí Pláně, tracing how memories of bark beetle, displacement, and overgrowth intersect in representations of rural disappearance.

Paper long abstract

The Bohemian Forest (Šumava) has long been represented through narratives of disappearance. Already in the 1870s, following a large bark beetle outbreak and intensified logging, the then literature and journalism evoked the “vanishing” of old Šumava after this natural disturbance – a narrative that resonated again during another outbreak in the 2000s. After World War II, the forced displacement of German-speaking inhabitants and the demolition of borderland settlements close to the Iron Curtain such as Bučina (Buchwald) and Knížecí Pláně (Fürstenhut) added another layer of loss. Once embedded in forestry and agrarian life, these villages were erased from the map, their ruins overgrown, and the area later reimagined as a national park.

Today, these sites are reframed as places of remembrance and tourist destinations, where memories of rural life, forced displacement, and the value of “nature” intersect. Vegetation figures prominently in these framings: as romantic traces of a vanished world, as material to be curated or removed for more attractive and respectful representation, and as symbols in contemporary debates about nature conservation and forest management.

Drawing on ethnographic observation and analysis of media representations, the paper situates this case within broader discussions of nostalgia, touristification and more-than-human agency in memory studies. It highlights how successive narratives of disappearance and loss – cultural, political, and environmental – accumulate in the landscape, and how they shape collective imagination of rural life that is both irretrievably lost and continually commemorated.