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- Convenors:
-
Barbora Vacková
(Masaryk University)
Lenka Waschková Císařová (Masaryk University)
Monika Metykova (University of Sussex)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Urban studies
- Location:
- B2.21
- Sessions:
- Thursday 8 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Prague
Short Abstract:
The panel explores ways of handling uncertainty-inducing events in a small-town setting. It focuses mainly on the possible ways of forgetting/commemorating these controversial, critical or otherwise problematic events, their actors and their impacts.
Long Abstract:
Insecurity is not just a global threat happening far away. Insecurities are part of everyday life in cultural centres and world capitals and also in small towns. Local, supra-regional or global events that impact on our history and present are sources of insecurity. They involve various types of actors who deal with uncertainty differently (actively, passively), and have different roles (victim, aggressor, observer, interpreter). Understanding these actors and their relationships forms part of the interpretation of these events.
The panel focuses on the remembering and forgetting of these events and their actors in a small town. We are interested in how uncertainty operates in the small-town social environment: What events provoke uncertainty and how does society work with them? How are their actors constructed and who can legitimately talk about them? What techniques exist for recalling, forgetting or reframing these events, which may be perceived as controversial or problematic, and how do they manifest themselves in the public space of a small town?
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
• uncertainty in a specific time and space;
• uncertainty as part of local identity;
• times of uncertainty (war, conflicts, economic crises, environmental disasters, violence related to otherness) in a small town/community;
• public commemoration of events associated with uncertainty and its actors (memorials, museums, commemorative events, local festivities);
• remembering and forgetting various actors;
• communication and sharing of uncertainty in private and public spaces of a small town.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 8 June, 2023, -Vidmantas Vyšniauskas (Vytautas Magnus University)
Paper short abstract:
The inhabitants of Southeastern Lithuania experienced a lot of violence and uncertainty during the 20th century. Most of which were inflicted upon them by supra-regional actors which fought for the control of this region. To escape violence, people started to identify as “locals”.
Paper long abstract:
The inhabitants of Southeastern Lithuania experienced a lot of violence, hardships and uncertainty during the 20th century. Most of which were inflicted upon them by supra-regional actors.
Poles, Lithuanians and representatives of other ethnicities lived in the territories of modern-day Southeast Lithuania for hundreds of years. After World War I, the war between newly created Poland and Lithuania broke out. Over the issue of which country should control these territories. During the Polish-Lithuanian war, local inhabitants suffered from both sides of armed forces. Each side wanted to portray the local inhabitants as 100 per cent Poles, or Lithuanians and exerted repression on everyone, who identified differently.
During World War II, the violence and uncertainty continued. Polish and Lithuanian partisans were fighting each other to make towns and villages of Southeastern Lithuania “ethnically pure”. Local inhabitants suffered as a consequence.
To avoid violence and repressions, inhabitants of this region started to identify as “locals”. People claimed to identify with their region, their village, their town (such as Salcininkai, Eisiskes) and with other local people. This was their strategy to distance themselves from Polish and Lithuanian national and ethnic identity, for which they could be persecuted. During my presentation, I would like to present how these people were handling uncertainty during difficult times and how it affected their identity.
This presentation is based on the ethnographical data, which I acquired during my qualitative field research in the Southeast of Lithuania from 2016 to 2019.
Karina Hoření (Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
Deriving from data gathered during field research in northern Bohemia, this presentation shows different relationships of current inhabitants to everyday objects left by Germans, who were expelled after WW2 and how these objects were incorporated into households and lives of post- war settlers.
Paper long abstract:
The post-war transfer of the German-speaking inhabitants of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent settlement of the borderlands was a violent event, which remains a sensitive topic of Czech public memory. However, a lot of aspects of it are still understudied, e.g. mundane relationship with things left behind by Germans and distributed among the new settlers. But how were these objects incorporated into everyday life of new settlers? In my presentation, I will address the question of today’s existence of these objects and how they are perceived. Is “German” still a valid point of reference for them, i.e. are they connected to the violence of the postwar period? The basis for my study is the fieldwork research in the city parts and towns in the vicinity of Liberec, a city in the northern borderlands of Bohemia, conducted within the ERC project “Recycling the German Ghosts. Resettlement Cultures in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia after 1945”.
The theoretical basis for my ethnographic research derives from hauntology and materiality studies. Engaging in a conversation about German objects with my interviewees, it allows me to reach the topic underlying the issue, i.e. the expulsion and resettlement, which in turn can reveal the traumatic potential of the events.
Monika Metykova (University of Sussex)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I outline the ways in which two towns publicly commemorate/forget Soviets in relation to key events from WWII onward. I focus on existing memorials to Soviets and also address the public silence/forgetting of the Soviet occupation.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I outline the ways in which two towns publicly commemorate/forget Soviets in relation to key events from WWII onward. Štúrovo - with its 15,000 inhabitants - and Esztergom - with 28,000 people - are separated by the river Danube that constitutes the border between Slovakia and Hungary. Those strolling around Štúrovo may be surprised by the sizeable cemetery that commemorates Soviet troops fallen during WWII that is situated just off the town’s high street. In contrast, Esztergom has a memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers on the very outskirts of the town, opposite a huge TESCO. On both sides of the Danube these are dedicated to liberators. However, not long after WWII the Soviets became occupiers, with significant military presence in both towns. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968 were brutally suppressed and Soviet troops remained stationed in Esztergom and in Štúrovo until the early 1990s. The military barracks and memorials of the Cold War era are gone and there are few visible traces of the long Soviet presence in the two towns. I focus on existing memorials to Soviets, their recent changes which were on the Hungarian side influenced by the pro-Russian stance of Viktor Orbán’s consecutive governments. I also address the public silence/forgetting of the Soviet occupation and discuss how the Bridge Guard project - funded by a Štúrovo native who left the town during the Cold War and settled in Switzerland - addresses the past without references to the Soviet occupation.
Jaroslav Ira (Charles University, Faculty of Arts)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how uncertainties were verbalized in the public discourses of two small towns in Czechoslovakia in ca 1928-1948, and how they were given meaning in the ways that helped reproduce a sense of agency and capacity to navigate through what were essentially uncontrollable conditions.
Paper long abstract:
Uncertainty is the inherent condition for small towns, which have to cope with unpredictable future and sudden ruptures, while also facing vulnerabilities characteristic for this kind of settlement. Yet, in order to reproduce themselves as (imagined) actors capable of navigating through historical process, small town communities deploy a range of stabilizing strategies, such as discourses of local planning “as if life goes normally”, or more dynamic narratives of historical hardships and resilience, or languages of challenging yet manageable future. Taking this as the point of departure, this paper enquires into how uncertainties were channeled into and verbalized in the public discourses of small towns and how they were translated into bearable discursive frames that reproduced a sense of normality or helped mobilize local community and legitimize proactive measures to strengthen local resilience. Adopting historical approach and focusing on towns as collective quasi-actors, the theme will be examined on a sample of two ordinary small towns in Bohemia (Kdyně and Heřmanův Městec) in ca. 1928-1948, a period that witnessed both long-term (or structural) and more abrupt sources of uncertainties, such as the Great Depression, tensions in international and domestic political system, occupation and war, and postwar transformations, which tangled with locally-conditioned pathways, such as decline of local industries or change in towns’ status. The paper exploits a range of sources, such as local periodicals, promotional books, local histories, poetry and archival documents (public records) that testify to how contemporaneous actors gave sense to uncertainty in the shared public discourse.
Barbora Vacková (Masaryk University) Nina Bartosova (Faculty of Architecture, Brno University of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
Partizánske (SK) was established as one of the Baťa company cities in August 1938. But since March 1939, the director J. A. Baťa was in exile; immediately after WWII, the property was nationalized. Still, the self-image of the city is based on the limited "Baťa heritage".
Paper long abstract:
The Baťa Shoe Company established the settlement of Šimonovany-Baťovany (from 1949 Partizánske, Slovakia) literally a few weeks before the Munich Agreement and shortly before the establishment of the Slovak State and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. During wartime, the factory operated successfully but had no chance to develop the company system as it worked in Zlín thoroughly. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to describe the patterns of creating the city's past, which can objectively be said to have never had a chance to exist. Therefore, we ask:
- What does it mean "Baťa/baťa" in remembering and constructing the past of this particular town?
- Could be the reinvention of Baťa past interpreted as the mechanism of re-framing the Slovak State period?
- What is emphasized and what is suppressed in the contemporary narrative of the past in Partizánske?
During WWII, several local anti-fascist groups were formed among the company's employees. After nationalization in 1945 and the coup d'état in 1948, the communist regime promoted the one-sided narrative of Baťa as a capitalist exploiter, and the city was renamed to memorize these WWII partisans groups. After the revolution in 1989, residents, local politicians, historians and workers in culture began reinventing the Baťa tradition and history.
The paper presents the data from the focus group (December 2022), other interviews (spring 2023) and archival materials (long-term research of Nina Bartošová).