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Accepted Paper:
Ethnography of things left behind. Unsettling memories of postwar displacement in a small town in Czech borderlands
Karina Hoření
(Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences)
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.