The March issue of the Czech cultural magazine A2 focuses on the Sudety region and features an interview with our researcher, Karina Hoření. In the interview, Karina shared insights from our Spectral Recycling project and spoke with journalist Alžběta Medková about common stereotypes surrounding the Czech borderlands. They discussed the widespread belief that people in the borderlands are ‘without roots.’ Karina explained that this view assumes the region has not changed since 1945 and that even the third generation of “new” residents cannot form a connection to the place where they grew up. She also noted that this idea relies on an idealized image of other Czech regions and their communities. To show how borderland residents build strong ties to their homes, she shared quotes from her interviews where people described deep emotional, physical, and spatial connections to the area.

Link to the interview you can find here.

In mid-March, our team met for a seminar dedicated to the book The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators by Michael Rothberg, a scholar of American literature and memory studies.

During the meeting, we reflected on how the concept of implicated subjects might be applied to the post-displacement areas that our team studies. Rothberg proposes a perspective that goes beyond the traditional division between perpetrators and victims, pointing to a space between them — a sphere of implication. In this view, individuals and groups may be connected to injustices or forms of violence in different ways, even if they were not their direct perpetrators. At times, such implication may also bring certain benefits. At the same time, Rothberg emphasizes that recognizing one’s own implication can become a starting point for transformation — encouraging reflection on responsibility and solidarity that goes beyond a simple distinction between the guilty and the innocent. In his book, Rothberg develops this theory through analyses of examples from film and other fields of art.

During our seminar, we attempted to bring these reflections into the context of research on post-displacement regions, which our team investigates. Together, we considered what forms of “implication” can be observed in the histories and experiences of people living in these areas and how such a perspective might help us better understand the complex relationships between past and present, as well as the role of material culture that is the central focus of our project.

Our researcher Karina Hoření was invited by the Písek Municipal Library to share her thoughts on the 2021 documentary “Jak jsem se stala partyzánkou” (“How I Became a Partisan”). The film, made by Vera Lacková, tells the story of her great-grandfather, Ján Lacko, who joined the antifascist resistance during the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. It explores not only his experiences during the war, but also how his story is remembered by the women in her Romani family, as well as the ongoing presence of anti-Romani prejudice in Slovakia today. Karina contributed insights from her own field research in central Slovakia, the same area where Vera’s family once lived. In this region, Romani, German, and Slovak partisans, along with members of the pro-Nazi home guards, all operated in ethnically mixed villages, and the memory of these events still shapes personal relations of people nowadays. 

In late winter, our team met for a regular seminar to explore a new genre. For the first time, we listened to an audio documentary. The documentary Kořeny se hledají v zemi (“Roots Are Found in the Ground”) follows artist Lucie Králíková as she and her colleagues invite participants of one of her projects to Northwestern Bohemia. Together, they explore the region’s former German heritage, visible in abandoned villages and in the remaining fruit trees that recall the vibrant life that existed before the Second World War.

While listening to the documentary, which focuses on memory work typical of the Czech borderlands, we discussed the strong visual elements and stereotypes associated with the region. We also considered how perceptions of post-displacement areas differ in Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland.

If you would like to experience the atmosphere of a post-displacement fruit feast, you can listen to the documentary here.