Angelika Zanki

The new blog post traces back the fate of the “lion monument”, erected as a war memorial in Deutsch Krone in 1925, and toppled down in the postwar Wałcz. The author asks the question of the meanings inscribed into the monument by both, prewar German inhabitants of the town and postwar Polish inhabitants. She delves into the question of what was the aim of erecting war memorials, and what happened to the German heritage in the years following the incorporation of Central Pomerania into Poland.  

Link to the text you can find here.

Although we associate the German settlement in the Czech Republic primarily with the borderlands, a significant German-speaking minority also used to live in Prague. Our researcher, Karina Hoření, spoke about the prominent female figures of Prague’s German community, and why they have been forgotten, at a panel discussion organized by the Czech organization Gender Studies. Together with another discussant, Zuzana Schreiberová, director of the non-profit organization Multicultural Centre Prague, they introduced the audience to interesting women such as photographer Grete Popper, politician Irene Kirpal or activist Kate Frankenthal, but also discussed how their life paths were influenced by their gender and ethnicity. Recording of the debate is available here.

For some time, the Spectral Recycling team helps with a local project in Goleniów, where Michal Korhel does his fieldwork. The project, Goleniowskie Fotohistorie (here you can find their webpage as well) contributes to the local post-war history through the prism of photography and family histories. They have already managed to collect hundreds of glass negatives and identify some of the people on them. The next steps are the interviews about the life stories of those identified persons. Michal Korhel has already done one interview (you can watch it here).

Lately, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska joined and conducted a video interview as a part of this project as well. Karolina listened to the story of Mrs. Bronisława Filipczyk, who came from Germany to Goleniów with her mother as a six-year-old girl. The interlocutor recalls the first moments after coming to Goleniów, how the city, their apartment and the life of her and her peers looked like. Moreover, Mrs. Filipczyk tells us whether there were any Germans at that time (and for how long they stayed) and what the relations with them looked like.

Link to the interview on Youtube you can find here.

As the conducting of interviews is a central part of our research methodology, in November 2023 our team held an internal seminar on the topic of oral history and oral history interviews. Our guest speaker was Jakub Gałęziowski from the University of Warsaw and the Polish Oral History Association.

As an introduction Jakub offered us an overview about the history and development of oral history in Poland. His presentation was followed by a lively discussion. Jakub as well as our team members shared their experiences in conducting interviews in various contexts and discussed the difficulties they had encountered. However, the main focus of the discussion was the issue of what distinguishes oral history from other methods of conducting interviews. As Jakub stressed, interviews are used as a tool in various disciplines, but not every conducted interview can be classified as an oral history one. Among the main characteristics of this interdisciplinary method and practice is its aim to produce historical sources. The emphasis of oral history interviews is not (or not only) on the content but mainly on the narrator and dialogue they create.

For our team this presentation and discussion was an important basis for future reflections regarding the methodology of the Spectral Recycling project. We are very thankful to Jakub for accepting our invitation and joining our seminar. We also congratulate him on an award-winning book “Niedopowiedziane biografie. Polskie dzieci urodzone z powodu wojny” [Untold Biographies. Polish Children Born of War], where he shows how the oral history method can be of great importance.

Within the series of lectures “Science at the Centre”, delivered by the NCN Award winners, and launched by the Copernicus Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies and the National Science Centre, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska shared her insights into looking in the post-displacement regions of Central Europe.

Following the research methodology we expore in our project, Karolina proposed to consider ghosts not as spiritual entities, but rather to see them as material remnants that shed light on forgotten histories and allow us to understand different experiences. Specifically, the mass migrations after World War II, when German and German-speaking communities were forced to migrate from present-day Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, and new settlers came. 

Karolina started her presentation by taking us in a time machine and transporting us to the spring of 1945 in Central Pomerania. If you are interested in what has followed, you can watch the recording on the YouTube Channel of the Copernicus Center (link here).

In November, our team participated in two training sessions, during which we learned basic and advanced options for working with MAXQDA software. MAXQDA is one of the programs for processing qualitative data such as interviews or archival materials that our team works with on a daily basis. Training sessions were led by Piotr Binder, a certified trainer of MAXQDA, and also an academic who could therefore show us many functions useful for our work. We are enthusiastic about the possibilities this software offers us and looking forward to start using it! 

As for other members of our team, research stays in the field are part of Karin’s work. We usually go to two countries for longer periods of time. For Karin, it is northern Bohemia and central Slovakia, two regions where the German past is still palpable. The field stays are intense, but at the same time often lonely. Ethnographers write down not only what they find out but also their feelings and experiences. To get you familiar with this particular experience, this time we present an excerpt from Karin’s diary from her second stay in central Slovakia. One Saturday in October, she went to Hadviga, originally a large village where mostly German Slovaks used to live, but which after the war became depopulated. Today, there are only a few summer cottages. Karin traveled with E., whom she had met in Hadviga already in the summer.

You can read blog post in Czech here.

At the end of October, our team experimented with a new genre for our regular seminar. This time we gathered to discuss a movie: we talked about a Slovak TV movie Mŕtvi nespievajú (The Dead Don’t Sing, dir. Andrej Lettrich) that was released in 1965. It is an adaptation of an unfinished trilogy of novels by Rudolf Jašík. Both the novels and the movie follow several families in the small town of Deutsch Proben, or nowadays Nitrianské Pravno, an ethnically mixed town in Central Slovakia where our team member, Karina Hoření, is currently doing her fieldwork. In the movie which takes place during World War II, ethnic (i.e. German, Slovak, Jewish) and political (i.e. communist, collaborant, anarchist) identities merge to create a kaleidoscope of strategies for coping with the ethical challenges of the war. The movie is interesting in overcoming the dominant ideological narrative of the 1950s and showing complicated characters of all the ethnicities. The analysis of these motives within the movie during a lively discussion among team members persuaded us that we should include more movies in our seminar schedule.

In this episode of NCN’s podcast, you can find out more about the most prestigious distinction for early-stage researchers working in Poland – NCN Award. Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska won the NCN Award for defining a new category of resettlement cultures in the research on post-displacement areas.

Karolina and Prof. Joanna Golińska-Pilarek, member of the NCN Council and NCN Award jury panel, talk to Anna Korzekwa-Józefowicz about this year’s awards and research conducted by Karolina.

Link to podcast you can find here.