News

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.

In this blog post, Michal Korhel explores the March of Gratitude dedicated to the Slovak National Uprising (SNP) as a present-day form of commemoration that blends physical participation with mediated remembrance. Drawing on participant observation and informal conversations with attendees, he reflects on how walking through historically significant landscapes can foster a form of experiential memory. At the same time, this dimension of memory often remains subtle and unarticulated.

Michal points to a tension between immediate, lived experience and the symbolic frameworks that seek to give the event a clear commemorative meaning. He suggests that the significance of the march tends to emerge retrospectively, if it emerges at all, rather than being fully realized in the moment of participation.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

In February, our team had the pleasure of hosting a seminar with Brett Ashley Kaplan, Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. During the seminar, our guest presented not only a portion of her research but also offered insight into the creative process behind her recent book on the now-vanished village of Seneca Village, located in the nineteenth century on the grounds of what is today Central Park in New York City.

Together, we reflected on what “haunting” truly means—whether it should be understood solely as a feature associated with figures (“human” ghosts), or whether it may also belong to objects. This question resonated particularly strongly in the context of our project, which explores the agency of things and the material traces of the past. The conversation then expanded to the issue of memory tied to specific spaces—how bringing new information about the past to light affects contemporary communities and what kinds of reactions it can provoke. We also considered the differences between the work of writers and scholars—how both groups gather and interpret data, construct narratives, and combine facts with imagination.

For our team, the seminar only broadened our research perspective but also opened up new questions about the relationship between place, memory, and that which—though seemingly absent—continues to shape the present. We particularly appreciated that our guest introduced us to the context of New York City, with its entangled memories of Indigenous and Black communities, erased from the white history.

Is there a mathematical formula for the most cohesive territorial shape a state can have? In the Czech literary magazine “Tvar”, our PI, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, explores this very question in her essay on postwar Polish efforts to conceptualize such a model.

The whole issue of the magazine, titled The Polish Ends of the World, is devoted to recent Polish literary attempts to answer the question about geographical and cultural scope of Poland as Central European state. Karolina engages with this theme as well, and mentions the work we are doing within the Spectral Recycling project!

A link to the full text you can find here.

The blog post was written by Angelika Zanki, research facilitator and manager in Spectral Recycling grant.

What do fingerprints, migration and Jacques Derrida have in common?

Starting with the invention of fingerprint identification by Juan Vucetich’s, Sherlock Holmes from Hvar, Angelika moves into a haunting reflection on Croatian emigration to South America, inspired by Derrida’s concept of hauntology.

The homeland appears here as a specter – geographically absent, yet powerfully present through language, rituals, music, religion, and religion in the collective memory of a diaspora. How do diaspora communities sustain an imagined Croatia that shapes everyday life and can even mobilize political action, especially in moments of crisis like the war of the 1990s?

This is a story about how the past returns, not as something fully present, but as a force that still acts, insists, and shapes the present.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

Building on our interest in memory, materiality, and transformation, we decided to revisit two canonical texts of memory studies by reading and discussing Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting” alongside the opening chapter of Kenneth Foote’s “Shadowed Ground.” Both texts propose analytical typologies that proved productive for thinking through the dynamics of forgetting, reuse, and normalization that are central to our research.

A significant part of the discussion focused on the usefulness and limitations of typology as an analytical tool. Connerton’s attempt to systematize forms of forgetting is a classic contribution that invites critique as much as application. Foote’s work, grounded in empirical observation of sites of violence in the United States, offered us a more spatial and practice-oriented framework, prompting debate about the transferability of his categories beyond the American context. We wondered if typologies created to embrace sites of memory are useful for intimate objects that are at the center of our interest.

We also explored how both texts intersect with our ongoing interest in recycling, reuse, and transformation. Foote’s notions of obliteration and rectification prompted discussion about different ways of dealing with sites of violence, and about whether some of these modes we can understand as forms of recycling. This, in turn, led us to reflect on the kinds of effort, recognition, and indifference that such practices involve.

Finally, we connected the readings to our own fieldwork, testing Connerton’s and Foote’s categories against concrete examples from European contexts. These discussions reinforced our shared sense that typologies function less as closed systems than as points of departure. They are useful for thinking with, but always in need of revision when confronted with specific historical and spatial conditions.

In the early 19th century, some thinkers dreamed of uniting all Slavs… or at least federating them. Panslavism, as this intellectual and political current was called, was a bold attempt. However, along the way, it encountered many obstacles, both internal and external. In episode 104 of Czechostacja, a podcast hosted by Jakub Medek, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska talks about the history of panslavism and Czech entanglements with it, Russia’s role in these ideas, Polish and Slovak perspectives, and why many believers quickly lost their illusions. She also examines what remains of Slavic unity today—in a world shaped by war and modern nation-states.

Link to the podcast you can find here.