News

We are happy to announce that in the course of her fieldwork in Wałcz, our PI, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, is collaborating with the new initiative of the Wałcz Land Museum, namely the project “Wałcz DNA”. You can read more about it here. The project aims to gather stories about the postwar history of Wałcz and collect memorabilia of the first settlers. By writing down the stories about the lives of the postwar inhabitants of the town and its surroundings, the Museum wants to create a memory room in the building of the Wałcz Land Museum, which will tell about the post-war everyday life of the new inhabitants of Wałcz and the surrounding area.

Since the Museum initiative, funded by the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage as part of the National Institute of Museums’ program “Memory Rooms”, is focused on the objects that the newcomers brought with them, it perfectly aligns with the aims of the SpectralRecycling project. As we want to uncover the stories behind the objects left behind by the previous German inhabitants of the region, we can easily join forces.

Thus far, we have conducted several interviews together. Karolina was also able to dive into the rich collection of the Museum archival sources, connected with the German past of Wałcz. On February 21, 2024, Karolina gave a lecture at the meeting of the local club for international collaboration. We are looking forward to further collaboration and the outcomes! We can’t wait to see the exhibition that will come from this project.

The Most Przyjaźni, or Friendship Bridge, connects the towns of Český Těšín and Cieszyn, once one locality. The bridge carries the ghosts of the past, symbolizing both division and unity. Magdalena Bubík, a PhD student in SpectralRecycling project, seeks to understand and navigate these complex historical and cultural nuances in the new blog post you can read here.

In mid-March, our team met in Dresden to attend the 6th Congress on Polish Studies (March 14-17th). Thanks to Michal Korhel, who put together a panel entitled “Presenting History in Post-displacement Regions” we had a chance to present our research and compare it with several other case studies of memory cultures in Lower Silesia, Warmia or Żuławy. 

During the panel, which was chaired by Karolina Ćwiek- Rogalska, the audience enjoyed four presentations. The first paper was presented by Anna Kurpiel (University of Wrocław) who was talking about the history and current re-inventing of the folk costume in Lower Silesia (“Lower Silesian Folk Costume as an Object of Contradictions: Presenting Pre-War Heritage within Folkloristic and Regional Frameworks”). Secondly, our colleague Michal Korhel talked about his research on local museums in formerly German regions of Western Pomerania (“German Objects: Local History Expositions in Western Pomerania”).  Next, we had a chance to listen to Agnieszka Pufelska (University of Hamburg) who presented a case study of the post-war history of a museum in Olsztyn under the title “Fractureless Appropriation in the Fractured Time”. Last but not least was Joanna Szkolnicka (Polish Academy of Sciences) who presented her paper on the memory activism in Elbląg (“An upheaval with regard to the German past and cultural heritage in the cities of former East and West Prussia: New perspectives and narratives based on the example of Elbing/Elbląg”). 

After the panel, there was a lively discussion based on comments from our discussant Karina Hoření. She raised questions about the specifics of museums in/of post-displacement regions, topics omitted from the newly emerging narrative of displacement, or possible backlash to it. Our audience discussed the future of Heimatstuben, i.e.  small museums of lost “homeland” that were built by German expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia in western Germany.  

On Saturday, March 16th, Karolina participated in another panel, entitled “How to change urban identity? Transitions in Polish towns in regional and transregional context”. She presented some results from the fieldwork in Wałcz in a paper “Recovering the City-Text of a Topolganger: A Case Study of the Pomeranian Town Deutsch Krone / Wałcz”.

It was not the end of our team’s activities in Dresden, as we were also presenting our poster that uses the symbol of a haunted dollhouse full of post-German objects to capture the essence of our project (you can see our poster here).

The Congress was a perfect occasion to share our research with other academics, meet new people, and listen to fascinating presentations from a wide field of Polish studies.

During the first two weeks of March, our Principal Investigator, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, served as a tutor at a workshop organized by the Polish Children’s Fund in Lusławice in southern Poland.

The Krajowy Fundusz na rzecz Dzieci, or the Polish Children’s Fund, is an exceptional organization that has been making a significant impact for nearly 40 years. The Fund supports talented students in Polish schools, helping them develop their cognitive, artistic, and musical talents. It provides a platform for these students to deepen their knowledge, broaden their horizons, and integrate various fields of science and art. The Fund collaborates with hundreds of scientists and artists from the best universities, research institutions, and art schools in Poland. This collaboration provides students with access to a wealth of knowledge and expertise. The Fund encourages community engagement, with many former beneficiaries becoming volunteers to give back to the organization.

Karolina, as one of them, frequently engages in various activities. This time, she was involved in several activities connected to the topic of post-displacement heritage. She gave a guided tour of two WW1 cemeteries in the region, discussing how various parts of memorial architecture can be interpreted. Together with students, they also watched and discussed the film “Prawo i pięść” by Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski, which depicts the reality of post-war Recovered Territories. Karolina also gave a lecture on the meanings behind objects and landscapes of the Recovered Territories.

Furthermore, as the Fund aims to collaborate with the local community, she also engaged in a series of workshops and lectures at the local Secondary School Complex named after Józef Piłsudski in Zakliczyn. One of these was a workshop she led entitled “How to read monuments?”.

In the aftermath of World War II, the geopolitical landscape of Central Europe underwent significant changes. One such event was the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, a historical process that continues to resonate today.

The 14th episode of the Czechostacja podcast, created by Jakub Medek, a Czech-Polish journalist, entitled “Czystka etniczna po czesku. Wypędzenie Niemców Sudeckich” provides an in-depth look at this event. A guest in the episode was Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska. Together, they delve into the circumstances leading to the expulsion, the experiences of those affected, and the lasting impact on the region of the Czech Borderlands.

It was a great opportunity to bring these events closer for the Polish listeners. You can listen to the podcast, in Polish, here.

We are happy to announce that a new article by our principal investigator, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, was published in the journal Acta Poloniae Historica.

The article delves into the memoirs of Polish soldiers who settled in the Recovered Territories after World War II, examining how they convey the stories of Poland’s acquisition of the formerly German lands in 1945. Karolina identifies two main forms of storytelling: myth and lore. The myth represents authoritative and obligatory stories, while lore involves flexible and optional storytelling. She also discusses how the myth of the ‘recovery’ evolved into lore over time, from the immediate post-war period to the 1970s. This analysis sheds light on the various ways in which personal and collective experiences shape the narratives of historical events.

The article is available in open access on the web page of Acta Poloniae Historica and our our website. We’d like to encourage you to check the whole issue of the journal as well.

During her archival research in the local archive in Liberec, Karina Hoření found a document that connects the issue of property changes after the war with the history of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti. After the war, a nomadic wagon that was supposed to be sold was found in Liberec, but the rightful owner claimed it at the last minute. In her essay, Karina not only describes this story and object in detail but reflects on the role it can play in our understanding of the forgotten culture of the North Bohemian Sinti.

Link to the text you can find here.

On January 21st, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska was a guest at the Skarbiec Nauki Polskiej audition at the Second Programme of Polish Radio. The audition, broadcasted in collaboration with the Foundation of Polish Science, aims to introduce the listeners to the research done by the former stipends of the Foundation.

Karolina was able to recall the recent discoveries made by the Spectral Recycling team, as well as to talk about her previous research in western Bohemia. She presented the fundamental intuition of our project: that the expellees are somewhat still present in the cultural landscape of the post-displacement regions by the things they left behind. She briefly discussed how hauntology works and how to engage with that theory while doing ethnographic research.

You can listen to the audition, in Polish, here.

We are pleased to share a new article by our principal investigator, Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska, published in the journal of Environment & History. In this article, Karolina explores the complex and often invisible histories of two orchards left behind, Baberow (Bobrowo) and Rieselei (Porosty), located near Wałcz, a town in northwestern Poland that underwent drastic demographic and political changes after 1945.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, Karolina reveals how the orchards are not only sources of fruit but also sites of memory and belonging for different communities. Moreover, she argues that the orchards are multitemporal entanglements, where the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman are constantly interacting and influencing each other. She invites us to rethink our relationship with nature and history and acknowledge the orchards’ agency and resilience.

The article is available in open access on our website. We’d like to encourage you to check the whole issue of the journal as well.

Hauerland. This is the name of the predominantly German speaking region in central Slovakia, but also the name of a new play in the J. G. Tajovský Theater in Zvolen, directed and written by Petr Palik. The play depicts the everyday life of a multi-ethnic community in central Slovakia and how it was largely negatively affected by the historical events of the 1930s and 1940s. In the following lines, you can learn about Michal Korhel’s impressions from the play he saw on December 13, but also about its significance in the context of the Slovak culture of remembrance with regard to the local German-speaking population.

Link to the text you can find here.