News

On October 7 and 8, a cohort of scholars interested in objects on the move gathered in the Willy Brandt Center for German and European Studies in Wrocław to discuss their findings. One of them was also Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska who presented her initial findings on how the second generation of settlers handles the heritage of their parents who collected receipts for the formerly German properties.

It was an occasion to meet old friends, such as Anna Kurpiel and Katarzyna Maniak, who were guests at our internal seminar and were talking about their fascinating book “Porządek rzeczy”. Also, Kerstin von Lingen whom we met in Vienna, and who was one of the organizers of this meeting, presented her work in progress on the Baltic German objects in Wielkopolska and then during the flight and expulsion.

The workshop showed a wide range of topics connected to the formerly German objects in a very wide understanding of the word. Also, because of how it was organized, everyone had enough time to present and then listen to the comments, which is a scholarly practice we admire.

During her visit to Warsaw on September 23, ERC President Maria Leptin engaged with members of the Polish government, science policy-makers, ERC grantees, and the research community. The program included the participation of ERC Scientific Council member Leszek Kaczmarek and former ERC Vice-President Andrzej Jajszczyk, alongside many ERC grantees and panel members.

Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska was invited to speak about Spectral Recycling, providing insights into the application process and answering questions from the audience offering a brief overview of the work being conducted within the project. 

We hope that the meeting became an inspiration and motivation for potential winners of ERC grants and that soon we will be able to see more and more people in Poland who will successfully run such projects.

How was it to be a settler in the early postwar years in Pomerania? Those who participated in an urban game prepared by the Wałcz Land Museum now have an idea. On September 14, the Museum invited all interested to join a cohort of new settlers. Karolina was among them, eager to observe the reactions and comments this activity would generate within the local community.

The participant observation began at the railway station, proceeded through the documentation services at the former State Repatriation Office, and included taking photographs in the oldest atelier in Wałcz, established in 1948. One of the activities involved identifying plaques that displayed German and Polish street names, and figuring out which German name had been changed to which Polish name. You might wonder if Karolina succeeded. Not only did she succeed, but she also broke the record, completing the task so swiftly that the current map was unnecessary. This is just in case you wonder what practical appliances the work on formerly German maps could have.

Eventually, all participants planted tulips in one of the town’s squares. These tulips are expected to bloom in April next year, 80 years after the first settlers arrived in Wałcz from Korzec in today’s Ukraine. We eagerly anticipate seeing how it will look in the spring!

How to make objects tell the story? One way is to give them space and see what they do in particular constellations with others. This was the way the Wałcz Land Museum’s temporary exhibition on the first postwar period of the town was created. Karolina took part in preparing the exhibition, including the preparation of the descriptions and learning how to arrange objects.

The exhibition, put in a formerly German building of a public school due to the ongoing renovation of the museum, was collecting objects about different groups of the new settlers. Starting with the postwar propaganda poster and stockpiles of the items of luggage, it led to a space divided between the objects brought by people who came from the Eastern Borderlands, Siberia, and Central Poland. A separate place was devoted to people resettled during the operation Vistula, i.e. the inner resettlement in Poland in 1947. In one corner of the room, the objects belonging to soldiers were devoted: those who fought within the 1st Polish Army and came to Pomerania from the east, and those who fought in the West and were able to come to town searching for their families only later. Objects commemorating the fate of those who spent the war in concentration camps were also presented.

In summary, the exhibition tells the story of how German Deutsch Krone changed into Polish Wałcz in the 1940s. It furnishes the base for the incoming permanent exhibition, prepared by the Museum team. Karolina is also taking part in it. We hope to invite you to this exhibition soon enough!

Karina Hoření participated in the “Walkability between Past and Present” workshop in Prague on 11-13 September. The workshop was organized by the Slow Memory project which “addresses the need for increased interdisciplinarity in our understanding of how societies confront their past to contend with environmental, economic, and social changes brought on by sudden events and by slow and creeping transformations.” Participants from different disciplines explored various layers of Prague´s memory in seminars on mapping, creative writing, and even contemporary dance. As walks with interlocutors or exploration of changes within the landscape are part of our  methodology already, the experience and knowledge will be used productively in our research. 

At the beginning of September, Magdalena Bubík participated in the mid-term meeting of the Anthropology of Religion Working Group of the German Anthropological Association (DGSKA) at the University of Bremen. The event brought together scholars in the anthropology of religion from all over the world. Magdalena listened to presentations on a variety of topics, such as beliefs in Jakarta, Bengal, or Bangladesh. Each was followed by a discussion by all conference participants. The lecture by keynote speaker, Professor Tyler Zoanni (University of Bremen), on beliefs in Uganda was especially captivating: it tackled the issue of the natives who have learned to live with spirits because they believe it benefits them. This tempted Magdalena to carry this issue onto her research and to consider how ghosts are perceived by the inhabitants of post-displacement regions in Central Europe and how they are aware of their presence. During her presentation, Magdalena shared the story of an altar painting from a blown up church in Liberec. She posed the question of what insights can this story offer about both former and present religious communities in Liberec.
After the conference, Magdalena also had the opportunity to visit the city center of Bremen, part of which is UNESCO-listed, and take a photograph with the famous characters from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, as touching them is said to bring good luck.

At the beginning of September Karin, Karolina and Michal met in Greifswald. It was not an ordinary work meeting, as their task was to prepare a proposal for the book that is going to be the main result of our project. Even though outside there were the last summer days, our team members worked diligently and, at the end, came up with the structure of the whole book as well as the individual chapters. When the right time comes, we will reveal more details about their results.

It was not a coincidence that our team members met in Greifswald. The town in northern Germany is the home of the Pomeranian State Museum, where Karin, Karolina and Michal met for their working sessions. The museum shows the history and culture of Pomerania, a historical region nowadays divided by the German-Polish border. In our research we focus on the Polish part and the objects left behind by their former German owners. In the museum in Greifswald our team members could see various objects that the fleeing or forcibly resettled Germans managed to take with themselves. Karin, Karolina and Michal got a guided tour through the exhibition of Pomeranian history in the 20th century by Dorota Makrutzki, a research assistant at the Cultural Office for Pomerania and East Brandenburg. They are very thankful for that and look forward to potential future collaboration. 

pictures taken by Michal Korhel

Karina Hoření decided to see the Trail of Slovak National Uprising to explore the life of Adolf Hammer, a Slovak German involved in the Uprising. She documented her experiences in diary form, delving into the current memory of the event and the role of Slovak Germans in it. This unique method of research allowed her to immerse herself in the places associated with the Uprising and gain a deeper understanding of its significance. Through her journey, she shed light on the historical and cultural aspects of this pivotal moment in history of Slovakia.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

The August issue of Kapitál magazine features an article by Karina Hoření and Michal Korhel, titled “Heroes or Victims? The Slovak National Uprising from the Perspective of Slovak Germans.” This article presents findings from their research in Central Slovakia, shedding light on the varied experiences of Slovak Germans during the uprising. Michal discusses the village of Sklené, where the largest massacre of ethnic Germans in Slovakia occurred in Fall 1944, while Karina covers the history of nearby village Malinová/Zeche, where local Germans formed a partisan group that actively participated in the Slovak National Uprising.

Editor Dominik Želinský emphasizes the importance of recognizing the multinational nature of the uprising, as demonstrated by the researchers’ work. Kapitál magazine is recommended reading for those interested in hiking the Path of Slovak National Uprising or other adventures, offering valuable insights into the historical and cultural context of the region. For non-local readers proficient in Slovak, the entire current issue is also available online.

On the last day of May 2024, we celebrated the second anniversary of work in the Spectral Recycling project. Our research involves archival queries in national and local archives, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in three selected regions, namely Pomerania in Poland, Northern Bohemia in Czechia, and Upper Nitra Basin in Slovakia. In the initial two years of our project, we successfully gathered nearly 200 interviews. This dataset encompasses both oral history interviews and ethnographic approaches. We spent many hours in the archives, looking for the relevant documents, talking with our interview partners, taking pictures of the things left behind, and exploring the locations we investigated. 

Community-based research

During our project, we collaborate with local communities, focusing on the history and present of their post-displacement experiences. Two key partnerships stand out. Firstly, we engaged with the “Goleniów Photostories” project, based in Goleniów (formerly German Gollnow, Poland). After a series of photographic negatives depicting local settlers in the post-war decades was found, we helped with the launch of a community-driven initiative. Our team assisted in establishing the methodological framework for ethnographic studies, including interviews, and carrying out some of them (interview 1 and interview 2). Secondly, we collaborate with the Wałcz Land Museum. The project’s PI not only conducted ethnographic interviews but also contributed to framing the museum’s new permanent exhibition, which will focus on artifacts brought by settlers and unveiled by them on-site. We are very happy to be a part of these initiatives, as we firmly believe that ethnographic research is inherently tied to social engagement as well. 

Presence in media

Our team maintains a notable media presence, actively disseminating the topic of our research. We participate in radio broadcasts, podcasts, and public lectures, effectively reaching wider audiences, i.e. beyond academia. Furthermore, the project’s PI has given several interviews for various news outlets (links you can find here). These interviews followed her recognition—the Polish National Science Centre Award in Humanities and Social Sciences [more information: short video with English subtitles, podcast on Spotify (in Polish) and a note]—for pioneering the establishment of a novel category of the resettlement cultures.

Series of public lectures

Our team actively engages with broader audiences also beyond the media. To date, team members have delivered a total of 8 public lectures in Warsaw, Wrocław, Halle, and Prague. These events cater not only to scholarly audiences but also provide an opportunity for individuals outside the disciplines of ethnography and history, or academia in general, to become acquainted with the topic. Attendees can share stories related to their families and personal experiences in the context of post-displacement. The interest shows how the topic is still relevant but also that hauntology provides us with language that  is new in the debate about this topic in respective countries. Furthermore, on May 22nd, 2024, we had the opportunity to present our project at the Scientific Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Vienna with invited commentators from the Department of History at the University of Vienna, Professors Claudia Kraft and Kerstin von Lingen. It helped us to polish some of the aspects of our methodological queries. Also, we organised the first workshop planned for the project that took place in Vienna (link) on 23 May, 2024. We are delighted to share our research and learn from other researchers–we look forward to more such opportunities in the future.

Where to read about our findings?

As is usual in academia, we presented the initial findings as the conference papers and articles. We invite you to get to know more about the topic we study, learning about our  conference presentations and poster. You are also cordially invited to read the 5 articles available on our website. You can learn about the redefining of the German heritage, including the furniture left behind and the fruit orchards, read what the ignoring of the local knowledge may cause and how the idea of “recovery” of formerly German lands developed over time. Moreover, we share with you many experiences through blog posts in the languages of the studied regions. To date, we published as many as 14 posts, beginning in March 2023. You can learn about our field experiences, impressions and partial studies (some posts you can find here, prepared by Karolina, Karina, Michal and Magdalena). We inform you about our activities on the News section, for now we have prepared around 100 news in Polish and English.

Additionally, we prepared Postcards — a component envisioned as part of our methodological experiment. Drawing inspiration from a similar approach, we engaged in collaborative practices centered around ethnographic postcards. These postcards facilitated the creation, sharing, and comparison of materials across seemingly disparate field sites. You can see them as well and learn about other aspects of our project!

There are three more years of work ahead of us, and we are not slowing down. We will keep you informed about new activities, plans and achievements. You can see the list of all our activities here. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook where we keep you updated about what we do, but also share various interesting facts and information about our research work, the people we meet and the regions where we work.