News

On 17-18 October, Karina Hoření attended the largest Czech conference dedicated to public history. This year, the conference took place in the North Bohemian town of Ústí nad Labem, which, like Liberec, where Karina is doing her field research, was an economic and cultural center of Czech Germans, which is visible in the materiality of the town. Perhaps this is also why several conference papers focused on remembering in post-displacement regions. Karina added to the discussion her paper titled: “There are Places We Cannot See: German Industrialists Villas as an Example of Research on the “Periphery”. She draws on Jacques Derrida’s ideas on “Spectres of Marx” and argued that post-German nostalgia is a Halloween costume of a fake ghost while remembering the post-1989 transformation is a real spectre that haunts Czech society today. 

In October, our team had the privilege of hosting Julia Gilfert, M.A., from Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen for a thought-provoking seminar titled (Un)comfortable rooms, neutralised objects. Exhibiting SS history at Wewelsburg Memorial and Museum.

During the session, Julia shared the history of Wewelsburg, a medieval castle in North Rhine-Westphalia. Once repurposed during the Third Reich as a center for Nazi mysticism, the site now serves as a memorial and museum. The exhibition there explores the activities of the SS in Wewelsburg, alongside the broader history of this organization under the NSDAP rule. Importantly, the museum also honors the victims of SS violence, providing a space for remembrance and reflection.

The seminar delved into the challenging themes of “comfortable” and “uncomfortable” histories. Together with Julia, our team explored how narratives of the past are shaped, contested, and remembered. A particularly intriguing discussion emerged around the concept of the “German ghost” and its potential embodiment as a Nazi ghost—offering insights into the haunting legacies of this difficult history in Germany as well as in the regions we study.

This seminar underscored the importance of critically engaging with sites of memory and their layered meanings, fostering a deeper understanding of the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Thank you Julia for sharing your research with us!

The blog post was guest-written by Dr Izabela Mrzygłód, assistant professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Izabela Mrzygłód encounters the spectre of Warsaw libraries destroyed by the Germans during World War II. It is now 80 years since the destruction of the Krasiński Library in October 1944. The author describes the losses of Polish archives and libraries resulting from German colonial policy. She listens to the silence that was left behind the loss and tries to interpret it in the context of archival turn and contemporary reflections on power and silencing in archives.

Link to the blog post you can find here.

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