On June 11th, 2024, Karina Hoření held a public lecture for a wider audience at the café Boršov in Prague, in Czech Republic. Her presentation was entitled “Myths, Ghosts, and Treasures of Czech Borderlands – Hauntological Perspective” and invited guests to re-think established narratives about Czech borderlands and the expulsion of ethnic Germans.
Karina was invited by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a Prague-based group of scholars interested in popular culture topics as an important factor for societal imagination, to close this year’s series of lectures called “The Magic Year”. Despite the sunny weather, this lecture attracted a wide audience who learned about Karina’s findings from her field research in the Northern Bohemian city of Liberec (formerly German Reichenberg). She enclosed, for example, how villas of the German-speaking industrialists were repurposed as sanatoriums for the masses during the communist period and why, now abandoned, they could be interpreted as ghosts of former utopias.
Within the lecture, Karina also presented stories of several objects owned by expelled Germans and what the current inhabitants of the town think of them.
According to the active discussion, the lecture proved highly successful. Members of the audience shared their own family stories but also discussed the current peripheral status of the Czech borderlands. The debate showed that the topic of expulsion is relevant also outside the post-displacement regions.
