Our researcher, Michal Korhel, spent two weeks in March doing fieldwork in Slovakia. His aim was predominantly to look for the first and second generations of settlers who came to Handlová after World War II. However, during his travels he encountered more ghosts than he expected.
Michal’s first stop was Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava. There he got a meeting with the author and director of the first theatre play that tackled the topic of the forced expulsion of Germans from Slovakia – Domov! (Home!). As the story of the play took place in his home town of Kežmarok and its surroundings, in the interview Michal additionally gained a comparative perspective to his research in Handlová.
Handlová itself was Michal’s next stop. There he was able to live in a formerly German stone house (nowadays a place where the local German community regularly meets). With its thick and cold walls one could at least partly imagine how the living standards might have looked like. Right on his first day in Handlová, a narrator took Michal to the „field“: in this case almost literally, as they went to the forests and meadows surrounding the town, collecting information for the narrator’s own research. He attempts to use the knowledge of the prewar cultivation of land (such as planting fruit trees and bushes away from human housing), in order to keep the animals in the nature and use the uncultivated parts of the local environment.
In Handlová and towns in its vicinity Michal conducted interviews with settlers, who or whose ancestors came to Handlová from Belgium, Hungary and Romania. As one of them came to Handlová together with her parents already during the war, Michal got a valuable account on the time directly after the war’s end and empty German houses that were not that empty after all. Even though Michal set up some meetings already in advance based on a call for participants, he also walked through the streets of Handlová in hope to gain some information talking to people “over the fence”.
At the end of Michal’s fieldwork a narrator took him for a short road trip. It was the same route that is usually shown to German visitors, who come to Hauerland to see the home of their ancestors. From Handlová the trip went to formerly German settlements Sklené / Glaserhau, Kremnické Bane / Johannesberg, Kunešov / Kuneschhau and Janova Lehota / Drexlerhau. Additionally, in Kunešov Michal and his guide took a walk following the path the German miners from the village regularly took on their way to the mine in Handlová.
