A new article titled “Sympathy for the Unfamiliar Ghosts: Why did Polish Settlers Care for Tombs of Ancestors of Expelled Germans?” by Karolina Ćwiek-Rogalska has been published in Memory Studies Review.
Although the scholarship to date has assumed that after the Second World War in central Europe, in regions where forced displacement took place, the new, mostly Slavic settlers neglected and destroyed German cemeteries left behind by the expellees, I argue that this process did not start in the first years after the war because of the relationships that the settlers established with chosen German dead. I explain why this particular deceased individual was chosen, focusing on how the care of their tomb temporarily established a form of spectral kinship. To do so, I focus on ethnographic materials, including interviews, gathered in central Pomerania, contemporary Poland, to see how these stories have been conveyed after 1989 and what impact post-socialist conditions had on them.
A link to the full text you can find here. The publication is also available in open access via Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/20623766