On Monday, April 15th, our series of seminars with invited guests continued – this time Associate Professor Stanislav Holubec from the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences accepted our invitation. We have been following his work for a long time and were therefore happy to learn about the results of his project Central European Mountains Krkonoše 1890-1950: Modernity, Tourism, Nationalism where he studied the modern history of the mountain range that is situated on the Czech- Polish border and that was inhabited by German-speaking communities until 1946.
Stanislav has done archival research on both sides of the Czech-Polish border and shared with us his findings on the different character of the postwar resettlement in the two countries and the different policies and practices of how the German past of this mountain range was rewritten into the Czech(oslovak) and Polish narrative after the Second World War.
Furthermore, Stanislav explored the exile culture of the expelled Germans who preserved and re-created the image of the Krkonoše (Riesengebirge in German and Karkonosze in Polish) even in exile in West Germany.
Since both Karolina and Karina are partially doing their research in the region, there was a vivid discussion not just about the findings themselves but also about methodological issues of research in the borderlands and possible future directions in the research of mountain areas in general.