Abstract
After the Second World War, millions of indigenous German speakers were forcibly expelled from Czechoslovakia. Their homes and property were taken over by newly arriving settlers. While there is a vast body of literature considering the expulsion from the perspective of those who were displaced, the author here focuses on the neglected question of how the newcomers and their offspring have made sense of their position. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research in the town of Opava, in today’s Czech Republic, the chapter investigates how and why the expellees have (not) been remembered by the current population. The author argues that the refusal to officially commemorate the German vanished Others can be understood as a strategy employed by “implicated subjects” to deal with an uncomfortable past as well as to maintain a positive self-perception. To support this argument, two cases of Opavian commemorative practice are compared: the realized Jewish memorial and the unrealized German memorial.
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Notes
- 1.
Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, “Introduction: Beyond the History of Ethnic Cleansing in Europe,” in Whose Memory? Which Future?, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 1–15.
- 2.
Eagle Glassheim, “The Mechanics of Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1947,” in Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 197–219.
- 3.
Adrian Arburg and Tomáš Staněk, Vysídlení Němců a proměny českého pohraniční 1945–1951 (Středokluky: Susa, 2010).
- 4.
See Zdeněk Beneš, Rozumět dějinám: vývoj česko-německého vztahů na našem území v letech 1848–1948 (Prague: Gallery, 2002).
- 5.
Kateřina Čapková, “Národnostně nespolehlivý?! Německy hovořící Židé v Polsku a v Československu bezprostředně po druhé světové válce,” Soudobé dějiny 1, no. 2 (2015): 80–101; Jan Kuklík and René Petráš, Minorities and Law in Czechoslovakia 1918–1992 (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2017).
- 6.
See Barbora Spalová, “Remembering the German Past in the Czech Lands: A Key Moment between Communicative and Cultural Memory,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2017): 84–109; Václav Houžvička, Návraty sudetské otázky (Prague: Karolinum, 2005); Tomas Sniegon, “Between Old Animosity and New Mourning: Meaning of Czech Post-Communist Memorials of Mass Killing of the Sudeten Germans,” in Whose Memory? Which Future?, ed. Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 49–72; Johana Wyss, “Stones Do Not Forget: The Symbolic Struggle between Forgetting and Being Forgotten,” in On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Commemorating War, ed. Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin, and Niall Munro (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020), 225–29.
- 7.
Kateřina Tučková, Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch (Prague: Host, 2010).
- 8.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
- 9.
Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
- 10.
See Čapková (2015); Kuklík and Petráš (2017).
- 11.
See Bernhard Forchtner, “Rhetoric of Judge-Penitence: Claiming Moral Superiority through Admissions of Past Wrongdoing,” Memory Studies 7, no. 4 (2014): 409–24.
- 12.
Unstructured interview with a male, conducted in Opava in October 2015 by Johana Wyss.
- 13.
Jan Kuklík and Daniela Němečková, “Majetkové změny v ČSR v letech 1945–1948,” Paměť a dějiny 1 (2017): 3–14.
- 14.
For conceptual grounding of the term see this book’s introduction by Anna Wylegała and Sabine Rutar.
- 15.
Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
- 16.
The idea that the Germans would come back to reclaim their property.
- 17.
For example, see Czechoslovakian government bulletin “Německý revanšizmus—hrozba míru” (Prague: Ústav pro mezinárodní politiku a ekonomii, 1959).
- 18.
Paul Atkinson and Martyn Hammersley, “Ethnography and Participant Observation,” in Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (London: Sage, 1998), 248–61.
- 19.
Raymond Gold, “Roles in Sociological Field Observation,” Social Forces 36 (1958): 217–23.
- 20.
I was born in Opava and was thus able to pass as a “native,” although my family moved away when I was a child. I returned to Opava as a Master’s student to conduct a three-month ethnographic study in 2013, and then as a doctoral candidate in 2015/16 to conduct longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, and later as a post-doctoral researcher to conduct short follow-up fieldwork trips lasting only a couple of weeks in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
- 21.
For more on the Silesian language, see Tomasz Kamusella, “The Szlonzoks and Their Language: Between Germany, Poland, and Szlonzokian Nationalism,” EUI Working Papers HEC, no. 1 (2003): 1–50; Tomasz Kamusella, The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 22.
Judith Okely, “Fieldwork Embodied,” The Sociological Review 55, no. 1 (2007): 65–79.
- 23.
Torkild Thanem and David Knights, “Embodied Immersion and Ethnographic Fieldwork,” in Embodied Research Methods (London: SAGE Publications, 2019), 54–77.
- 24.
Clifford Geertz, “Deep Hanging Out,” The New York Review of Books, no. 16 (1998): 349.
- 25.
Not to be confused with the Silesian University in Katowice, Poland.
- 26.
H. Russell Bernard, Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 27.
Forchtner (2014).
- 28.
Anna Wylegała, “The Absent ‘Others’: A Comparative Study of Memories of Displacement in Poland and Ukraine,” Memory Studies 8, no. 4 (2015): 470–86.
- 29.
Anna Wylegała, “Forced Migration and Identity in the Memories of Post-War Expellees from Poland and Ukraine,” in Disputed Memories in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. Tea S. Anderson and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 177–202.
- 30.
Inge Melchior and Oane Visser, “Voicing Past and Present Uncertainties: The Relocation of the Soviet World War II Memorial and the Politics of Memory in Estonia,” Focaal 59 (2011): 33–50.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Rothberg (2019).
- 33.
Ibid., 1.
- 34.
Semi-structured interview with Jaroslav Duda (pseudonym), male, conducted in February 2016 by Johana Wyss.
- 35.
Focus group interview with Conrad Halfar (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss.
- 36.
Semi-structured interview with Conrad Halfar (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss.
- 37.
Arnold Suppan, Hitler-Beneš-Tito: National Conflicts, World Wars, Genocides, Expulsions, and Divided Remembrance in East-Central and Southeastern Europe, 1948–2018 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019), 290.
- 38.
Rothberg (2019), 8–22 and 59–84.
- 39.
Recorded interview with Steffi Pospišilová (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in June 2016 by Johana Wyss.
- 40.
Recorded interview with Anna Truparová (pseudonym), conducted in Opava in December 2015 by Johana Wyss.
- 41.
Recorded interview with Libor Dvořák (pseudonym), conducted in November 2015 by Johana Wyss.
- 42.
Rothberg (2019), 1.
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Geertz, Clifford. 1998. Deep Hanging Out. The New York Review of Books 16: 349.
Glassheim, Eagle. 2001. The Mechanics of Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1947. In Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948, ed. Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, 197–219. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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———. 2012. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Wylegała, Anna. 2015. The Absent ‘Others’: A Comparative Study of Memories of Displacement in Poland and Ukraine. Memory Studies 8 (4): 470–486.
———. 2016. Forced Migration and Identity in the Memories of Post-War Expellees from Poland and Ukraine. In Disputed Memories in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. T.S. Anderson and B. Törnquist-Plewa, 177–202. Boston: De Gruyter.
Wyss, Johana. 2020. Stones Do Not Forget: The Symbolic Struggle between Forgetting and Being Forgotten. In On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War, ed. Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin, and Niall Munro, 225–229. Oxford: Peter Lang.
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Wyss, J. (2023). New Settlers as Implicated Subjects: Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia. In: Wylegała, A., Rutar, S., Łukianow, M. (eds) No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0_15
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