East Central European Cemeteries

Generous financial support from the Central European Network for Teaching and Research in Academic Liaison (CENTRAL) enabled us to develop a project in collaboration with our students. Our shared learning, based on field research and theoretical discussions, has evolved into this publication. We had the good fortune to enjoy the long-term supervision of Professor Christian Voß (Humboldt University of Berlin). Christian Voß and Stefan Karsch (International Department, Humboldt University of Berlin) facilitated financial support and publishing with the Peter Lang series Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe.

All individual projects focused on cemeteries, gravestones, and other artifacts featuring remembrance of the dead, on the one hand, and conveying the dynamics of borderland multi-ethnic and multilingual areas, on the other. Studying these manifestations of past times allowed us to deconstruct how narratives and specific cultures of remembrance connected to various minority groups evolve. In this vein, we may speak of private and public realms of memory that translocally synchronize different pasts.

Therefore, lieux de mémoire imply two main intertwining structures: the tangible, i. e., the materiality, and the intangible residing in the system of visible signs (semiotics) tied to hidden lifeworlds of memories, emotions, stories, and various interpretations of history. The book follows these entanglements in a way that each chapter attempts to reveal a particular layer within the various regional “palimpsests.” Each author adopted a unique methodological and conceptual language to convey their own approach.

The regions examined in this book are southern Carinthia in Austria, Croatia, Czech Silesia, Eastern Slovakia, Upper Lusatia in Germany, and Southeastern Banat in Serbia. All these areas share similar experiences: From the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after both world wars, they were affected by various assimilation processes, homogenization, and mass violence that would erupt into deportation, expulsion, and murder. Twentieth-century East Central Europe bears dramatic scars of forced displacement and ethnic homogenization. Our reading and telling of the past based on East Central European cemetery, therefore, involved two aspects: On one level, it considers gravestone design and language, while, on the other, it studies past events, practices and collective awareness developed around the sites.

Anežka Brožová (Charles University) writes about World War II monuments and graves in the Hlučín Region (Hlučínsko/Hultschiner Ländchen) and their contested importance within the Czech culture of remembrance. World War II plays a significant role in the collective memory of inhabitants of the Hlučín Region who identify with former Prussian inhabitants. Due to different historical experiences, their interpretation departs from the dominant narrative constructed in the postwar period in communist Czechoslovakia and adopted by the successor state, the Czech Republic, as Hlučín soldiers, i. e., inhabitants of the Hlučín Region, fought in the German Wehrmacht and either survived or fell in the war. This chapter analyzes the alternative Hlučín narrative manifested on graves and monuments dedicated to the fallen World War II Hlučín soldiers.

Tereza Juhászová (Charles University) examines different manifestations of identity in cemeteries in the eastern Slovak town of Medzev, where until today, the German minority, so-called Mantaks, descendants of German immigrants from the thirteenth century, live and still use a specific German dialect (Mantakisch). Her contribution asks if and how the identity of the Germans/Mantaks in Medzev manifests via inscriptions on gravestones. She argues that categories based on language or nationality are not always relevant in a multilingual space and that gravestones represent only one level of the multilayered identities of the German minority members.

Michał Piasek (Humboldt University of Berlin) explores how shifting borders and religion in German Upper Lusatia are entangled with the current use of the Sorbian language on gravestones. Throughout history, the different areas of Upper Lusatia have undergone specific historical and religious changes, which the chapter aims to make visible through a cartographic approach combined with the phantom borders theory. The author has designed a map as a narrative tool that helps read how different states, their language policies and extensive coal mining impacted the use of Sorbian in the explored areas over time. This approach enables the author to track down continually evolving phantom borders.

We would especially like to thank the Humboldt University of Berlin for hosting our workshops and helping develop the project; especially Aleksandra Laski, Lucy Häntschl, Nenad Stefanov, Christian Voß, and Stefan Karsch; Konrad Petrovszky (Austrian Academy of Sciences, ÖAW), the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna; the Austrian and Central European Center (Wiener Österreich und Ostmitteleuropa Zentrum) at the University of Vienna and its director Marija Wakounig; Alojz Ivanišević; the Institute of East European History at the University of Vienna; Kateřina Králová, the Faculty for Social Sciences at Charles University; the CENTRAL-Network, the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD); Gisela Lindeque for English proofreading; the reviewers for their thorough work. Last but not least, we are grateful to our colleagues, the then students, many of whom have become early career researchers. Thank you for your inspiring enthusiasm, hard work, patience and endurance, without which this volume would not have been possible.

This publication has undergone the process of anonymous peer review.

Ferdinand Kühnel, Soňa Mikulová, and Snežana Stanković