Issue 2, Vol. 111 (2024)

Article focuses on ways how residents of north Bohemian town of Liberec deal in their family histories with possesion of post- displacement. Objects they use were confiscated from German speaking minority at the aftermath of WW2. Text gives an overview on narratives of this event in Czech public discourse and ways how these narratives are reflected in family stories. Study is based on three family histories collected during ethnographic study and analysed using memory studies and hauntology theories.

People who identify as “tutejszy” (Polish, “local”) live in southeastern Lithuania. The question of how and why “tutejszy” draw identity boundaries between themselves and other people is raised in this article. To answer this question the qualitative field research was conducted in southeastern Lithuania. Researchers used life story interviews, observation and participant observation.
Four main ways in which “tutejszy” identify themselves, were discovered. A “tutejszy” individual can identify as:
1. A person who lives in the north-east of Vilnius and has no clearly defined ethnicity. They might identify with neither or different ethnic groups.
2. An ethnic Pole, born and living in Lithuania and who feels less than a Pole (the Poles from Poland).
3. A person who can speak all local languages and understand the local way of life in southeastern Lithuania.
4. An ethnic Pole, born and living in Lithuania, who knows many languages and preserves the “true” Polish culture.

The text focuses on the ways of re/construction of identity and heritage conservation in the Slovak town of Partizánske. The town was founded as one of the industrial company towns of the Bat'a company at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s. Despite the efforts of the professional community, neither the town's urban planning nor any significant part of it (except for the modernist church) is institutionally protected. In this text, we offer an alternative view of the re/construction of historical heritage and its institutional protection, which, in addition to artistic qualities, is also based on a reflection of the current collective memory on which the town's inhabitants base their relationship to it. We anticipate that focusing on the current relationship and understanding of the city's history by its inhabitants and broadening the view beyond the founding firm and its activities can support efforts to institutionalise local heritage conservation.

This article explores how resilience and the sense of agency of small towns was built by local media in interwar Czechoslovakia. It enquires how small towns were constructed as actors capable of coping with structural disadvantages and navigating through the conditions of uncertainty in the turbulent period of the “long” 1930s. The questions are examined on the example of two towns, Kdyně and Heřmanův Městec, and through the systematic survey of two periodicals, Kdyňská Stráž and Zájmy Heřmanoměstecka. The comparative analysis of periodicals’ agendas, narratives of towns, views of the towns’ relations to larger system, and framings of major challenges of the analyzed period has proven common traits but also revealed different strategies in the building of the sense of agency pursued by the respective periodicals: an internally- and individually-oriented discourse in Heřmanův Městec and externally and collectively oriented discourse in Kdyně.