The post-war agrarian revolution and other activities of the new authorities in a few years removed from the landscape of central Poland the descendants of German settlers, for whom their villages were often the only homeland they had. However, their material traces in the landscape have been preserved: farms, houses, orchards and Evangelical cemeteries.
- Our research project aims at restoring the past to these villages and give their German inhabitants their names and surnames, although we know that the world that has passed cannot be fully reconstructed even with the help of the best sources and the most sensitive research tools - explains dr S. Latocha.
- In Poland post-Germanness is commonly associated with the so-called Western and Northern Territories after moving the western border of the state to the Oder and Nysa Łużycka after World War II. At the same time, we tend to forget about the post-Germanness experienced by the inhabitants of contemporary central Poland. While Polish literature and film have worked fairly well on the problem of the heritage of the indigenous inhabitants of Gdańsk, Lower Silesia or Masuria, in the public discourse the topic of post-Germanness of, for example, Lodz and the surrounding area is almost non-existent, with a few exceptions. Our research on the border of anthropology and history is aimed at verifying this "biased geography" of the post-German heritage - adds dr S. Latocha.
Post-Germanness constitutes a multi-phase cultural category, which since the end of World War II has been shaping experience of part of inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe. The post-war period - wrote Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind - is the time of "universal journey. The whole Europe was on the road, millions of forced labourers, prisoners and war prisoners were returning to their countries, other millions fled or were thrown away from their native land". In other words, the people who created them over the years have disappeared from local cultural landscapes.
- In our research we focus specifically on this difficult post-German heritage in central Poland. With ethnographic attention to social and cultural details (places, specific inhabitants and their fate), and with historical factual meticulousness we analyse documents from the years 1945-1951 in the microscale of one commune, where from the end of the 18th century, the Germans were settling down. They were looking for a better life and founded villages there by managing wastelands and clearing forests - says dr M. Łapa.
An interdisciplinary team including: dr Sebastian Latocha (a cultural anthropologist) and dr Małgorzata Łapa (a historian) will study, among others, documents dating back to the post-war land reform, in which human experiences, emotions, dreams, suffering and fear of a completely new reality were imprinted. The next stage will consist of ethnographic field research in Łazisko (from 1953 - Ujazd), during which interviews about this difficult heritage will be conducted with the inhabitants of post-German villages.
The research project entitled "Ethnography of difficult post-German heritage in rural areas in Poland. Anthropological analysis of documents from the period of the land reform (1944) in central Poland (example of the Łazisko commune)" is managed by dr Sebastian Latocha under the Grant for Young Researchers (the Excellence Initiative - Research University competition).
Dr Sebastian Latocha - a cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, researcher of difficult heritage; dr Latocha works at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology; he is an editor and secretary of "Zeszyty Wiejskie" - an interdisciplinary scientific journal devoted to rural studies, and a member of the Polish Ethnological Society.
Dr Małgorzata Łapa - a historian, researcher of the Polish economy and state economic policy in the 20th century, the history of religions and denominations in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of Lodz and the region in the 19th and 20th centuries; dr Łapa works at the Department of Contemporary Polish History; she is a member of the Polish Historical Society and the Polish Association of Economic History.
Source: dr Sebastian Latocha, the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy and History, UL
Edit: Promotion Centre, UL