Collective Mourning

Scholarly Essay from the year 2004 in the subject History Europe - Other Countries - Ages of World Wars, printed single-sided, grade: keine, Cornell University Ithaca (NY) (History Departement), course: Interdisciplinary Conference: German Suffering / Deutsches Leid - (Re)presentations, language: English, abstract: In the 20th century no decisive event left its mark on the people of Central Europe as much as the time of the Second World War. War, death, and the separation of families were sources of suffering that had and have to be integrated, to be repressed, to be understood, and to be remembered. I would like to make the focus of my discussion a village, its people, and their fates and memories. The pictures you will see, uncommented, in the next half hour are being shown with the ex-press permission of the surviving villagers and their Czech friends. I am compro-mising to a certain extent the usual standards of scholarship because my mother s family forms a part of the community about which I am reporting. Here I want to examine two questions: How is the past of the village re-membered and how are these memories connected with the expulsion of its in-habitants and the village s subsequent fate? And how was memory constructed after 1990, and what forms does it take today? To establish different levels of discourse, I d like to diferentiate beetween the usage of the name Maiersgrün as a memory-designator and Vysok