Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Interaction, migration and change
Property, power, and emotions 237 Nostalgia and other emotions indeed moved the expellees to organise annual visits to their place of birth which, subsequently, enabled them to "feel good” in their old village. Evidently, everything needed to be organised beforehand, and this demonstrates that emotional forces do not simply overpower individuals, but that individuals, as social beings, also aim to actively manage emotional dynamics. To realise their plan to hold religious services and ceremonies in the villages, the expellees created and used personal and religious networks. Gerhard Schwartz, one of the expellees who lived in Bärnau, a Bavarian village situated only ten kilometres from Vesnice, told me that he had befriended one of the Orthodox Ruthenian families who lived in Vesnice. The expellees strengthened their connections with the local Orthodox priest, and with a German Catholic priest who were willing to lend their “official support”. The priests, who by their presence seemed to legitimize the Sudeten German presence in the village, were receptive to the emotional discourse of sudden loss and nostalgia, and translated it into a religious message of love and reconciliation. To the Sudeten Germans, being able to spend some time together in the village and remember their “collective” past, was emotionally rewarding, although also somewhat confusing. “Especially the first time when we were back in the church, me and my sisters, we all cried”, said one of the expellees in 1997. "I got many childhood memories, but today the village is of course very different from how it was so many years ago. That was hard, but at the same time, it made things easier”. She had felt a sense of relief during that first visit because she could now accept that the clock could no longer be turned back, and that she would not even want to return. She noted that the act of symbolic reappropriation had had a healing effect on what was still painful (cf. Svašek 2000b).11 Changing ownership: property as long-term investment It is interesting to compare the nostalgic and moralistic subject-object discourse of the expellees from Vesnice with capi-
