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 233

This extremely traumatic experience soon generated the emotionally and politically powerful discourse of die verlorene Heimat (the lost homeland) (cf. Svašek 2000a, 2002). The Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, the biggest organisation of Sudeten German expellees with its seat in Munich, defined the confiscated land as “stolen property”, and politicised their claims to the old homeland by demanding Heimatrecht, the right to return to “home” and to repossess their personal and collective belongings (cf. Hamperl 1996; Stanëk 1991; Svašek 1999).

Immediately after the war, the Czechoslovak government introduced a policy to re-populate its border areas, and the abandoned Sudeten German houses (those which had not been destroyed in revenge attacks) were occupied by Czechs, Volhynia Czech, Slovaks, Roma, and others. The most obvious signs of the Sudeten German past, such as German sign boards, were removed, and all cities, towns, and villages were officially renamed or only referred to by their Czech names.

During the rapidly unfolding Cold War, the border with West- Germany and Austria was transformed into one of the most heavily guarded sections of the Iron Curtain. Numerous border villages were blown up for security reasons, and villages like Vesnice - situated only four kilometres from the border with Eastern Bavaria - were never fully re-occupied. Situated in a remote, peripheral corner of the Eastern bloc, many houses remained empty and were eventually destroyed.6

In 1950, a number of Ruthenian families from Northern Romania moved to the village of Vesnice.7 They occupied some of the houses along the main road, worked in the state-owned forest and in the newly established collective farm. Most of the other houses were knocked down or slowly deteriorated. Over the years, in particular during the more liberal periods when the rigorous, state-controlled politico-economic system relaxed, the new villagers were able to buy the houses in which they lived from the Czechoslovak state, and some used their large gardens to cultivate fruit and vegetables for their own use.

I first visited Vesnice in the summer of 1991 as my family had bought a house there from one of the Ruthenian inhab-