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 235 from all over the Sudetenland have actively engaged themselves with their pre-expulsion past, and have expressed strong feelings for their old Heimat. These feelings - a combination of sadness, grief, love, pride, and nostalgia - have been triggered by emotional memories which have been actively evoked and managed, for example through a continuous production of nostalgic poems, novels, and Heimatbücher. The Sudeten German case suggests that emotions can be regarded as powerful narratives and performances which - when directed at property - reinforce particular subject-object discourses. As Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine Lutz noted, “emotion gets its meaning and force from its location and performance in the public realm of discourse” (1990: 7). The emotional expellee discourse of "stolen property” and the related politics of nostalgia engender a particular image of ownership which portrays the expellee community as a collective undivided whole, and naturalizes their connection to their old Heimat. The feelings of loss, anger, and nostalgia clearly reinforce the expellees’ image of themselves as the rightful owners of their ancestral home. Diasporic homeland discourses are often politicised and highly moralistic, producing claims to both property and identity (Skrbiš 2002). They tend to produce a cultural logic in which the object is the subject and vice versa. Dominant Sudeten German property and identity narratives have similarly produced an emotional subject-object ideology which equalizes being and having, and collapses the distinction between present (actual) and past (imagined) property. The object of ownership, the homeland as lost property, is presented as an inherent part of the owning subject. In other words, the lost homeland is perceived as the core of their collective being. Lost property and symbolic appropriation Not surprisingly, after the abolition of compulsory visa requirements in 1990, the Sudeten German expellees displayed an increased interest in their Heimat, and many visit-
