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
236 Maruška Svašek ed their places of birth for the first time in forty years. The visits were highly emotional occasions during which the expellees reconstituted themselves as a village community as they remembered and re-experienced feelings of loss, fear, and anger.9 At least five expellees from Vesnice recounted how they had burst into tears when they had first seen their old family houses. In many cases they had only found groups of trees with the remains of old foundations or simply an empty field. One of the Ruthenian inhabitants of the village said: “They cried, they all cried. They searched the ruins and cried.” Property, in this context, must clearly be defined as a subject-object relation which is inherently emotional. As family homes, the houses had been important environments in which personal and family identities had been constituted. As with the school, the parsonage, and the church, the family homes had been central to their sense of personal and collective self. As noted earlier, the call by the Sudetendeutsche landsmannschaft for Heimatrecht demanded that the Sudeten Germans should be given back their property, thus enabling them to restore their “damaged” subject-object relationship. The expellees from Vesnice, however, did not believe that they would ever return to the village as actual owners.10 As a matter of fact, they were not even attracted by the idea of returning. They had started new lives in Germany, their children and grandchildren who had been born after the expulsion often regarded themselves as local Bavarians, and the village itself was in a depressingly poor state. Consequently, the expellees from Vesnice did not seek to legally reclaim their old property from the Czech state. Instead, they began to symbolically reappropriate specific social spaces in the village that still had a particularly strong emotional value. From 1993 onwards, they held commemorative services in front of the war memorials and in the church. They also renovated the memorial which commemorated victims of the First World War, and cleaned some of the still existing graves. Emotions, in this regard, can be conceptualised as social forces which motivate specific object-focused activities.
