John C. Swanson
Association of Critical Heritage Studies
“The Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies”
Gothenburg, Sweden, June 5-8 2012
Paper Abstract
TITLE:
“Remembering Home: German Refugees from Hungary explain their Past”
ABSTRACT:
Scholarship on memory and heritage provides me (as a historian and filmmaker) with
different ways to talk about history and portray discussions of the past on film. A recent
documentary film of mine tells the story of a village in Hungary that before the Second
World War was inhabited mainly by German speakers (members of the German minority
in Hungary). In the film, I allow former members of the village to tell their stories: what
happened to their village and how they became refugees in Germany by the late 1940s.
The film also demonstrates how this small village in southern Hungary remains for the
displaced Hungarian-Germans, more than sixty years after their removal, their home.
During my presentation I will use the example of my film to explain what
historians and scholars of heritage studies can offer one another. As a historian, I have
been most influenced by Kate Brown’s ethnographic-informed investigation of western
Ukraine as well as the studies of nationness by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker. Both
Brown and Brubaker shun the grand narrative and strive to explain individual moments
of history as well as give a voice to everyday people. Following this perspective of
history from below, I, in my film, portray a struggle over memory--over individual
memories of a home that the film’s protagonists lost. In my presentation I would like to
place this struggle over memory in a larger discussion concerning collective memory--a
subject of great interest to heritage studies scholars--since all constructions of the past are
assembled from memory, conversations, and material one reads and hears. My argument
is that the personal explanations in the film have been influenced by larger discussions of
the expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe, what Wulf Kansteiner has termed a
“cultural trauma metaphor.”
AFFILIATION/ADDRESS:
John C. Swanson
Department of History, Utica College
1600 Burrstone Road
Utica, NY 13502
Telephone: (315)792-3242
E-Mail: jswanson@utica.edu