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Projects
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Steinort
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Background article
Agata, Dorota, Iwona, Jolanta
"What luck that we had this kindergarten!" All four say. That was in the early 1970s. Agata and Jolanta now live in Germany, Dorota and Iwona have stayed in Masuria. Lehndorff Castle, the "Pałac", was a place they all felt happy. In those stately rooms they had a feeling of security and comfort, they played among the old oaks, went swimming in the lake. It was a microcosm away from the adult world with its worries and traumas.
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Antje Vollmer
She is known as a Green Party politician and for her longstanding role as Vice President of the German Bundestag. After retiring in 2005, she became a freelance author. Her first book project “Doppelleben” (Double Life) tells the story of Heinrich von Lehndorff, one of the conspirators of the events of 20 July 1944 , and his wife Gottliebe. It is a moving biography of two young aristocrats that tells of their daring and their love.
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Biography
Bettina Bouresh
"I’m a typical post-war child," says Bettina Bouresh. Born in 1950, she grew up burdened with German guilt and the traumas of her mother's family, who had lived in Allenstein until 1945. She herself felt homeless for a long time. Until one day she found her place: in Masuria. Here she found a home – and in Steinort Palace her life’s work. Today she is vice-chairwoman of the Lehndorff Society.
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Map and text
Commemorating Copernicus
Since the 19th century, numerous Copernicus monuments have been built around the world. Even today, new sites of remembrance honoring the astronomer emerge, especially in Poland. Each site has a unique agenda, narrative, and background.
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Danube. River stories
"Look at me, says the Danube. Great am I, beautiful and wise. There is no one in Europe who could hold a candle to me." The Hungarian writer György Konrád put this not exactly modest statement into the mouth of the great river when he opened the first International Danube Festival in Ulm in 1998...
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Picture gallery
Emil Orlik
Emil Orlik (1870–1932) was one of the most famous and versatile Czech artists of the turn of the century. He was known primarily as a graphic artist and draftsman whose artistic work ranged between realism and art nouveau. His extensive oeuvre includes drawings of famous contemporary musicians and composers – whom Orlik also liked to show practicing their art.
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Biography
Eva Anna Therese Puschke
As far back as the 19th century, the Puschke family worked as teachers in Steinort and in the neighboring church village of Rosengarten. They played an important role in village life and had close ties to the noble Lehndorff family. The last teacher of the dynasty was Eva Puschke, a "lay teacher" in Rosengarten from 1940 to 1944. After the Germans were expelled, she lived in Hamburg. She left behind a suitcase full of family documents.
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Biography
Fritz Lamm: A diary as a companion during his escape in 1936
Fritz Lamm describes his escape from the Nazi persecution of Jews from Stettin via Switzerland and Austria to Prague in his previously unpublished diary.
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Podcast
Hanna Schygulla
The actor Hanna Schygulla was 30 years old when she first met Gottliebe von Lehndorff in 1973. The scene of the encounter: the artists' colony in the old Peterskirchen vicarage, east of Munich. They lived there for thirteen years, their apartments backing onto each other. Despite their age difference, they had many things in common, not least the experience of losing their homeland. In the podcast, the years they shared at Peterskirchen come back to life.
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Biography
Hannah Wadle
In 2009, Hannah Wadle settled in Sztynort to do research for her doctoral thesis – and stayed for a whole year. Gradually, her cautious explorations turned into familiarity and what began as a purely academic interest became a dedicated personal commitment to the town and its people. She learned to see the Lehndorff manor house from many perspectives. In 2017, she founded a cultural festival, and since then the palace has come to life every August.
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Background article
In search of history at the Jewish Museum Vienna
Each of the objects on display at the Jewish Museum Vienna was once intended for daily or ritual use in Jewish families and communities and is bound up with the fates of Jewish people. Together, the objects, each torn from their original context, provide a memorial to the Jews who were displaced and murdered, and for this reason the story behind every object deserves to be told. Although only scant reliable information is available for most of the objects, this article describes an attempt to trace the story of a Torah crown from the JMV using just a few details.
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Editing project
Josef Pfitzner und Hans Hirsch
Source edition of the interwar correspondence between Prague-based historian and Nazi politician Josef Pfitzner and Hans Hirsch.
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Biography
Marek Makowski and Piotr Wagner
Two passionate sailors, raised in Giżycko, not far from Sztynort. Marek Makowski (b.1984) and Piotr Wagner (b.1986) left at a young age, took advantage of the opportunities on offer in a united Europe and later returned to the world they grew up in. Marek, an entrepreneur and owner of a sailing school, and Piotr, a self-employed interpreter, tour guide and cultural professional, share a tangible vision for Sztynort.
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Biography
Maria Zarębska
When Maria Zarębska was born, in July 1948, the village of Sztynort was still scarred by war. A few Masurian families had remained living there, but most of the inhabitants – like Maria's parents – were newcomers. Everyone was struggling to survive, to get along with each other, to find their way in socialist Poland. For a child like Maria, all this was "normal." The curious girl later became an avid and perceptive chronicler.
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Background article
Migration to Southeast Europe in the 18th Century
Migration stories can be success stories. Migration is often associated with people’s desire to improve their living situation. However, this wish does not always come true, and so migration stories are often marked by disappointments and failures – like that of Michael Kreutzer.
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Object story
Moving Piety
The family crib was so important to his father that he took it with him when he emigrated to the USA. The report of a donor reveals what happened between its production in Waldenburg and the return to Europe, which made its donation to Haus Schlesien in Königswinter possible.
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Object story
Papierówki – “Paper Apples”
A summer apple. The first to ripen. In Polish, it is called "papierówka", in German "Papierapfel" (paper apple). It once grew almost everywhere in Masuria and Warmia, including in the garden of Stefan Tymiec's grandmother, Gertrud. "It smelled and tasted delicious," he remembers. "And that yellow!" For his 60th birthday, he brought seedlings from a Polish nursery all the way to Wuppertal.
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Background article
Post-War Jewish Migration from the USSR and the refuseniki movement
The post-WW II Jewish migration from the Soviet Union (and also after its dissolution) is one of the largest in modern history. Altogether 2.75 million Soviet Jews left the USSR for Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere. The position of the Soviet state with respect to emigration was remarkably ambivalent: in some cases, it was allowed and even encouraged, in others, others; it was controlled and strongly limited. The Jewish emigration movement that arose in the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s-1980s became an example of resistance and activism within the authoritarian system, which increasingly alerted international attention. In one way or another, it affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and changed the appearance of many cities and towns within the Soviet Union and outside it.
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Education and communication project
Sounds of Bukovina: Musical Cultures of a Multiethnic Region
From folk songs to high culture – with this project, the Bukovina Institute, the Cultural Officer for Transylvania, the Department of Music Education at the Leopold Mozart Center – part of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Augsburg – and the Jewish Museum...
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Biography
Stefan Tymiec Junior
Stefan Tymiec was born in Sztynort in July 1950. “I had a happy childhood”, he says. He hardly felt anything of the tragedies that his parents had lived through. His mother was German and remained in her homeland in 1945. His father was Ukrainian, one of many people who had been forcibly resettled from southeastern Poland. Stefan's childhood happiness lasted eight years, then the family set off for the West.
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