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Articles
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Webdocu
"We, too, are stepping down from our role"
Web documentary about the German Drama Theater in Temirtau and the Germans in the Soviet Union between staying and leaving.
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Biography
A diary report of deportation and arrival
Joanna Konopińska recounts her deportation by the Germans during World War II and her arrival in Wroclaw after the end of the war in 1945 in her moving diary “Tamten wrocławski rok”.
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Object story
A toolbox with a secret compartment
Many museum objects hold secrets: Not infrequently, their origin and maker, their age, or their various owners are hardly known, if at all. Often, one has to rely on assumptions and guesses. A toolbox from present-day Kazakhstan, however, is a bearer of secrets in more ways than one.
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Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish romantic, poet, translator and journalist, was a migrant for most of his life. He also travelled to Berlin, Rome, Constantinople and other places for pleasure, scientific purposes and on political missions. These frequent changes of location show a mobile and transnational life story.
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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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Introduction
Emigration, Forced Migration, and the Iron Curtain
Eastern Europe has been a "migration hot spot" since the late 19th century: Initially as a core area of overseas emigration, then of ethnic forced migration after the end of World War I. Emigration during the Cold War was nearly impossible. Today, many countries in this region benefit from the European Union's Freedom of Movement policy.
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Webdocu
Neumann Family
The web documentary invites you to explore a family history between farewell and a new beginning.
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Interview (video)
Pandemic and Migration in Eastern Europe
Copernico asked: What role have epidemics and pandemics actually played in history, especially in Eastern Europe? How were they combated in the past? What impact did they have on the course of history? What role do they play, for example, in the context of human migration movements?
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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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Introduction
Religious Migrations
What do the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, the American director Woody Allen and the French chansonnier Charles Aznavour have in common?
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Background article
Renate Marsch-Potocka on the Side of the Polish Opposition
Wolfgang Crasemann, a nephew of the famous journalist Renate Marsch-Potocka, has used interviews and personal documents - originally for his own family - to write down her life story and pay tribute to her contribution to German-Polish understanding. This previously unpublished text tells of her popularity in both countries in the years before 1989.
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Object story
Silent witness
Nothing is more closely connected with the circumstances of flight and expulsion than the experience of loss. Three touching objects from the years 1944/1945, which are now in the East Prussian state museum with German-Baltic department in Lüneburg, bear witness to this.
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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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Editorial
Steinort – a European place of remembrance
Steinort is a European place of remembrance, because it is a place where the most diverse stories and memories intersect, intertwine, and overlap. The interview project by Ulla Lachauer and Agata Kern explores these subjective strands of memory and reveals a number of different cultures of remembrance.
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Background article
Summer 1941: Jews from the Baltic States flee for their lives
The long shadow of the past. Only a few Jews from Lithuania and Latvia managed to escape the Holocaust in the Baltics. Here are some of their accounts and the reasons for their difficult escape.
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Biography
The Four Lehndorff Daughters
"I lost my home," Vera von Lehndorff once said, "but lost childhood is a better description." When her father was executed on September 4, 1944, she was five years old. Her sister Eleonore, "Nona," was six and a half, and Gabriele was two. Catharina was only 19 days old; she was born in the Torgau prison hospital. The Nazis had taken the girls and their mother Gottliebe into custody, a practice known in German as "Sippenhaft” or “kin liability". It was a traumatic time and was by no means over when the war ended in 1945.
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The History of the German-speaking Volhynians as Part of a Global Migration History
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, innovations such as steam navigation and the advent of the railroad led to a sharp increase in global migration movements. The German-speaking Volhynians were part of this development, which moved between the ideal-typical poles of voluntary and forced migration and was significantly influenced by the enforcement of the ethnonational principle. This article focuses on the emigration movements of this group from the Russian governorate of Volhynia in the period between the 1860s and the First World War. The subsequent forced migrations of the German-speaking Volhynians are also briefly discussed.
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Background article
The Lehndorff Family and the East Prussian Nobility
The East Prussian noble Lehndorff family can be traced back to the 13th century. The history and culture of remembrance around the family are exemplary for many other noble families in Eastern Europe. Our author Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg explains the role of commemorating the nobility and calls for a new approach to regional history.
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