Worldness behind Cemeteries. Stories of the Absent: German-Jewish Minority in Southeast Banat
Project lead:
Funding institution:
Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts (seed money funding within the research group "Border and Boundary Studies")
Duration:
since 2014
Project description:
This study focuses on historical discontinuities (forced displacement and absence) of German-speaking minorities, Danube Swabians and Jews, in the Serbian part of the Banat, today shared by Hungary, Romania, and Serbia.
Preserved, abandoned and decayed German-speaking cemeteries, accompanied by archival sources and semi-structured interviews, serve as reading lenses for research on former and present spaces of coexistence (convivencia). I use the given artefacts to capture polyphonic and entangled storyworlds that emerge as new realities in present-day neighbourhoods.
In which ways do these worlds become enlivened? Who inhabits them, and what memories do they fill their new realities with – the present and the past? What mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion are employed in the process? These are some of the leading questions that the present research discusses conceptually departing from the crossroad of narratology, boundary studies, historical and visual anthropology.
