During World War II and in its aftermath, Central Europe was exposed to huge migration waves. People of different religions and various mother tongues had to leave their homes and newcomers settled in the abandoned places. This paper focuses on a small town, Medzev, located on the southern edge of Spiš (eastern Slovakia), which was until the end of World War II inhabited mainly by a German-speaking population. While exploring local post-conflict and post-migration settings, this paper focuses on everyday life in the intimate small town community. Drawing on archival sources and oral testimonies, this paper aims to show the micro perspective of the post-war migration flows and interactions in the east Slovak small town. It claims that the dominance of German speakers in the remote town of Medzev was not ended by the post-war expulsion in late 1940s, but rather by economic migration flows connected with socialist industrialization in following decades. This paper argues that in the examined micro space, people were connected mainly through their working experience in the factory Strojsmalt and lived together without major conflicts.
This paper addresses the personification of death (a being in human or animal form) as a public representation. The public representation of death is traced among respondents from the Slovak and German language group who are residents of the town of Medzev. The author examines the nature of the individual and group representations of death held by respondents in the selected samples. She poses the research question whether there exists a cultural or long-term shared representation of death in the selected language groups, or overall in this ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous locality. Finally, she asks whether the postulated divergent representation of death between Slovaks and Germans (more precisely, the local group known as Mantaks) in Medzev functions as a differentiating cultural code, on the basis of which symbolic boundaries are formed between groups.
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