EN
Fiction, oral history, and memoirs of the then participants, besides history and its ambitions to approach the historical truth, enable one to return to a relatively distant or near past. Three such publications – by the authors V. Kuštek (2018), M. Greenfield (2019), and E. Adam – I. Jirků (2018) fulfil this role in regards to the past political, cultural, and economic developments of the Eastern Slovakian and Trans-Carpathian regions, including in the context of their present day co-operation. Each of these works portrays life in Trans-Carpathian as well as life in the area of the entire Czechoslovakia, a state which had been formed by the Allied Powers as a result of the Treaty of Versailles after the conclusion of World War I in 1918. The currently developing cross-border cooperation among the regions of Eastern Slovakia and Trans-Carpathian – part of the European Union’s strategy („Europe 2020“) – can benefit from their common historic and cultural heritage; they struggled with the religious and ethnic plurality, their dramatic destinies were characterized by an uncertain statehood (unstable statehood coordinates), by their distrust against the political and religious elites.