Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 34 (2017): The Great War in Lithuania and Lithuanians in the Great War: Experiences and Memories = Didysis karas Lietuvoje ir lietuviai Didžiajame kare: patirtys ir atmintys, pp. 125–146
Abstract
During the Great War, the main conflicting powers established the first public institutions to create and spread propaganda. Governments treated cinema as a powerful medium which might influence men’s minds. While cinema became a potential weapon to use in propaganda struggles, screens in neutral states were made into battlefields. But the cinema wars did not finish after 1918. After the war, films depicting the Great War were made in various countries, and the films often contradicted each other. The article analyses the role that films and stories depicting the Great War played on Lithuanian cinema screens in the interwar period. The first part of the article discusses the relevance of themes of the Great War in the films and newsreels made in interwar Lithuania. The second part provides an overview of foreign films depicting the Great War that were shown in Lithuanian cinemas in the interwar period. Four types of films are distinguished, according to their function. Attempts are made to answer the question whether these films could have contributed to reflections on the Great War in the public sphere in Lithuania at that time.
Journal:Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis
Volume 20 (2010): Studia Anthropologica, IV: Identity Politics: Migration, Communities and Multilingualism, pp. 52–71
Abstract
This article analyses how the inhabitants of Visaginas construct their past and present. The first part of the article presents the ways the informants talked of the period 1970s-1980s, i.e. when they came to Lithuania, to the construction site of Visaginas (Sniechkus) and the nuclear power plant. The second part of the article discusses how the informants described their and the community’s social, economic situation in the post-Soviet period. The author discusses why the informants tend to construct the Soviet and post-Soviet periods in particular ways and provides parallels with other anthropological works. The article is based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in Visaginas in 2000-2004.
This paper deals with the processes of identity reconstitution for descendants of Jewish emigrants from the Baltic and Central Europe, and with the current relationships they have with these regions. Considering their practices of identity reconnexion which are part of identity re-registration processes, the attention is centered on the individual and collective identity economies existing in victims’ families, and on the social interactions increasing in the context of the institutional politics concerning the Baltic and Central Europe. Many descendants of victims begin nowadays to come more and more to zones where their families lived, and not only to the extermination places. They try to find all that happened in the social history of their family before and during the Holocaust, and also what occurred for the Jews in these territories during the Soviet domination. They seek there the past and current presence of their cultural and historical heritage, which is also one of the important components of the European inheritance.
Since 1990 many Germans travel to the former German regions in Eastern Europe from which they or their relatives had been displaced in the course of World War II. Studying the case of Nida on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania – the former Nidden in East Prussia and the Memel district, respectively – the article examines the role of ‘roots-tourism’ (Heimattourismus) for the visitors as well as for the town Nida. Visits to the former homeland spark the examination of one’s own life story. This enables the former inhabitants to overcome their homesickness so that they gradually become ‘normal’ tourists. In this process they reinforce the ‘place-myth’ of this region as an idyllic paradise at the Baltic Sea. Tourism, thus, provides for continuity by reconstructing the past in the mind of the visitors as well as in the tourist place. The article points out how the tourism industry tunes its ears to the visitors’ demands and offers different approaches to the past.