European Studies Lunch Talk: Musical Narratives in the Expulsion of the Germans from the Bohemian Lands

Join us for a talk by Ulrike Präger, a recent Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Boston University and a lecturer in the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Department and the Writing Program at BU, and at the University of Massachusetts Boston, on the expulsion of the Germans from Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia in the aftermath of the Second World War. She discusses how these Germans use music as a means for remembrance and adaptation and to establish a distinct group identity after their forced displacement to West Germany.

Präger will highlight not only the way music encoded nostalgia and the loss of a home, but also on the modes of sociability that individual and collective music-making offered them. She compares these processes to the memories of Germans expelled to the former East Germany—as well as to the recollections of Germans who were forced to stay in Czechoslovakia. This comparison shows how the re-framing and even silencing of musical practices in these environments affected both, these processes of social identity reconstruction and of memory building until the 1989 fall of communism.

Open to the BU community and others with a research interest in the topic.