Education of Sorbian youth in the Czech border region 1945-1950

• Applicant: Dr. Jana Pinosova
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540447822

The project highlights an aspect of the transnational history of East Central Europe in the immediate post-war period that has received little attention. The focus is on Sorbian youths (boys and girls) who temporarily left Germany between 1945 and 1950 to pursue their education in Czechoslovakia. The project will examine the agency of these young people, their life situation and their role in shaping Czech-German-Sorbian post-war relations from a historical and transnational perspective. The project starts from the thesis that the upheavals of the post-war period presented young people with special challenges and inevitably made them actors of the post-war period. The material and social hardship, the questioning of lived norms as well as of ethnic, administrative and social affiliations, the appropriation of "youth" as a symbol of an (innocent) new beginning both challenged these young people and created new possibilities and spaces for action. Starting an education in northern Bohemia was accompanied by the expectation of unconditional loyalty and identification with Sorbian culture and society. In addition, the border regime established after 1945 between the Soviet-occupied part of Germany and the restored Czechoslovakia shaped their everyday life at school and boarding school. The aim of the project is to gain a deeper understanding of the immediate post-war period as a phase of social upheaval and in particular as a phase in which young people played a central role. The analysis is based on a wide range of sources, e.g. first-person documents, interviews with contemporary witnesses, published memoirs, official records, archival legacies of individuals and associations, and contem-porary press. This broad material base allows to emphasise the perspective of the actors and to gain new insights into constellations of "youth" as well as questions of "borders and affiliations".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants