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- Title
XX a. Klaipėdos krašto gyventojų klaipėdiškių kultūrinio ir tautinio tapatumo išraiškos epitafijose.
- Authors
POCYTÈ, SILVA
- Abstract
The history of the Klaipėda Region of the 20th century and its turning-points related to the political changes driven by the world wars has lately received an increasingly growing attention from historians and scientists from other research fields. In addition to the research of political topics of the history of the region, the revelation of the national and cultural expression of the group of residents from the Klaipėda Region, the so called Klaipėdiškiai, in different periods of history is important as well. The goal of this article is to reveal the fragments of cultural and national expression of the Klaipėdiškiai in different periods of the 20th century based on the information that survived in the epitaphs in the historical cemeteries of the Klaipėda Region. The objectives of the article are the following: to analyse the aspects of cultural and national expression of the Klaipėdiškiai in the 20th century by revealing the bilingual situation among the residents of the region; to analyse the statistical expression of the Klaipėdiškiai after 1945 by comparing the church documents from an Evangelical-Lutheran parish and the data of confessional heritage. The chronological limits of the research cover the period until 1960 when, based on the agreement signed between the German Federal Republic and the Soviet Union of 8 April 1958, 8,232 local residents from the Klaipėda Region departed from the Klaipėda Region to Germany in the period of 1956-1969 (the most intensive period: 1958-1960). This turning-point in the history of the Klaipėda Region manifestly eliminated the existence of original residents of the region in their homeland. Driven to the margins of history, the community was deprived of the opportunity to speak about its past because the public opinion, constrained by ideological chains, either "purified / Lithuanianized" history in its favour or shaped a foreign and unacceptable image of both the entire region and the Klaipėdiškis in Lithuania by highlighting the understanding of culture and history of the Klaipėda Region based on its exclusively German character. After 1960 the Klaipėdiškiai basically assimilated with the remaining part of the society and their peculiar character can only be grasped and a certain pulse of identity can be recognised through certain signs of religious environment and church life. The research results lead to the conclusion that certain insights about the national and cultural expressions of the Klaipėdiškiai in the 20th century can be drawn by means of a multi-layered base of sources, with epitaphs surviving in the artefacts of confessional heritage playing the major role. The concept of Klaipėdiškis, having emerged in the public domain of the interwar Klaipėda Region, is defined in the sense of construction of identity relating to both the Lithuanian and German tradition of the knowledge of the past or its interpretation. The analysis of epitaphs leads to the conclusion that the bilingualism of Lithuanian and German languages clearly expressed in the interwar period symbolised an obvious continuity of the linguistic and burial tradition, which had previously dominated in the region. The fragmentary examples of epitaphs dating back to 1939-1944 testify that the national and cultural expression of local residents was strictly fit into the framework of the national policy pursued by Nazi Germany; therefore, any possibilities of exploitation of the language other than German in the public sphere, or in the culture of cemeteries in our case, were made impossible. The concept of national expression of the Klaipėdiškiai in the afterwar period reveals the continuity of the previous cultural / national tradition of local residents from the Klaipėda Region, mostly linked to religious, burial customs. Irrespective of the strict atheism policy enforced during the Soviet times, the Lutheran Church was an important part of regional history that enabled the preservation of the peculiar identity of local residents. Such a tendency is in a representative manner reflected by epitaphs, where the intertwining German and Lithuanian languages illustrate the continuity of bilingual tradition which had dominated in the region until the outbreak of World War II as well as the national and cultural expression of the Klaipėdiškiai in the changing political and social environment in the afterwar period. It was a very prominent identification criterion of the Klaipėdiškiai as their peculiar, different community distinct from those who moved from Lithuania Major in the years after the war.
- Subjects
KLAIPEDA (Lithuania : Territory); CULTURAL identity; NATIONAL character; EPITAPHS; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY
- Publication
Lituanistica, 2013, Vol 59, Issue 4, p235
- ISSN
0235-716X
- Publication type
Article