European Studies Lunch Talk – Musical Narratives in the Expulsion of the Germans from the Bohemian Lands (09/16/14)
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.
Ulrike has published her research in a chapter of Music and (Be)longing. Articulations of the Self and Other in the Musical Realm at Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013) and has forthcoming articles in the journal European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire and in the handbook Medien und Praktiken der Erinnerung an Flucht und Vertreibung.
A native of Munich, Germany, Ulrike also holds degrees in Voice/Voice Pedagogy from the Mozarteum University Salzburg and in Music and Dance Pedagogy from the Mozarteum’s Carl-Orff-Institute. Other research interests include cultural memory studies, diaspora studies, narrative inquiry, and migration-based global fusions. Before moving to Boston, Ulrike was on faculty at the University of Münster and the Academy for Social Pedagogy in Munich, Germany. She also actively performs as a soprano soloist and chorister with ensembles in Europe and the United States, including Cambridge Concentus, of which she is a founding member.
Lunch will be served. Open to the BU community and others with a research interest in the topic. [Download flyer]
