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Transcarpathia’s recent past in two memoirs and non-fiction
Authors: Gita Geremešová
Number of views: 222
Fiction, oral history, and memoirs of the then participants, besides history and its ambitions to
approach the historical truth, enable one to return to a relatively distant or near past. Three such publications – by the authors V. Kuštek (2018), M. Greenfield (2019), and E. Adam – I. Jirků (2018) fulfill this role in regards to the past political, cultural, and economic developments of the Eastern Slovakian and Transcarpathian regions, including in the context of their present day cooperation. Each of these works portrays life in Transcarpathia as well as life in the area of the entire Czechoslovakia, a state which had been formed by the Allied Powers as a result of the Treaty of Versailles after the conclusion of World War I in 1918. The currently developing cross-border cooperation among the regions of Eastern Slovakia and Transcarpathia – part of the European Union’s strategy („Europe 2020“) – can benefit from their common historic and cultural heritage; they struggled with the religious and ethnic plurality, their dramatic destinies were characterized by an uncertain statehood (unstable statehood coordinates), by their distrust against the political and religious elites.