Institutional care across borders: How care relocation (re)articulates sediments of German histories of East-Central Europe

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in care homes in Silesia, Poland, and the former Sudetenland in the Czech Republic, we analyze how institutional care can re-articulate contested pasts, and how care relocation from Germany makes this capacity visible. Drawing on Koselleck’s notion of “historical sediments,” we show how pasts become repercussive beyond linear causality as layered relations that surface through co-presence, language regimes, and the practical organization of everyday life in the care home. In the former Sudetenland, the presence of German seniors brings back conflicting histories. In Silesia, the history of mixed and multilingual populations and changing state affiliations resurfaces through the co-presence of German-speaking seniors and residents from transnational local families. These cases show how institutional care becomes a “space-time envelope” in which histories can resurface, be (mis)recognized, or sidelined, generating moments of belonging and dis-belonging, that are shaped by, and connected to, individual pasts.