Locality depends on the history and existence of a place, but what happens to our understanding of locality when it is vanished or destroyed? Since 1924, 313 villages have disappeared in Germany as a consequence of the expansion of the brown coal industry, where 136 of these settlements were once located in Lusatia.
In his article The countryside as destruction, nostalgia and re-invention: The German Case, Peter Lang, while Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, began working on the relationship between the historic countryside and its transformation. “One of the conclusions so far is the evident perception that the sense of nostalgia arrives well before the disappearance of a memorable landscape or landmark.” In the wake of re-location and excavation, archeologists have tried to rescue fragments of Lusatian settlements and their history. Even so, many of the disappeared villages cannot be placed on the map as there are no remains or traces of the settlements.
