Abstract

The article presents selected aspects of relations between cultural heritage and human personality. The main hypothesis is a belief that there exists a tight connection between the place of birth and growing up and the development of human personality. Political manipulation, aiming at distorting historical facts concerning the history of places that were subject to different authorities as a result of territorial changes in order to legitimize authorities, constitutes an important barrier in personality development. Its consequence is the so called suspended identity. An important role of a homeland in human personality was illustrated on the example of an Upper‑Silesian Evangelic community. Its members live in dispersion in Germany nowadays. They create however a community based on a cultural bond shaped in the past in a home village and continued today in various forms of meetings, action and journeys to Heimat. In the case of this community, religion, apart from forms of cultivating bonds with a homeland, plays an important role in the process of rationalization of traumatic experiences from childhood and youth times, and, hence, in maintaining a mental balance through a consolidation of a social bond. Conclusions on the very relation between cultural heritage and personality are drawn in the final part of the text. They are philosophical as well as psychological‑anthropological in nature.