Public history

Une histoire orale du Minett

The "Minett" region in southern Luxembourg was the industrial heartland of the country. The mines and blast furnaces, most of which have now disappeared, once dominated the landscape. Luciano Pagliarini's collection of interviews constitutes a unique corpus of audio testimonies that allow us to discover the local history and the daily experiences of the inhabitants of that time.

The interviews conducted from the end of the 1970s to the early 1990s by Luciano Pagliarini, “an Italian born in 1957 in Differdange (Luxembourg) to a father who was an underground miner and accordion player and a mother who worked in a textiles shop, (and who) worked most of his life as a jazz musician”, all contribute to a particularly rich testimony of a past that ultimately forged contemporary Luxembourg.

“An oral history of the Minett” takes us back to a not so distant past, one characterised by the intertwined stories of industry, labour, migration and war. It is the history of a region and its inhabitants. The aim is to rediscover a local history by bringing to life the daily experiences of the region’s inhabitants through their testimonies on subjects as diverse as:
• what the miners ate as they engaged in difficult and gruelling work
• the history of young people, who often followed in the footsteps of their elders and embarked on industry trades from a very young age
• accidents that befell the workers
• the question of the value of work, linked closely with that of wages
• the memories of the two World Wars (1914-1918; 1939-1945) and their impact on the region and its inhabitants

Show this publication on our institutional repository (orbi.lu).