No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe: Vanishing Others

ISBN-13: 9783031108563 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023 / 423 str.

Anna Wylegala; Sabine Rutar; Malgorzata Lukianow

Opis

This book focuses on the social voids that were the result of occupation, genocide, mass killings, and population movements in Europe during and after the Second World War. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on those who now lived in ‘cleansed’ borderlands. Its contributors explore local subjectivities of social change through the concept of ‘No Neighbors’ Lands’: How does it feel to wear the dress of your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to friends, colleagues, and neighbors no longer being part of everyday life? How is moral, social, and legal order reinstated after one part of the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another? How is order restored psychologically in the wake of neighbors watching others being slaughtered by external enemies? This book sheds light on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and multi-religious, experienced postwar reconstruction, attempted to come to terms with what had happened, and negotiated remembrance.

Spis treści

PART I: THE POINT OF DEPARTURE: EXPERIENCING THE CATASTROPHE.

The Prussian Spirit of the Land: Cultural Transfer and Fears of German Contamination in Soviet Kaliningrad, 1947–1953; Nicole Eaton.

In 1945 'Poles Were Taking Over the Entire Town of Rabka'; Karolina Panz.

New Neighbours’ Land: Istria and the Complexities of Solidarity; Pamela Ballinger.

Native Children in the Belgian-German and Polish-German Borderlands: Comparing Verification and Nationalization Narratives after the Second World War; Machteld Venken.

PART II: A BRAVE NEW WORLD: DYSFUNCTIONALITY, JUSTICE AND RECONSTRUCTION.

Men Who Witnessed Rape: Holocaust Survivors’ Testimonies and Postwar Trials in Soviet Ukraine; Marta Havryshko.

Doctors, Craftsmen and Landlords: Reconstructing Professional Structure in Postwar Galicia; Anna Wylegała.

Disappearing Neighbours: Postwar Reconstruction in a Temporary Capital of Poland (the Industrial City of Łódź); Agata Zysiak.

Trials for Anti-Jewish Crimes in Bulgaria; Nadège Ragaru.

PART III: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF THINGS: PROPERTY ISSUES.

The Alienation Lacks Any Legal Basis': The Fate of Jewish Property in Postwar Hungary;  Borbála Klacsman.

Notions of Property and Belonging in the Film 'Piran - Pirano' (Slovenia 2010, dir. Goran Vojnović); Sabine Rutar.

Negotiations of Property between the Romanian and Hungarian Governments in the Aftermath of the Second World War; Emanuela Grama.

The Fate of the Property of the Kočevska Germans after Their Resettlement and Deportation from Slovenia; Mitja Ferenc.

PART IV: LIVING WITH THE DEAD: MEMORY AND COMMEMORATION.

What Is Behind a Monument: Local Commemoration Strategies in Polish Galicia; Małgorzata Łukianow.

'A Matter of Four Screws': Holocaust Commemorations in Post-Soviet Russia (the Rostov-on-Don Case); Irina Rebrova.

Heritage of Silenced Memories: A Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia; Johana Wyss.

O autorze

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She is the author of Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (2019) and the co-editor (with Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper) of The Burden of the Past: History and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020).

Sabine Rutar is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany, where she works as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Comparative Southeast European Studies. In her forthcoming monograph At Work under Hitler and Tito: Mining and Maritime Industries in Yugoslavia, 1940s–1960s she compares microhistories of industrial labour during World War II and the early Cold War.

Małgorzata Łukianow is a sociologist and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her work is situated at the intersection of the sociology of culture, memory studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Blurb

This book focuses on the social voids that were the result of occupation, genocide, mass killings, and population movements in Europe during and after the Second World War. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on those who now lived in ‘cleansed’ borderlands. Its contributors explore local subjectivities of social change through the concept of ‘No Neighbors’ Lands’: How does it feel to wear the dress of your murdered neighbor? How does one get used to friends, colleagues, and neighbors no longer being part of everyday life? How is moral, social, and legal order reinstated after one part of the community participated in the ethnic cleansing of another? How is order restored psychologically in the wake of neighbors watching others being slaughtered by external enemies? This book sheds light on how destroyed European communities, once multi-ethnic and multi-religious, experienced postwar reconstruction, attempted to come to terms with what had happened, and negotiated remembrance.

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She is the author of Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine (2019) and the co-editor (with Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper) of The Burden of the Past: History and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine (2020).

Sabine Rutar is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, Germany, where she works as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Comparative Southeast European Studies. In her forthcoming monograph At Work under Hitler and Tito: Mining and Maritime Industries in Yugoslavia, 1940s–1960s she compares microhistories of industrial labour during World War II and the early Cold War.

Małgorzata Łukianow is a sociologist and is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her work is situated at the intersection of the sociology of culture, memory studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.