Preliminary Programme

By the end of the Second World War, more than twelve million people, members of German minorities, left their homes in Central and South Eastern Europe. They left because German authorities had evacuated them or encouraged them to flee while the war was still raging. Following the war, the migration continued when postwar Socialist regimes categorized them as “Germans,” forcing them to flee to avoid persecution. While most of these twelve million migrants went to Germany, roughly one million ended up stranded in Austria. There, they faced the situation of being a refugee in a country which wanted them to leave as soon as possible. Nevertheless, more than 300.000 of them subsequently established lives there.
In my paper I will analyze life story interviews which I conducted with some of these immigrants. When I asked them to tell me their “whole” life story, childhood narrations were an integral part of it. In my paper I argue that childhood narrations are of major importance for the construction of the autobiographical self as they enable the interviewees to strengthen the coherence and continuities within their life stories. As I will show, German-speaking evacuees, refugees and expellees in Austria thereby mainly focused two topics recurring in their life stories: Social status and mobility on the one hand, and narrative alienation from National Socialism and ethnicized politics on the other.

(Show less)

Descendants of Dutch Nazi-collaborators have been in the news in the Netherlands since the early 1980s. They organized a self-help group and gained access to specialized (psychological) care and Dutch public debate about the Second World War. First I will address these children’s wartime experiences and show how their war experiences were often more similar to those of children in Germany than to other Dutch children. Second, the period of arrest and incarceration of (one of) the parents will show how these families, but also Dutch state and society dealt with the problems of collaboration within the framework of the reconstruction of the nation. The third period in what is usually named the period of silence (1950s) and rediscovery of the war (1960s). I will show how these children and their families were coping with the past in this period: what strategies did they choose? Was the past denied, talked about, argued about, ignored, a cause for shame or on the contrary a source of pride? What made them feel integrated in or excluded from society? I will conclude addressing the ways in which some of the descendants sought (and found) public attention from the 1980s onwards and what this development shows us with regard to the question of social integration and exclusion. Where possible, comparisons with Norway are provided (Show less)

Our introduction focuses on policies and experiences related to “war children” in Western, Central and Eastern Europe in the post-war period through the use of comparative and transnational historiographical approaches. After the bloodshed of World War II, children became the main object of projections of hope. Children were to be the backbone of systems, whether democratic or communist ones. Studies until now have concentrated either on Western, or on Central Europe, and have presented a dichotomist view, as if the organisation and content of this rehabilitation fundamentally differ. The aim of this special issue is to reconsider this dichotomy. Despite differences in ideology, can similarities be found in the policies and experiences of war children settled in post-war Europe? How are transfers, exchanges and interactions across the (emerging) geographical border, the Iron Curtain, and/or across a (changing) mental border, i.e. the shifting enemy-antagonism, to be evaluated? (Show less)

If one thinks of common Central and Eastern European historical experience, one is certainly universal: considerable number of Europeans from the region experienced in their childhood deportation, resettlement, repatriation or at last semi-forced migration. My analysis is based on field studies (more than 100 biographical interviews) in two local communities located in the borderland regions which were particularly exposed to the postwar exchange of populations: Ukrainian Galicia and Western Poland (so called "regained lands"). I claim that although the history of these two distant communities was totally different, general memory of being refugee/deportee/forced migrant, loosing home/homeland and watching the deportation of the previous inhabitants of the new place of residence can be compared. While analyzing autobiographical narratives, I attempt to find common threads and topics generated by their children's experience, as well as explain differences by exploring the social context of individual memory, with a special accent on postwar socialization. (Show less)