Preliminary Programme

Southeastern Europe never formed part of Germany’s “traditional” irredenta; nevertheless, this region’s post-Habsburg, German-speaking minorities became a target for German nationalization efforts from the early interwar period onwards. Focusing on two Southeastern European borderland territories, home to almost 300,000 ethnic Germans (“Donauschwaben”)— the Batschka and the Western Banat— this paper will introduce novel research on German educational institutions in interwar Yugoslavia and its post-1941 Axis-occupied territories, tracing their development from minority classrooms during the 1920s, to their expansion into full-blown (albeit precarious) German-language Bürgerschulen and Lehrerbildungsanstalten during the 1930s, to their fashioning into National Socialist academies during the early 1940s.
Implementing archival documents from Germany and Serbia, contemporaneous pedagogical literature, and original oral history interviews, this paper will illustrate how children’s education became not merely a hotbed of national contestation, but also the very issue around which the Donauschwaben’s “national” identity initially crystallized. Demands for German minority education within Yugoslavia’s own nationalizing school system thus reverberated from the provincial schoolyard to Stresemann’s offices during the 1920s, and from Donauschwaben educators to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle during the 1930s and 1940s. Backed by Germany, the Donauschwaben gained some “national” autonomy in the education of their children prior to World War II; backed by Germany, too, these educational sites became infiltrated by National Socialist teachers and activists. After the Batschka became Hungarian and the Western Banat a Reich-administered territory in 1941, these schools faced new national and state constellations. In most cases, however, attending a German-language school now meant delving into a Nazi education, presenting Donauschwaben parents with the choice of either enlisting into local National Socialist organizations, or depriving their children of a mother-tongue education. Partially through children’s education, “national” increasingly connoted “National Socialist,” a transformation which is both reflected and evaded in the contemporary memories of former Donauschwaben students and teachers. (Show less)

Odessa (Odesa), Ukraine was famously known as ? city of promise and crime. From its founding, this major port city on the northern coast of the Black Sea attracted the entrepreneurial, desperate, and immoral. Stories of beggar children who populated the city’s poorer neighborhoods and infiltrated its opulent center fascinated late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century educated society in Odessa and beyond. Delinquent, neglected, and abandoned children represented the city’s failures; their existence exposed its corruption and contradictions. Once lost to the street, reformers believed their moral redemption became difficult. My paper will tell the story of attempts to discipline, tend to, and redeem marginalized children through institutional care and thus lend order and coherence to a city of paradox.
Troubled adolescents in the Russian Empire were viewed as capable of being schooled, housed, and reformed. Institutionalization of wayward girls suggested protection of their sexual innocence. Modern Odessan society also constructed adolescence as a “rehabilitative concept,” designed to explain and control the “savagery” of youth. In Odessa perceptions of the threat of adolescence had a particular staying power because of a strong belief that crime committed by children and youths was an inevitable result of the growth of the city. This anxiety endured because of the contradictions inherent in the city’s construction and orientation. Odessa was modern, planned, and cosmopolitan and yet it was on the edge of empire, reliant on labor and resources from its hinterland and subject to the perceived dangers that emanated from it. (Show less)

This paper focuses on children who were born in territories lost by Germany after World War I: Alsace-Lothringen, East Cantons (Eupen-Malmedy), North Schleswig, Western Poland, the Hlu?in region in today's Czech Republic and the Memel region. Most experienced German annexation in the late 1930s/40 and further annexation in the mid-1940s. Highlighting the time period from right after World War I until the end of the 20th century, issues related to nationalisation policies launched towards borderland children and to child practices of affirmation, outward and/or inner distance towards nationalisation are addressed. Case studies on education, youth organisations and family life are embedded in a more general investigation about the role of children in 20thcentury European Borderlands. (Show less)

The movements of forced migration in Central and Eastern Europe during and after the Second World War constituted a profound rupture in the histories of many European regions. The erstwhile German province of East Prussia found itself transplanted into new contexts of statehood and government, with its northern part, containing the cities of Kaliningrad (once Königsberg) and Klaip?da (once Memel), being incorporated into the Soviet Union and its south, the region surrounding Olsztyn, formerly Allenstein (Warmia and Masuria) becoming part of Poland. These changes were accompanied by exhaustive de- and repopulation. The political controversies around the interpretation of what took place and how it was remembered have been examined in the last two decades quite intensively, and also in a comparative perspective. The social issues relating to the repopulation of the region, the integration of the new population, and the construction of group identities, however, are only touched upon in ethnic or national case studies.
This paper seeks to widen the view by paying special attention to the emergent methodological paradigms of social and cultural encounters, cultural translations and historical diversity. Its aim is, first, to point to the heterogeneity of migrants in this period, including German expellees, Polish repatriants from the Eastern border regions (Kresy), Polish settlers from the Central regions of Poland, Ukrainian expellees due to the “Vistula Action”, and Holocaust survivors after the end of the war, as well as ethnic Germans immigrating from Poland and the Soviet Union (Spätaussiedler) and Poles immigrating from the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards. These groups appear to be very heterogeneous and without mutual ties, but their descendants have been sitting together in the same classrooms. The paper, thus, refers to the idea that ethnic groups in the borderland of formerly “East Prussia” should no longer be viewed in isolation, and that it is necessary to recognize newly constructed interrelations in the sense of hybrid identities. This said, the paper will ask, secondly, for actual social practices in schools and the change of knowledge, perceptions and people’s images of themselves, being subject to perpetual renegotiation in the school setting. Using archival sources, textbooks and pupil’s ego documents from Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, the paper will confront educational policies which responded in a highly defensive manner to the challenges migration brought with a bottom-up view of processes of negotiation and identity-forming on the ground.
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