Overview
- Focuses on the social voids that were the result of occupation, mass killings, and population movements in Europe
- Offers a comparative look on the history of the postwar Europe, exploring the changing lives of ordinary people
- Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists adopt comparative perspectives on those who lived in borderlands
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience (PSHE)
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About this book
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.
Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via springer.longhoe.net.
Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via springer.longhoe.net.
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Keywords
Table of contents (18 chapters)
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Front Matter
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The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe
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Front Matter
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A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction
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Front Matter
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The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues
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Front Matter
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Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration
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Front Matter
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Reviews
“The volume succeeds to deconstruct unilateral memory narratives by drawing attention to the emotionality and materiality of losses, by showing different scales of individual agency in the context of structural, state-imposed violence, and by unveiling the social dimension of many national conflicts. No Neighbors’ Land is a fruitful contribution to the historiographical and mnemopolitical discussion of experiences of violence during and after the Second World War.” (Laura Clarissa Loew, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, H-Soz-Kult, hsozkult.de, December 5, 2023) "Built around various geographical locations and diverse topics, No Neighbors’ Lands masterfully weaves together several themes throughout its pages, making a significant contribution to European postwar history. A delicate and compassionate account of the “lost neighbors” (as well as their properties and memories) is at the core of this impressive collective effort, which offers readers a fresh look at the post-Holocaust and postwar era, while reflecting on both short- and long-term consequences of the horrifically engineered “social voids.” Whether professional historian, student, or curious reader, all will find novel and deeply moving information, be it about the armed assault on Jewish Holocaust survivor minors in the Polish town of Rabka, the trial in Soviet Ukraine of perpetrators of sexual crimes against Jewish women, the Romanian communist authorities’ (failed) attempt in the mid-1950s to make amends for the postwar expropriation and collective punishment of its Germanminority, or the refusal of contemporary Czechs from the Silesian town of Opava to allow a memorial to the German residents expelled after the war. No Neighbors’ Land is at once a harsh and powerful reminder of the long-lasting legacies of war and mass violence."
- Diana Dumitru, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, Georgetown University, Washington/D.C., USA
"How does it feel to wear a dress that once belonged to your murdered neighbor? How is it possible to restore moral, social, and legal order in places where one part of the community was killed or expelled? This book addresses such difficult and important questions, drawing on a variety of disciplines and inviting comparative approaches. It is a much-needed inquiry into the postwar resettlement and migration processes in Europe that followed on from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and border shifts. The authors provide an impressive and detailed account of the long-lasting consequences of these events. The book stands out by focusing on those who remained or came to fill the void left by those who had been expelled or murdered, and by questioning fixed notions of the categories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders."
- Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University, Sweden
- Diana Dumitru, Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, Georgetown University, Washington/D.C., USA
"How does it feel to wear a dress that once belonged to your murdered neighbor? How is it possible to restore moral, social, and legal order in places where one part of the community was killed or expelled? This book addresses such difficult and important questions, drawing on a variety of disciplines and inviting comparative approaches. It is a much-needed inquiry into the postwar resettlement and migration processes in Europe that followed on from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and border shifts. The authors provide an impressive and detailed account of the long-lasting consequences of these events. The book stands out by focusing on those who remained or came to fill the void left by those who had been expelled or murdered, and by questioning fixed notions of the categories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders."
- Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, Lund University, Sweden
"No Neighbors’ Lands is the first volume to offer a comparative perspective on the immediate and long-term effects of the violence of World War II across Europe. A range of deftly researched case studies deliver an extraordinary account of the complex legacies of mass murder, forced migration, and plunder. As the war and the ensuing mass violence created demographic and social voids, people struggled to rebuild the material environment and reconstruct social networks and relationships. In this volume, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists make full use of their skills to trace thepitfalls of these efforts and add a necessary lens to our understanding of the implications of war, genocide, and nationalism in the twentieth century."
- Anika Walke, Washington University in St. Louis, USAEditors and Affiliations
About the editors
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 Professorat 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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe
Book Subtitle: Vanishing Others
Editors: Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar, Małgorzata Łukianow
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10857-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-10856-3Published: 13 March 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-10859-4Published: 13 March 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-10857-0Published: 12 March 2023
Series ISSN: 2524-8960
Series E-ISSN: 2524-8979
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 422
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations, 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: European History, History of World War II and the Holocaust, Social History