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.
Author(s): Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar, Małgorzata Łukianow
Series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 423
City: Cham
Praise for No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Abbreviations
List of Figures
No Neighbors’ Lands: Living with Vanished (and Rarely Returning) Others in Post-1945 Europe
Barysz (Barysh), Galicia
Piran/Pirano, Istria
Lands of No Neighbors: A Pattern in Post-1945 Europe
Conceptualizing No Neighbors’ Lands
No Neighbors: Catastrophe, Reconstruction, Property, Remembrance
Bibliography
Part I: The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe
The Prussian Spirit of the Land: Fighting Fascism and Legitimating Annexation in Soviet Kaliningrad, 1947–1953
Introduction
Interwar Myths of Territorial Belonging and the Fate of German East Prussia
Mobilizing Antifascism in Soviet Königsberg–Kaliningrad
“Prussian Spirit of the Land”
Ancient Slavic Soil
Conclusion
Bibliography
“The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka”: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing
Introduction
The End of the War and the Foundation of the “Children’s Home”
The Children
The Violence
The Perpetrators
The Expulsion of Jews from Rabka
The Desecrated Graves
Conclusion
Bibliography
New Neighbors’ Land: Istria and the Complexities of Solidarity
The Making of an Exodus
Remaking “Italian Istria”
Emplacing Solidarities: From Above and Below
Conclusion: Istria Revisited
Bibliography
Native Borderland Children in the Belgian-German and Polish-German Borderlands. Comparing Verification and Nationalisation Narratives After the Second World War
The Lubliniec District in East Upper Silesia
The Region of Eupen, Sankt Vith and Malmedy
Similarities in Narratives on Verification
Similarities in Narratives on Nationalisation
Differences in Narratives
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II: A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction
Doctors, Craftsmen, and Landlords: How Vanishing Others Influenced the Galician Economy During and After the Second World War
In the Countryside: Between a Land Estate and an Inn
Trade and Crafts
Intelligentsia and Liberal Professions
Conclusion
Bibliography
The Joy and Burden of Living: Roma Communities in the Western Borderlands of the Postwar Soviet Union
Introduction
Where to? Postwar Mobility from a Community Perspective
Nomadism Revival
Internal Migration Within the Soviet Union
Cross-border Mobility
Reconstructing Communities, Healing Traumas
Signs of Community Dysfunction
“Surrogate” Families
Healing and Reconstruction
Conclusion
Bibliography
Among Neighbors and Relatives: Intercessions and Jewish Persecution Through the Lens of Bulgaria’s Postwar Trials (1944–45)
Jews and Non-Jews: An Uneasy Return to Normalcy
Judging Anti-Jewish Crimes: Boldness and Limits of an Initiative
The Slow Restoration of Jewish Rights and Properties
Favors and Crimes: Ties of Dependency
Banal Antisemitism at the Trial of the Antisemites
Personalized Protection, Personalized Destruction: The Challenging Pursuit of Anti-Jewish Crimes
Conclusion
Bibliography
Rape on Trial: Criminal Justice Actors in 1940s’ Soviet Ukraine and Sexual Violence During the Holocaust
Soviet War Crimes Trials in the 1940s as a Phenomenon and Historical Source
Voices of Jewish Rape Victims: Speaking the Unspeakable
Witness Testimonies
Perpetrators: Defense Strategies
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part III: The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues
“The Alienation Lacks Any Legal Basis”: The Fate of Jewish Property in Postwar Hungary
Historical Background
Case Studies
The Auctioning of the Properties of Jews from Ócsa
Aladár Frank’s Land Property
The Shoes of József Bernstein
Conclusion
Bibliography
A Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania
Introduction
Postwar Disenfranchisement and Property Confiscation
Conditional Restitution as Alleged Reparation
Testing the Terrain
External Pressures: Romanian Émigrés in Federal Germany
The Ethnicization of Emigration: Romania’s Germans and Jews Between Stereotypes and Foreign Policy
Epilogue
Bibliography
The Fate of Property in the Kočevje (Gottschee) Region during and after the Second World War
Introduction
Toward the Point of No Return: The Situation Before the War
Occupation and Resettlement
Kočevje After the Germans’ Relocation
The Property of the Kočevje Germans after the War’s End
The Slow and Partial Filling of the Close-to-Total Void
Conclusion: The Void that Persists
Bibliography
Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010)
Introduction
Piran/Pirano, Istria: Film and History
The Apartment
Piran as Property
The Languages Spoken
The Piano
Family Graves
Conclusion, or Mnemonic Properties
Bibliography
Part IV: Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration
“The Matter of Four Screws”: Holocaust Commemorations in (Post-)Soviet Russia (the Case of Rostov-on-Don)
Zmievskaya Balka: The Fate of the Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1942
Zmievskaya Balka as a Memorial Site for “Peaceful Soviet Citizens”
Zmievskaya Balka as the Largest Holocaust Memorial Site in Post-Soviet Russia
Bibliography
Documentary
Secondary Sources
New Settlers as Implicated Subjects: Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia
Introduction
Methods and Methodology
Remembering the Vanished “Others”
The Historical Context of the Town of Opava
Two Memorials to Vanished Others
The Unrealized German Memorial
Conclusion
Bibliography
We, the Perpetrators: Remembering Violence Committed by One’s Own Group in the Polish-Ukrainian Conflicts
Introduction
Łubno and Barysh: The Sites of Violence
Outsiders Who Know
“Because They Wanted Poland, and They Wanted Ukraine”
Blurred Vision
Passive Acts of Disappearing
The Resettlement
Conclusion
Bibliography
Post-1945 No Neighbors’ Lands: A Conclusion
Index
