No Neighbors' Lands in Postwar Europe - Vanishing Others

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 link.springer.com.

List of contents

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 Wylegala.- Disappearing Neighbours: Postwar Reconstruction in a Temporary Capital of Poland (the Industrial City ofLódz); 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 Vojnovic); 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 Kocevska 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; Malgorzata Lukianow.- 'A Matter of Four Screws': Holocaust Commemorations in Post-Soviet Russia (the Rostov-on-Don Case); Irina Rebrova.- Heritage ofSilenced Memories: A Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia; Johana Wyss.

About the author

Anna Wylegäa 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 Mägorzata G¿owacka-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.

Mägorzata ¿ukianow 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.

Report

Assessing archives, trial records, and interviews, the contributors offer micro-historical fieldwork, whose grassroots insights inform decades of analysis about the era s population upheavals. This volume brings multilingual research to English-language specialist researchers, as well as upper-level university courses on nationalism, forced migration, or memory history." (Andrew Demshuk, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, Vol. 74 (1), 2025)
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)

Product details

• Assisted by: Ma¿gorzata ¿Ukianow (Editor), Malgorzata Lukianow (Editor), Sabine Rutar (Editor), Magorzata ukianow (Editor), Anna Wylega¿a (Editor), Anna Wylegala (Editor)
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 13.03.2023
• EAN: 9783031108563
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3110856-3
• No. of pages: 422
• Dimensions: 148 mm x 27 mm x 210 mm
• Illustrations: XVIII, 422 p. 14 illus., 8 illus. in color.
• Series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories