Anne Friedrichs and Kerstin von Lingen

Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Besprechungsraum
November 15, 2024

Global and social distinctions between people are subject to historical change. After the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Japanese Empire in 1945, new categories emerged based on people’s wartime mobility and violence endured. Following World War II, international organizations as well as state and local authorities identified more than 60 million “out of place” people in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. As they were registered, categorized, interviewed, recruited, and resettled, those former refugees, displaced persons, and stateless people, along with members of the National Socialist Party, used dominant categories such as “refugee” to assert their notions of belonging and emancipation. As a consequence, tensions developed between self-declared and external evaluations of belonging. As historians, we thus face the challenge of differentiating and contextualizing these many distinctions that we often have to reduce to a single term.

The workshop will gather historians from the Collaborative Research Center “Human Differentiation” in Mainz and the ERC research group “GLORE – Global Resettlement Regimes” and the FWF team “Norms, Regulations and Refugee Agency“ (both at Vienna) to discuss their specific projects and general questions such as the relationship between micro- and macro-perspectives. The workshop will especially explore how local practices of distinguishing, categorizing, and representing displaced persons and refugees have affected human differentiations which, in due course, structured space and time in twentieth-century Europe and Asia.

Programm: 9 am – 6 pm

9:00 am
Welcome and introduction
Anne Friedrichs (Mainz/Munich) , Kerstin von Lingen (Vienna), Johannes Paulmann (Mainz)

9:15 am
Johannes Glack (Vienna), IRO's rehabilitation program for DPs with disabilities

Comment: Christina Wirth

9:55 am
Christina Wirth (Mainz), Sh'erit ha-Pletah and infiltrees on their way to Eretz Israel

Comment: Johannes Glack

10:35 am                            Coffee break

10:50 am
Linda Erker (Vienna), Argentina and the Eichmann group: Political contexts and networks of the Austrian hydraulic engineer Armin Schoklitsch

Comment: Marina Perez De Arcos

11:30 am
Marina Perez De Arcos (Oxford), Transit of CARE: Feeding minds and bodies in post-WWII Austria

Comment: Linda Erker

12:10 pm                            Lunch

1:30 pm
Philipp Strobl (Vienna), Self-organization of German-speaking refugees in Austria between 1945 and 1954 – The Zentralberatungsstelle für Volksdeutsche

Comment: Pauli Aro

2:10 pm
Pauli Aro (Vienna), The flexible categories of French post-war labour migration schemes. The case of ethnic German expellees

Comment: Philipp Strobl

2:50 pm                             Coffee break

3:05 pm
 Sarah Grandke (Regensburg/Canberra), Unheard memory activists?! Non-Jewish Displaced Persons and their commemoration projects for victims of Second World War in Western Germany and Austria (1945-1951)

Comment: Jiayi Tao

3:45 pm
Lena Christoph (Vienna): Negotiating Refugee Futures. US and IRO Management of Resettling Russian Refugees in the Philippines, 1950-1951.
Comment: Sarah Grandke

4:25 pm
Jiayi Tao (Vienna), Inventing displacement: Re-locating Korean ‘refugees’
in China after the end of the Japanese empire

Comment: Lena Christoph

5:10                                     Break

5:20 pm
Anne Friedrichs (Mainz/Munich), From European refugees to post-imperial people (future research project)

5:50 pm                             Final discussion