No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe

Beschreibung

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.

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 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.

Chapter 7 and 13 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

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Anna Wylegała

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ethnic cleansing forced resettlement deportation property transfers postwar reconstruction

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“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)

"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

"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."

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