Event Report: Book Presentation of “Kingdom of Barracks”

On the 15th of November Katarzyna Nowak presented her academic monograph titled “Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria” at the Fachbereichsbibliothek Zeitgeschichte at the University of Vienna. The book was published at McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2023 and deals with the history of Polish displaced persons in Austrian and German DP camps from a bottom-up, multi-perspective approach. Katarzyna Nowak is a contemporary historian with a focus on cultural and social history in the early Cold War. In 2023 she was a fellow of the ERC project GLORE and is currently a Marie Curie Fellow with her project Knocking on the Vatican’s Gates. Refugees, the Holy See, and the Spectre of Communism, 1945-1958 of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna.

During the presentation of her recently published book “Kingdom of Barracks” Katarzyna Nowak gave fascinating examples of refugee life in the immediate postwar period in Germany and Austria. Her book launch was characterized by depictions and examinations of a diverse range of primary sources – many of them ego documents created by displaced persons themselves. This focus on DPs’ voices is also a key feature of Nowak’s book. The presentation started off with a picture from a DP camp newspaper depicting a dog on a leash listening to the words “Freedom, Equality, Fraternity” coming from a radio. With this very apt example and many others, Nowak succeeded in making visible the DPs’ criticism and satire of the postwar relief and rehabilitation measures implemented in the camps. In the course of her presentation she gave other examples of such strategies for criticizing the way aid was administered and aimed against the general nature of westernized postwar welfare work. With the dog on the leash, Nowak pointed out to one of the main goals of her book: In “Kingdom of Barracks” she wants to show how life in postwar refugee camps was experienced by DPs and how they wrote and expressed themselves about it. With her cultural and social historical approach Katarzyna Nowak manages to focus on identity building processes among refugees and their personal accounts on their displacement experience. In her presentation she further demonstrated how much especially Polish DPs were influenced by the dynamics of the emerging Cold War. The focus on Polish DPs allowed her to analyze cultural communities that were very much influenced by the dichotomy of repatriation versus resettlement. Nowak gives the example of a Polish woman called Wanda, whose stay in the DP camp had changed her attitudes towards repatriation and resettlement. In the camp she learned new skills, got married and then emigrated to New York. Nowak hereby demonstrated how living in DP camps provided Polish DPs with opportunities they might never have had before: Some DPs went to the theatre for the first time in the DP camps, others learned to read and write there, for many it was the first time in their lives they had access to free health care. Nowak depicted in her presentation that, while living in a DP camp often meant being patronized by Allied relief workers and military personnel, it also presented DPs with new possibilities and chances. Nowak demonstrated how the life in DP camps was characterized by processes of re-nationalization, expediated by the fact that in the camps DPs lived together with DPs of the same nationality. In her book launch Nowak showed that for the Polish government in exile Polish DPs became the new hope for a revival of a non-communist Polish nation – the Polish DP community scattered in camps in postwar Germany and Austria thus became what Nowak calls “a nation in exile”.

The presentation was followed by a discussion round with Katarzyna Nowak, Kerstin von Lingen, and Jannis Panagiotidis. The discussion mainly went in two directions. On the one hand, the questions addressed the extent to which Nowak’s case study on Polish DPs can be placed in the international context of the treatment of DPs by international actors after the Second World War. In this regard, the collective agency, the everyday challenges, and problems as well as the individual room for manoeuvre of DPs were central points. On the other hand, the extent to which Polish DPs differ from other groups of DPs as well as the historical specifics of Poland before, during, and after the Second World War were discussed. Actors such as Polish diaspora communities, the exile government, and the treatment of ethnic minorities were particularly emphasized in this context. The author was able to demonstrate the extent to which the examined Polish DPs can be integrated as a subgroup into the long-term transnational history of Displacement. At the same time, she also made it clear that factors such as the Polish nation-building process after the Second World War, international diaspora communities, and the political situation at the beginning of the Cold War are factors that made the focus of “Kingdom of Barracks” particularly interesting.

Authors: Franziska Lamp and Konstantin Schischka