Research

The twentieth century has seen unprecedented violence, not only on the battlefields in Europe and Asia, but also against civilians who suffered large-scale deportation and forced migration in both European and Asian theatres of the Second World War. Many members of the ERC GLORE team presented at the workshop ‘Mapping the end of empire: coming to terms with the Pacific War’, held at the University of Cambridge on 10 September 2024. Focusing on Shanghai as a hub of displacement and departure in the 1940s, this workshop scrutinised the global connections which linked ex-Nazi Germany (today Germany and Austria) to Asia, and the uncertainties that refugees and international organisations encountered during the episode of post-WWII resettlement. Aware that Shanghai, politically divided during the colonial era (until 1943), had a pre-war and wartime history of offering protection to Asian and European refugees, we pay attention to the racialised categorisation, the evolution of infrastructure that sustained global resettlement, the fragility of and limitations of refugees who wished to exert agency, and in a longer timeframe, their lives after departure from Shanghai. The workshop was generously funded by the DAAD Cambridge hub, co-convened by Kerstin von Lingen (Vienna) and Barak Kushner (Cambridge).

The twentieth century has seen unprecedented violence, not only on the battlefields in Europe and Asia, but also against civilians who suffered large-scale deportation and forced migration in both European and Asian theatres of the Second World War. Many members of the ERC GLORE team presented at the workshop ‘Mapping the end of empire: coming to terms with the Pacific War’, held at the University of Cambridge on 10 September 2024. Focusing on Shanghai as a hub of displacement and departure in the 1940s, this workshop scrutinised the global connections which linked ex-Nazi Germany (today Germany and Austria) to Asia, and the uncertainties that refugees and international organisations encountered during the episode of post-WWII resettlement. Aware that Shanghai, politically divided during the colonial era (until 1943), had a pre-war and wartime history of offering protection to Asian and European refugees, we pay attention to the racialised categorisation, the evolution of infrastructure that sustained global resettlement, the fragility of and limitations of refugees who wished to exert agency, and in a longer timeframe, their lives after departure from Shanghai. The workshop was generously funded by the DAAD Cambridge hub, co-convened by Kerstin von Lingen (Vienna) and Barak Kushner (Cambridge).

Research and Holdings in the National Archives Kew, London – An archival trip to the U.K. – by Raphaela Bollwein and Lena Christoph The National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom are located in Kew, London and their collection is one of the largest in the world, with over 11 million historical and governmental records. The Archives were founded as a result of a cooperation between the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscript Commission.[1] For the GLORE project, the TNA contain relevant documents on the issue of resettlement and repatriation of different groups of displaced persons (DPs) after World …

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Event Report: Book Presentation of Katarazyna Nowaks “Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria” 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 …

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On 21 September 2023, Lena Christoph and Raphaela Bollwein took part in the PhD workshop of the Gesellschaft für Exilforschung e.V. at the University of Osnabrück. Interdisciplinary presentations by doctoral students on the topic of “Migration, Flight and Exile” were at the center of attention. The workshop was led by Kristina Schulz, Andrea Hammel and Wiebke von Bernstoff. Both doctoral students put their focus on marginalized groups of displaced persons, whose resettlement proved particularly difficult after the end of the Second World War. The invisibility of the migration paths of unaccompanied children and persons who went to and through the Philippines were discussed.