No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. No Neighbors’ Lands: Living with Vanished (and Rarely Returning) Others in Post-1945 Europe

   • Anna Wylegała, Sabine Rutar

   Pages 1-26

3. The Point of Departure: Experiencing the Catastrophe

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-27

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   2. The Prussian Spirit of the Land: Fighting Fascism and Legitimating Annexation in Soviet Kaliningrad, 1947–1953

      • Nicole Eaton

      Pages 29-50

   3. “The Poles Are Taking Over All of Rabka”: A Microhistory of Ethnic Cleansing

      • Karolina Panz

      Pages 51-73

   4. New Neighbors’ Land: Istria and the Complexities of Solidarity

      • Pamela Ballinger

      Pages 75-100

   5. Native Borderland Children in the Belgian-German and Polish-German Borderlands. Comparing Verification and Nationalisation Narratives After the Second World War

      • Machteld Venken

      Pages 101-125

4. A New Brave World: Dysfunctionality, Justice, Reconstruction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. Doctors, Craftsmen, and Landlords: How Vanishing Others Influenced the Galician Economy During and After the Second World War

      • Anna Wylegała

      Pages 129-153

   3. The Joy and Burden of Living: Roma Communities in the Western Borderlands of the Postwar Soviet Union

      • Volha Bartash

      Pages 155-178Open Access

   4. Among Neighbors and Relatives: Intercessions and Jewish Persecution Through the Lens of Bulgaria’s Postwar Trials (1944–45)

      • Nadège Ragaru

      Pages 179-203

   5. Rape on Trial: Criminal Justice Actors in 1940s’ Soviet Ukraine and Sexual Violence During the Holocaust

      • Marta Havryshko

      Pages 205-227

5. The Unbearable Lightness of Things: Property Issues

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 229-229

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   2. “The Alienation Lacks Any Legal Basis”: The Fate of Jewish Property in Postwar Hungary

      • Borbála Klacsmann

      Pages 231-253

   3. A Conditional Restitution and Strategic Silences: The Shifting Political Value of Ethnic Germans in Communist Romania

      • Emanuela Grama

      Pages 255-278

   4. The Fate of Property in the Kočevje (Gottschee) Region during and after the Second World War

      • Mitja Ferenc

      Pages 279-303

   5. Property as Metaphor: Home and Belonging in Goran Vojnović’s Film Piran – Pirano (Slovenia, 2010)

      • Sabine Rutar

      Pages 305-329Open Access

6. Living with the Dead: Memory and Commemoration

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 331-331

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   2. “The Matter of Four Screws”: Holocaust Commemorations in (Post-)Soviet Russia (the Case of Rostov-on-Don)

      • Irina Rebrova

      Pages 333-358

   3. New Settlers as Implicated Subjects: Case Study of Collective Amnesia in Czech Silesia

      • Johana Wyss

      Pages 359-381

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.

• ethnic cleansing
• forced resettlement
• deportation
• property transfers
• postwar reconstruction

"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 German minority, 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 the pitfalls of these efforts and add a necessary lens to our understanding of the implications of war, genocide, and nationalism in the twentieth century."

- Anika Walke, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

  Anna Wylegała

• Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany

  Sabine Rutar

• Department of Sociology University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

  Małgorzata Łukianow

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.