Episode 21, Rebuilding Lives: Displaced Persons, Jewish Recovery, and Postwar Europe, Gast: Anna Holian
Episode 21, Rebuilding Lives: Displaced Persons, Jewish Recovery, and Postwar Europe, Gast: Anna Holian
In this episode Philipp Strobl talks to the historian Anna Holian about her research on Displaced Persons in postwar Europe. They discuss how competing political systems shaped DP communities in occupied Germany, her project Setting Up Shop in the House of the Hangman on Jewish economic life after the Holocaust, and her work on postwar European cinema, including The Search and Europe’s War Children. The conversation also explores the role of cities like Munich in DP integration and the challenges of reconstructing everyday life from fragmented archives.
Redaktion: Philipp Strobl
Produktion: Magdalena Ragl, Franziska Lamp-Miechowiecki
Musik verwendet von: https://gemafreie-musik-online.de
Hier geht es zur Episode mit Anna Holian:
File size: 41 MB
Anna Holian is a cultural and social historian of twentieth-century Europe, with a special interest in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. Her recent work has focused primarily on migration and displacement in the postwar context.
Holian's first book, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, tackles the big question of how Europeans made sense of the Second World War. It examines how Eastern European refugees in postwar Germany defined and represented themselves. Focusing on Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish refugees, it explores how divergent historical narratives about the war, especially wartime encounters with Nazi and Soviet power, formed the basis for the development of distinct displaced political communities.
She is currently completing her second book, Setting Up Shop in the House of the Hangman: Jewish Economic Life in Postwar Germany. The book looks at postwar Jewish history from the perspective of migrant economies and ethnic entrepreneurship. It examines how Jews made a living in postwar Germany and how making a living and making a "home" were intertwined. Covering the period between the end of the war and the mid-1970s, it offers a social and economic history of a long and painful (re-)integration process. It challenges the prevailing view that Jews in postwar Germany were “sojourners,” temporary residents who were prepared to leave—and abandon their businesses—at the earliest opportunity. It also considers how survivors’ economic biographies mapped onto the larger economic history of postwar West Germany. It is often assumed that Jewish economic life followed the general trajectory of the postwar West German economy, from privation in the immediate postwar years to affluence in the 1950s, 60s, and beyond. Setting Up Shop shows that for a number of reasons, including the lasting consequences of Nazi-era expropriation, postwar institutional discrimination, and concentration in declining branches of the economy, most Jewish entrepreneurs benefited only modestly from the economic boom.
Holian's work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Historical Institute, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (Potsdam), and the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (Munich), among others.