FRIAS, Freiburg; Anne-Laure Briatte, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies / Sorbonne University

Time: 06.-07.06.2019
Venue: Freiburg
Proposals by: 01.02.2019

There is currently a renewed interest in the Allied occupation of Germany after 1945 and in military occupation in general. Concerning the occupation of Germany after 1945, there is a lot of work dedicated to its economic, political and cultural dimensions. More oriented towards the „history from below“, current research questions the daily life of military occupation, the places and forms of encounters between occupiers and occupied, covering a whole range of interactions from conflicts or confrontations to various forms of cooperation or fraternization. This type of questioning highlights actors to whom historiography from above is often blind: ordinary soldiers, the civilian population, improvised mediators, men, women, and children.

At the same time, a historiographical trend is developing, which observes the social and cultural history of war phenomena, including transition periods such as war entries and ends of war. More recently, the history of bodies, emotions and sensitivities in wartime has been explored. While the centenary of the First World War was an opportunity to make progress on this front, much remains to be done on the Second World War. Waged as an all-out war, it has affected sensitivities, bodies, and emotions in a particularly sensitive way.

On the basis of these two observations, … read more and source (Web)