Buchpräsentation: Katarzyna Nowak: Kingdom of Barracks. Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria, 15.11.2023, Wien

Fachbereichsbibliothek (FB) Zeitgeschichte der Univ. Wien; Veranstaltungsreihe *at the Library (Web)

Zeit: Mi., 15.11.2023, 18.30 Uhr
Ort: FB Zeitgeschichte, Univ. Campus, 1090 Wien

Programm

  • Einleitung: Markus Stumpf | Leiter der FB Zeitgeschichte, Univ. Wien und Kerstin von Lingen | Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Univ. Wien
  • Zum Buch: Katarzyna Nowak | Institut für Zeitgeschichte
  • Podiumsdiskussion: Katarzyna Nowak, Kerstin von Lingen und Jannis Panagiotidis (Forschungszentrum für die Geschichte von Transformationen, Univ. Wien)
  • Brot und Wein

After World War II displaced more than sixty million people, Cold War politics opened global eyes and wallets to European displaced persons. The postwar experiences of more than three million forcibly displaced Polish people illuminate the painfully long process of reckoning with war and its fallout. Drawing on rich primary material unearthed in over a dozen archives, Kingdom of Barracks depicts the texture of everyday life in refugee camps in post-World War II Europe within a panorama of the social and cultural history of the twentieth century. Western Allies and Polish social elites construed the camps as spaces for rehabilitating and „re-civilizing“ refugees to prepare them for the reconstruction of war-torn countries and a rebirth of the nation. On the ground, refugees lived in close proximity, sharing bug-infested barracks with people from other regions, social classes, and wartime experiences.
Taking a bottom-up perspective and exploring the formation of cultural identity in exile through the lenses of class, gender, body, and nationality, Katarzyna Nowak argues that Polish DPs‘ experiences of displacement stimulated a personal and a collective revival understood in religious and national terms. In an age of intensifying forced displacement, Kingdom of Barracks sheds new light on past experiences of war and migration that are still deeply relevant in the present.

  • Katarzyna Nowak: Kingdom of barracks. Polish displaced persons in allied-occupied Germany and Austria. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2023 (Web)

Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in cultural and social history of the early Cold War. Having completed her PhD in 2018 at the Univ. of Manchester, she held research posts at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and the CEU. She is currently working on her project Knocking on the Vatican’s Gates. Refugees, the Holy See, and the Spectre of Communism, 1945-1958 as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Univ. of Vienna.

* at the Library ist die Veranstaltungsreihe der Fachbereichsbibliothek Zeitgeschichte und umfasst u.a. Ausstellungen, Buchpräsentationen und Podiumsdiskussionen.

Co-funded by the European Union under the Grant Agreement Nr.101053242 — GLORE — ERC-2021-ADG. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Eine Kooperation von
Fachbereichsbibliothek Zeitgeschichte, Universitätsbibliothek Wien
Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Universität Wien
Forschungsschwerpunkt Diktaturen, Gewalt, Genozide, Universität Wien
Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Project COMREF-VATICAN