Nachwuchstagung
Deutsche und Juden im östlichen Europa
Young
Scholars Workshop
Germans and Jews in Eastern Europe
date:
May, 6th and 7th 2020
venue:
Nordost-Institut (IKGN e.V.), Lindenstraße 31, Lüneburg
Call
for Papers
From
the late Middle Ages up until the Second World War, German and Jewish
population groups constituted a formative economic and
cultural element in many regions of Eastern Europe.
In
the shadow of the holocaust, the role of both groups as imperial or
post-imperial minorities and their temporary entanglement as well as
historical parallels received not the attention they deserved. Newer
studies, mainly informed by paradigms of cultural research, tried to
abandon the problematic bi-polar juxtaposition of minority and
majority. Instead, researchers took greater account of the constant
and daily negotiation of coexistence in Eastern Europe and put more
emphasis on the manifold experiences of people in the most various
orders.
The
young-scholars-conference to be announced here is welcoming
contributions concerning the settlement of the fertile black soil
regions in the Russian Empire since the reign of Catherine the Great
and other related subjects like internal colonization understood in
the perspective of shared history or intertwined history or histoire
croisée. Similarities and historical parallels concerning Germans
and Jews were noticeable not only in the Tsarist Empire. After the
end of the First World War German and Jewish politicians from Eastern
Europe cooperated in the course of the Congress of European
Nationalities to assert that respect be accorded to minority rights
they had been assured of in the Paris Peace Conference. Independent
Poland after 1918 accommodated significant Jewish and German
minorities that had a political, cultural, and economic life of their
own. In the early Soviet Union the cultural autonomy of Jews and
Germans was promoted - albeit under the banner of communism. In 1924,
a Volga German Republic was established while the territorial
component of cultural independence in the case of the Jews was
realized only at the beginning of the 1930s in Birobidshan, in the
Soviet Far East.
The
genocide of the Soviet Jews committed by the German occupying forces
as well as several waves of deportations that affected among others
the population of the formerly autonomous regions of the Volga
Germans put the historical role of Germans and Jews in the Russian
realm to a sudden end. This was also true for Central Europe and
South-East Europe from where a considerable part of the German
population fled, was expelled, or deported. In the light of these
events, it becomes clear that not only the beginnings of the history
of Germans and Jews in Eastern Europe, in the form of the so-called
Eastern colonization, were firmly interconnected, but so was their
end in the early 20th century, too. Admittedly, studies will have to
be continued to overcome the problematic proposition of the
simultaneous destruction of the German Empire in the East and
European Jewry as it was proposed by Andreas Hillgruber in 1986.
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there is a newly
awakened interest in the transnational history and the heritage of
these multi-ethnic cultural landscapes of Eastern Europe. While
German and Jewish immigrants from the states of the former Soviet
Union in considerable numbers live in re-united Germany today, the
German public is confronted with post-Soviet realities.
We
seek to engage young scholars who study Germans and/or Jews as
minority groups in Eastern Europe in their academic theses or other
academic projects and are interested in presenting and commenting on
their findings within the framework of an international workshop.
Scholars who are dealing with one of the two groups only, are
welcomed too. The texts to be presented will be submitted in advance
so that presentations can be limited to 20 minutes each. Historians,
as well as ethnologists, literature scholars, and political theorists
are invited to attend the workshop in Lüneburg, which is organised
in cooperation with the thematic dossier “Germans and Jews in
Eastern Europe – aspects of an entangled history?” – funded by
the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well
as the chair for East European History at the University of Göttingen
and the Nordost Institute in Lüneburg (IKGN). Please send us an
academic CV as well as a proposal for your planned contribution.
Suggested
topics for possible panels
-
Economic, social, and cultural history
1. Internal
colonization and settlement in the Middle Ages, Early Modern Age as
well as in the 19th
century 2. Migration 3. Imperial states and minorities 4.
Establishment of nation-states in the interwar period 5. Ethnography
of the minority
-
Exposure to war and violence in the „Century of Extremes"
1. Forced
evictions as well as “ethnic cleansing“ during and after the
First World War 2. Pogroms and ethnic violence 3. The genocide of the
East European Jews and the role of the German minority in the Second
World War 4. Forced migration (flight and expulsion, evictions, and
exchange of populations) from 1941 and after the end of the war 5.
History of remembrance and war memory 6. Ideologies of political
violence and minority policies
-
History of remembrance and public history
1. The image of
Germans and the image of Jews 2. Concepts of enemy, stereotypes, and
the policy of historiography, 3. Sites of memory / lieux des mémoire
4. Local projects of memory, 5. Oral history
-
The history of languages and literature (Interdependency and Interplay)
-
German and Jewish life in Eastern Europe today
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