Sabine Rutar et al. (eds.): "No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others"

"No Neighbors' Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others" by Sabine Rutar, Anna Wylegała and Małgorzata Łukianow has been published in the series "Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience".

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.

The idea for this joint project originated at the IOS when Anna Wylegala worked there as a visiting fellow in October 2018. Volha Bartash (IOS research fellow) also contributed to the publication.