Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany) - Tapa dura

"In her stimulating study of the political and ideological self-positioning, social networking, and cultural activities of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Jewish displaced persons in West Germany after World War II, Anna Holian now has the beginnings of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations reconstructed and its hostility towards the Federal Republic of Germany worked out." --Archiv f r Sozialgeschichte -- (03/08/2017) "The story presented here serves as both an epilogue to the ethnic and demographic turmoil that marked the early twentieth century in Europe and as a prologue to the story of certain European emigrant communities seeking new homes - physically, politically, and culturally - in the Cold War world." - Jay Howard Geller, German Studies Review-- (04/10/2013)

"Though its primary focus is on the immediate postwar, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism will surely illuminate the contemporary crisis around citizenship and definitions of Germanness in the context of European Union and globalization." ---Geoff Eley, University of Michigan In May of 1945, there were more than eight million "displaced persons" (or DPs) in Germany---recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. In the aftermath of National Socialism, Germany thus ironically became a temporary home for a large population of "foreigners." Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons---Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish---created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups. Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.