Book Presentation | Anna Wylegała (Warsaw), Sabine Rutar (IOS) & Volha Bartash (UR) | No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Others

Abstract:

The book No Neighbors’ Lands in Postwar Europe. Vanishing Othersfocuses 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 adopted comparative perspectives on those who now lived in ‘cleansed’ borderlands. They 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? In the book’s presentation, we explore 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.

Two of the co-editors, Anna Wylegała and Sabine Rutar, and one of the book's authors, Volha Bartash, will present the book within the framework of Prof. Ger Duijzing’s seminar on oral history methods.

Bio:

Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the qualitative methodology of social research, oral history and memory studies. She is author of "Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine" (2019) and "Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce" [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: "The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine" (2020), and "No Neighbors' Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe".

She will be a visiting researcher at the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America from 12–18 January 2025. She will be collaborating with Sabine Rutar (IOS Regensburg) and Natali Stegmann (UR), who have applied for ScienceCampus Seed Money, to develop research ideas relating to Graphic Novels as a Medium to Visualise Historical Experience of Mass Violence and Refuge. She will also discuss her research on Researching the Collection, Preserving, Analysing and Disclosing of Ukrainian Testimonies of war, as well as presenting the output from a previous project developed with Sabine Rutar on oral history.

Sabine Rutar studied History as well as English, Italian, and French Language and Literature in Münster and Rome. She holds an MA in Modern History (University of Münster, 1996) and an MA in Education (Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin, 1992). She earned her PhD in History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence (2001). From 2001 to 2002, she worked at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig and from 2003 to 2007, at the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum (DFG). In 2004/05, she taught Southeast European History at Basel University. Then, in 2007/08 she was a Feodor Lynen scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Koper, Slovenia. She has been Editor-in-Chief (since 2014) and Managing Editor (since 2008) of Comparative Southeast European Studies (formerly Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society). She has been a guest professor/scholar at the Universities of Koper and Ljubljana (both 2011), at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (2012 and 2013), at the Imre Kértesz Kolleg in Jena (2012/13), at the International Research Center “Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History” (re:work) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2014), at the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies (2016/17), and at the EHESS Paris.