Project description
Community building through retribution in post-war Polish Jews
During the Second World War, Polish Jews suffered disproportionally heavy damages resulting in mass migration. In the immediate post-war period, Polish Jews searched for retribution of crimes committed against them. The EU-funded transnat project focuses on post-war individual agency in seeking retribution and studies retribution as an aspect of community building among Polish Jews. It will study how Polish Jews moved between the two separate post-war zones, shared their memories and sought retribution. It will provide synthetic interdisciplinary and cross-regional research of institutions, actors and the vast effects of retribution. The project will contribute to post-war Poland’s history as well as to the global history of rebuilding the disintegrated post-war society.
Objective
My project discusses trans-territorial aspect of the individual search for retribution for crimes committed during the Second World War in East-Central Europe, focusing specifically on the immediate post-war response of Jewish pre-war Polish citizens to wartime norm-violating behaviour. As Polish Jews left Poland and settled abroad, my research will cross the traditional historiographical post-war divide between “West” and “East”, showing how people moved between those two zones just before the Iron Curtain came down, how they dealt with their memories and how they would go on to build what we refer to, following the conceptual framework developed by Barbara Rosenwein, as emotional communities dened by the social affiliation and shared memories. As such, this project contributes both to writing an integrative, multi-ethnic history of post-war Poland and to the global history of rebuilding of shattered society post-conflict.
My work will provide a synthetic interdisciplinary and cross-regional study of the institutions, actors, and larger implications of retribution, while tracing trajectories of individuals and the impact of their journeys on the links between collectives around the world. It will focus on individual agency in seeking retribution, taking into consideration gender, age, social status and geographic location as key aspects in shaping it. The project will be introducing a new methodology, combining research tools of history, history of emotions, legal history and digital humanities. It will be primarily carried out under the supervision of professor Michael Brenner at the Department of Jewish History and Culture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), with a three-month secondment focused on training in the history of Jewish legal representation at the Leibniz-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur – Simon Dubnow (DI) under the supervision of Dr. Elisabeth Gallas.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
80539 Muenchen
Germany