I. The Theme of the Conference
Almost sixty years after the end of the Second World War in Europe, we continue to search for a framework of analysis that can adequately capture the abiding aftermath and legacy of this monumental event. Until 1989/91, narratives of the post-Second War period in Europe emphasized that 1945 marked a major rupture in European history. The end of the war marked a new beginning and in what followed, Europeans made their own history but not under circumstances of their choice. The Cold War and the division of the continent was believed to constitute the most important political consequence of the war. 1945 was understood as the beginning of a future that would head either in a liberal democratic or communist direction. The story of the post-Second World War period was the story of the world the Cold War made. The experiences of Europeans were eclipsed by the confrontation of the superpowers and the division of Europe between East and West.
The end of the Cold War, however, has enabled us to study postwar European societies from a different perspective that centers on the concept of the "postwar," emphasizing not only what divided but what united Europeans. From this perspective, European history after 1945 is not only exclusively or even primarily refracted through the prism of the Cold War. The purpose of this conference is probe the usefulness of this decidedly different, novel approach to the postwar European experience. We start from the working hypothesis that postwar European history should not be told as a story of the parallel processes of integration into competing models of liberal-democratic Americanized consumer society in the West and a Stalinist dictatorship in the East. Rather, the approach to the "postwar" we propose emphasizes that understanding the divergent wartime experiences of European societies is essential for understanding post-1945 developments. This approach disrupts the notion of 1945 as a complete hiatus that severed the two halves of the "Age of Extremes" (Eric Hobsbwam) and instead charts the various continuities from war to postwar. Most importantly, this perspective conceives of European history in the decade or so after 1945 as a period in which Europeans confronted the legacy of unprecedented experiences of violence. The war's destructive legacies included death tolls that approached thirty million, with far more civilian than military casualties, as well mass movements of populations, including not only Holocaust survivors and other "displaced persons" but also some fourteen million ethnic Germans, pushed out of Eastern Europe by the Red Army. By focusing on the often traumatic legacies of the past, "postwar" history draws on an important historiography of the history and memory of the Holocaust that has emerged over the last two decades or so. But it also extends its focus to a broader range of individual and collective experiences of violence that shaped the reconstruction of European societies in East and West after 1945.
This approach allows us to challenge dominant narratives of European history after 1945 in at least three different ways. First, the concept of the postwar enables us to decenter the significance of the Cold War and to restore the plurality and multiplicity of European histories in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Cold War established a context over which postwar Europeans had little control, but they nonetheless made their own history in ways that scholars of this period have yet to fully explore. Secondly, by focusing on the abiding legacies of the war, the conference undermines largely self-congratulatory narratives that have celebrated Europe's successful postwar reconstruction. We posit that the "postwar" represents a period in which Europeans—East and West—confronted enormous challenges of how to cope with shared experiences of mass death and destruction of an unprecedented scale. Postwar stabilization in East and West thus coexisted with persistent insecurities, injuries, and trauma resulting from the war and its aftermath. While Communist and Capitalist projects of reconstruction were largely centered on the erasure of wartime violence, the conference seeks to uncover the ongoing significance of the war's destructive legacies. Thirdly, by making central pre-1945 experiences to the history of post-1945 Europe, the conference seeks to integrate Eastern and Western (and Southern!) European histories into a transnational and comparative history of postwar Europe. Individual contributions that focus on specific national experiences will be juxtaposed in ways that will help us to understand where national experiences converged and where they moved in very different directions. To what extent did the vastly different wartime experiences of Eastern and Western European societies shape their respective postwar histories? How did the integration into antagonistic Cold War blocs structure possibilities for confronting the legacies of the Second World War? Are there ways in which Europeans in East and West overcame the war's legacies in similar ways, transcending the ideological antagonisms of the Cold War?
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II. Panel Overview
The first panel "Defining the Postwar" sets the conceptual agenda for the conference. It will seek to provide a series of answers to central questions: What was the nature of the postwar period? What were its central indicators? How long did the postwar period last and is the answer to this question the same in all national contexts? Among different social groups within individual nations? Given the nature of the Second World, which eliminated most boundaries between front and homefront, between soldiers and civilians, these questions are difficult to answer. Postwar European societies not only confronted the traditional task of reintegrating returning soldiers. They also faced a past that included occupation, collaboration, internal civil wars, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Postwar Europe was also a society in motion. Millions of ethnic Germans were pushed out of Eastern Europe by the Red Army at the war's ends. Millions of DPs—Holocaust survivors and Polish and Soviet Jews who had eluded the Nazis but now sought to find their way to the United States, Britain, Palestine, or other destinations, Poles pushed out of those parts of their country that were incorporated into the Soviet Union, families, separated by the war, to which loved ones might never return. Contributors to this panel will elucidate the different meanings of postwar in different parts of Europe. They will also propose different methodological and conceptual agendas for studying the war's aftermath.
Panel Two "Coming to Terms With Which Pasts? Public and Private Memories" will draw on the flourishing historiography on "memory" that has emerged over the last decade or so. However, the panel will not simply seek to provide an overview over the existing literature. Instead, the panelists will address more specific questions: Which memories of the war were drawn into public discourse and which ones were relegated to the private sphere? Which groups could claim victim states? Which groups were identified as perpetrators? How did societies occupied by the Germans come to terms with pasts that included collaboration? What were the patterns of selective memory in East and West? How did the different political contexts of liberal democracies in the West and Communist dictatorships in the East shape the interaction between public and private memories?
Panel Three "Making Peace at Home: Families, Genders, Sexualities" continues some of the themes of the previous panel by investigating those experiences and memories of the war that remained confined to a never completely "private" sphere. Contributors to this panel will investigate the significance of the family, gender, and sexuality as central sites for processing the war and its aftermath in East and West. They will also address the deep imprint that experience of violence left on individuals' minds and bodies, the lasting impact of the war on families for whom the loss of loved ones was permanent, and the ways in which these consequences of the war shaped the fabric of interpersonal relations between genders and generations. Finally, they will consider the consequences of the separation of children from their parents and international attempts to reconstitute families and facilitate adoptions through the offices of the United Nations and various NGOs that emerged in the postwar period.
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Panel Four focuses on "Mass-Mediating War: How Movies Shaped Memories in the Postwar Years." Even more so than after the First World War, the extent of violence and destruction during the Second World War created a massive crisis of meaning. Although many scholars have addressed the intellectual responses to the war and the lasting impact of the German intellectual migration provoked by the Nazis, historians have paid much less attention to one of the most important media that provided interpretations of the war's destructive impact—the movies. This panel will especially explore the popular genre of war movies as a privileged site for fighting the war a second time in the postwar period. Popular movies directly addressed themes of mass death, devastated cities, irreparably damaged bodies, and visions of a future of restoration and renewal. Contributors to this panel will also show how intellectual and cultural responses to the war contributed to the formation of public memories in East and West.
Panel Five "In the Shadow of the Bomb: Military Cultures between Nuclear Annihilation and Collective Security" focuses on issues of military security broadly defined. In both East and West, massive experiences of violence and insecurity provoked an intense desire for security in the postwar era. Widespread expectations of an inevitable new war co-existed with the realization that this scenario would lead to nuclear annihilation. The goal of this panel, then, is to explore how European wartimes experiences shaped approaches to the military security and international conflicts after 1945.
Panel Six "From Warfare to Welfare: Nations and Citizenship" broadens the focus to central issues of citizenship and national identity. During the Second World War, states had imposed extraordinary demands and sacrifices on ordinary citizens. After the war, citizens demanded recognition of their service to the nation, and the panelists will investigate the ensuing renegotiations of citizenship in East and West. The panel is based on a concept of citizenship that is not exclusively concerned with political rights but also considers other forms of integration into the national community, such as ideological belonging or social security. In this sense, the panel seeks to make valuable the concept of citizenship for liberal-democratic or authoritarian (Spain!) societies in the West as well as for Communist societies in the East. Of central importance as well is the consideration of how postwar European societies conceptualized race against the background of legacies of Nazi racism, particularly antisemitism, on the one hand, and anti-colonial movements and the beginnings of immigration of former colonial subjects into Europe on the other. Paper presenters will also be charged to consider the impact of population movements within Europe, from south to north and from east to west.
A final Roundtable will offer perspectives on postwar Europe from scholars whose major areas of focus include the U.S., Japan, and China, and a comparative Europeanist whose major focus is the nineteenth century, a past which is, as it were, "another country." The roundtable will offer critical commentary on our findings from this range of perspectives; summarize what we've accomplished; and offer reflections on the potential usefulness of future research that will juxtapose and compare the European "postwar" with the "postwars" of others affected by the global conflict that ended in 1945, in particular Asia and the United States.
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