Mobilities, Citizenship, Identity Syllabi

“We Refugees:” A History of Displacement in Modern Europe

This is an introduction to our Campus Spotlight on Sarah Lawrence College, and part of our special feature, Displacement, Memory, and Design.

When I entered the United States at Newark airport at the very end of August this year, ahead of the beginning of the fall semester, the immigration lines were long, yet they moved more quickly than usual. Personnel had been moved to Dulles Airport to respond to the arrival of those Afghani refugees who had been lucky enough to get onto the US evacuation flights. Yet, the entry ban on travelers from Europe and many other parts of the world meant that most people in line at Newark were US citizens or permanent residents. Hence the quick moving lines for me, while 250 miles south, the Afghani arrival only very slowly made their way through the controls.

In some ways, this picture described a world very different from the one in which we started the consortium, and in which I taught the first courses on immigration and forced migration at Sarah Lawrence College in the spring of 2017 and 2018. Back then, the Trump administration had radically reduced the number of asylum seekers allowed into the United States and banned travelers from Muslim countries. Now, the Biden administration at least attempted to react to the disastrous exit from Afghanistan by allowing refugees from the country in, while the Europeans hailed by Trump as desirable arrivals were still barred from entering. In more substantive ways, however, the picture revealed similar global conditions. In 2015, the crisis in Syria with its concomitant forced migration might not have reached the United States directly. Teaching a European history of migration in 2017, though, occurred on background of the mass arrival of refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and also Afghanistan in Europe. The desperate scenes of rickety refugee boats on the Mediterranean provided together with the more celebratory images of Syrian refugees with the German chancellor, provided the visual background. Teaching forced migration seemed timely. Our students deemed it very urgent. In their conference projects, semester long research projects, they wrote about the architecture of refugee camps in Jordan, the media coverage of Syrian refugees in Europe, or the place of asylum in the history of the European Union.

Some of that urgency seemed to have disappeared in the spring of 2021, when I taught the course on forced migration in European history once more. In contrast, more general issues on belonging in immigration societies plagued by continuing racist and social inequities loomed larger. I had tweaked the course and the last few weeks of the syllabus to allow more space for the long-lasting effects of decolonization and labor migration and to reflect the ways that agreements of the European Union with bordering nations had, often forcefully, restrained migrants from arriving at the bloc’s borders. Together, with Covid-19 restrictions in place since the spring of 2020, they had led to step reduction in the number of refugees claiming asylum in Europe. Students, while still morally incensed about the way European governments handled immigration and asylum, too seemed to be less urgently concerned with it, while the situation on the southern border of the United States still loomed larger, however somewhat disconnected from European history. Their conference papers reflected this shift, now including projects on a history of refugee’s mental health, tropes of “odyssey” in writing about refugees, and a history of “boat people” in Hong Kong. In addition, holed up at home for the better part of a year, travel restrictions were very real to the students, yet the actual idea of movement seemed to have become more abstract. If crossing borders had been their main focus in 2017, the erection of new ones loomed larger now. As a result, the questions of the rights, claims, obligations and future strategies related to migrants and migrations initially dominated our discussions, less the need for immediate action vis-à-vis those arriving on foreign soil. Our course by the same token became more historical and theoretical. Already by the later spring, the renewed arrival and conflicts over migrants across the Mediterranean in the European context, as well as the on the US southern border made migration a very live and a very political issue. The collapse of the Afghan government and the desperate scenes from Kabul Airport have now added new visual urgency to it.

Especially the latter were mostly placed in an American context—Vietnam. Yet, teaching the topic of migration and the emergence of refugee regimes in Europe since the late-nineteenth century instead places them in the larger arches of historical development, of recurring patterns but also disruptions of migration. The developments of these past six years alone remind us not to come up with periodization’s too quickly, yet the quite different responses of students within just four years also remind us of the influence of immediate context. With their concerns they reminded me not to become a historian, and a European one at that, too readily, but to keep thinking of the continent’s place in the global world as well as the lessons drawn from it for other periods and places. I am curious to see what the next cohort of students will have to say.

“We Refugees:” A History of Displacement in Modern Europe

Spring 2018

Course description

In 1922, in response to a wave of refugees from civil war Russia, the League of Nations created a passport for stateless people: The Nansen Passport. It was one of several measures to deal with the massive displacement occasioned by the results of the First World War and the revolutions and redrawing of boundaries that followed. Migration, for economic or political reason, was not new to twentieth century Europe. Yet, the (re)emergence of strict border regimes, the rise of international law but also of fascism and communism, and the sheer numbers of people on the move within Europe as a result of two world wars changed the conditions as well as the experience of displacement fundamentally. This course investigates the events that forced (or motivated) Europeans to move in the twentieth century. It traces the development of law, language and institutions dealing with migration that arose in response to it. Yet it also gives voice to the individual experience of refugees, be it the German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt who wrote ‘We Refugees’ in her New York exile in 1942 or a Polish forced laborer stranded in Germany following the Second World War.

The course will primarily focus on mid-century Europe when the structures emerged that regulate today’s refugee related politics. We will consider the history of terms such as stateless people, refugees, displaced persons, and asylum seekers and the way these influenced both politics and experience. Towards the end of the semester we will discuss current events in Europe in light of this history.

Writing and assignments

The assignments for the course per semester consist of a conference paper (6,000 words which roughly equals 14 to 16 pages depending on formatting), an in-class presentation of your conference paper PRIOR to finishing it, and a 1,500 word essay to hone your writing skills half way through the semester. The conference presentation should be around 10 minutes and will happen in week 10. A responded will be assigned to every presentation. The purpose is to develop your presentation skills and provide room for discussion and input from your classmates. We will go over academic writing and presenting early on in the semester.

Week 1 (Jan 22-26): An Introduction to Migration and Refugees

Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Indiana University Press: Bloomington; 2003), Chap 4, Migration in the Age of Urbanization and Industrialization, 102-160 and Chap 5: 161-197.
Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), Chap 1: 13-30.
Patricia Ehrenkamp, ‘Geographies of Migration I: refugees’ in Progress in Human Geography 41:6 (2017), 813-822.

Week 2 (Jan 29-Feb 2): Citizenship and Statelessness

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 (1951)), Chap 5: The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, 341-384.
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard UP: Cambridge MA, 1992), Intro and Chapters 1-2, 1-48.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 48-53.

Week 3 (Feb 4-9): The Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Lausanne

Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, Chap 2: 31-48.
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 2^nd, Chap 2: The Nansen Era, 51-121.

Primary Sources:

Tatiana Schaufuss, ‘The White Russian Emigres’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 45-54.
John Glad, Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), Introduction, 1-29; Interview with Roman Goul, 50-68.

Week 4 (Feb 12-16): Interwar: The Emergence of a Regime

Skran, Refugees in Inter-war Europe, Chap 3: 65-100.
Barbara Metzger, ‘League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights’ in Jessica Reinisch and Matthew Frank (eds), Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Year Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury, 2017),
Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Emergence of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), Chap 1: The Evolution of Immigration Control, 17-44.
Sharif Gemie et al, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936-1948(Bloomsbury: London, 2013), Chap 1: The Retirada: Spanish Republican Refugees, 1939

Week 5 (Feb 18-23): Refugees from Fascism: Voices of the Time

Primary Sources:

Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ in Marc Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994), 110-119.
Walter Adams, ‘Refugees in Europe’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 37-44.
Oscar Jaszi, ‘Political Refugees’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 83-93.
Excerpts from James G. McDonald, Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 2009), Introduction; 17-29; 34-51; 138-159.
Excerpts from Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra (New York: Knopf, 2015), xi-xxxv; 265-267; 282-289; 300-302; 307-317; 423-439.

Movie: Michael Curtiz, Casablanca (1942)

Week 6 (Feb 26-March 2): The War

Marion Kaplan, ‘Sites of Anxiety and Hope: Jewish Refugees in Lisbon, 1940-1945’ in Lessons and Legacies(forthcoming).
Ulrich Herbert, History of Foreign Labour in Germany, 1880-1980 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), Chap 4, 127-172.

Primary Sources:

Letter of Ida Rubinstein, 28 September 1945
Letter of Ida Rubinstein, 16 October 1945

Week 7 (March 5-9): Post-War: Displaced Peoples

Midterm Paper due on Monday at 7pm

Atina Grossmann, ‘From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors in Postwar Germany’ in Rita Chin et al. (eds), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 55-79.
Adam R. Seipp, ‘Refugee Town: Germans, Americans, and the Uprooted in Rural West Germany, 1945—52’ in Journal of Contemporary History 44:4 (2009), 675-695.

Primary Sources:

Letter of Ida Rubinstein, 12 March 1946
Testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Online Video Archive

Every student researches one Jewish survivor who stayed in Germany as a DP

Week 8 (March 26-30): Expellees and Ethnic Cleansing

Matthew Frank, ‘Reconstructing the Nation: Population Transfer in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944-1948’ in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds), The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 27-50.
Kyrstina Kerstern, ‘Forced Migration and the Transformation of Polish Society in the Postwar Period’ in Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–48(Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefied, 2001), 75-87.
Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, ‘Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualizing Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet East-European Borderlands after the Second World War’ inPeter Gatrell and Nick Baron (eds), Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 255-268.
Rainer Schulze, ‘The German Expellees and Refugees from the East and the Creation of West German Identity after World War II’ in Ther and Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations, 307-326.

Primary Sources:

Numbers of Expellees in the Federal States of West Germany (1950 and 1961)

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2301

Movie: Hans Deppe, ‘The Heath is Green’ (1951)

Week 9 (April 2-6): From Volunteers to Agencies

Daniel Cohen, ‘Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarism in Occupied Germany, 1945-1946’ in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 43:3 (2008), 437-449.
Axel Cunliff, ‘The Refugee Crisis: A Study of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ in Political Studies 43:2 (1995), 278-290.
Katy Long, ‘When refugees stopped being migrants: Movement, labour and humanitarian protection’ in Migration Studies 1:1 (2013), 4-26.

Primary Sources:

UHNCR, ‘Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’
Atle Grahl-Madsen, ‘The European Tradition of Asylum and the Development of Refugee Law’ in Journal of Peace Research (1960), 278-288.

Week 10 (April 9-13): In class presentations

Week 11 (April 16-20): Political Asylum as Democratic Identity

Greg Burgess, ‘Remaking Asylum in Post-War France, 1944-1952’ in Journal of Contemporary History 49:3 (2014), 556-576.
Harold Troper, ‘Canada and the Hungarian Refugees: The Historical Context’ in Chistopher Adam, Tibor Egervari, Leslie Laczko and Judy Young (eds), The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives (Ottawa 2010), 176-193.

Primary Sources:

John Hersey, ‘Journey toward a Sense of Being Treated Well’ in The New Yorker, 1956

Week 12 (April 23-27): Asylum and its Challenges in the 1980s and 1990s

Geoff Eley, ‘The Trouble with “Race”: Migrancy, Cultural Difference and the Remaking of Europe’ in Rita Chin et al., After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 137-181.
Klusmeyer and Papademetriou, Chap 13: The FRG’s International Refugee Challenge, and Chap 16: The Restriction of Asylum, 126-143 and 168-180.

Primary Sources:

An Alliance for Tolerance Appeals for Openness toward Foreigners (October 31, 1991)

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3684

Klaus Brill, “My Children are Burning!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 24, 1992

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=4314

Week 13 (April 30-May 4): Agamben, Benhabib and Philosophical Challenges to the International Refugee Regime

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights’ (1993) in Open 15 (2008)
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1-24.
Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Hannah Arendt on the stateless’, parallax, vol. 11:1 (2005), 46-60.
Patricia Owens, ‘Reclaiming ‘Bare Life’?: Against Agamben on Refugees’ in international relations 23:4 (2009), 567-582.

Week 14 (May 7-11): Fortress Europe and the ‘Refugee Crisis’

Colin J. Harvey, ‘Dissident Voices: Refugees, Asylum and Human Rights in Europe’ in Social and Legal Studies 9:3 (2000), 367-396.
Lilie Chouliaraki, ‘Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news’ in Media, Culture and Society 39:8 (2017), 1162-1177.

Primary Sources:

Merkel, the Bold’, The Economist, Sept 5, 2015
‘Cologne’s After-Shock’, The Economist, Jan 16, 2016

In addition students will choose and research one anti-immigrant party in Europe today and present a recent speech of one of their leading politicians.

Movie: Gianfranco Rosi, ‘Fire at Sea’ (2016)

Changes in the syllabus between 2018 and 2021 are in blue.

HIST3182 “‘We Refugees”: A History of Displacement in Modern Europe’

Spring 2021: Open Seminar

Course description

In 1922, in response to a wave of refugees from civil war Russia, the League of Nations created a passport for stateless people: The Nansen Passport. It was one of several measures to deal with the massive displacement occasioned by the results of the First World War and the revolutions and redrawing of boundaries that followed. Migration, for economic or political reason, was not new to twentieth century Europe. Yet the (re)emergence of strict border regimes, the rise of international law but also of fascism and communism, and the sheer numbers of people on the move within Europe as a result of two world wars changed the conditions as well as the experience of displacement fundamentally. This course investigates the events that forced (or motivated) Europeans to move in the twentieth century. It traces the development of law, language and institutions dealing with migration that arose in response to it. Yet it also gives voice to the individual experience of refugees, be it the German-Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt who wrote ‘We Refugees’ in her New York exile in 1942 or a Polish forced laborer stranded in Germany following the Second World War.

Basic Policies

Our class will meet through the Zoom online conference system. We will adopt the same rules and norms as in a physical classroom (take notes; participate by asking and answering questions; wear classroom-ready clothing). For everyone’s benefit, join the course in a quiet place. Turn on your video. Mute your microphone unless you are speaking. Close browser tabs not required for participating in class. I understand that the distractions the internet and social media offers are plentiful and only a tab or click away. But your distraction will be visible to the instructor and to your fellow students. Our success as an online class will depend on the same commitment we all bring to the physical classroom.

Class Participation

Since this is a discussion-based seminar, everyone is expected to have done the readings before class and to contribute to our conversation. My role is not to lecture, but only to guide and shape our collective discussions. Contributing to our dialogues does not necessarily mean having answers; you are encouraged (and expected!) to engage with each other, actively listening to what your classmates are saying and responding to their comments and observations. Often a well posed question about something that puzzles or intrigues you is more valuable than a pat answer. Interesting and seriously considered questions stimulate discussion and demonstrate a genuine engagement with the texts / issues at hand.

Our meetings should be a lively, comfortable forum in which we can exchange and discuss ideas, questions, and perceptions about the course readings. This process depends on differences (only things that are not identical can be exchanged) and thus it is natural (and essential) that there be some level of disagreement in our conversations. Yet, it is absolutely vital that our discussions remain civil and respectful to each other. All of us are encouraged to challenge others’ viewpoints, but we must do so in ways that carefully articulate our own arguments and ideas. Aggressiveness, and particularly ad hominem attacks, are completely out of bounds.

The key to a really good discussion is listening—the better you listen to what everyone has to say, the more fluid and probing our conversations can be. I’ll be paying special attention to how each of you listens to and picks up on the ideas of other students in the discussion—learning how to listen well and discuss ideas with a room full of peers is an important skill (for any work environment) that I hope you will you have honed by the time the semester is through. It is also important that our conversations stay on topic. We must remain focused on issues of historical importance, rather than on contemporary politics or personal feelings/ anecdotes. Considering the topicality of some of the issues we will be discussing, there is some degree of flexibility in this need to stay focused on the past and our class materials.

Discussion Leaders

Each week during our second class of the week (Thursdays) two students will be responsible for brief presentations of our assigned readings, followed by facilitation of discussions. We will rotate the discussion leaders throughout the semester. Leaders must come up with a list of at least five discussion questions and a brief group activity (15-20 mins), to be submitted to the instructor the day before.

Reading Responses

To promote discussion, you are required to post a short “reading response” on the MySLC discussion board the day before our seminar. That you submit them BEFORE is crucial and also helps the student discussion leaders. These responses must be in the following format: a short quotation from the class reading(s), followed by a commentary on that quotation and a thoughtful analytical question you would like to discuss in class. The quotation should be the foundation or jumping off point for your own thoughts about the text and the question should push those thoughts to ask about significance. These reading responses are not free associations, but must offer some thoughtful analysis or interpretation of the readings. You are encouraged to relate the texts to each other, if there are more than one, and to other (earlier) readings or class themes. In classes with two or more readings, you may choose to respond to just one of them (you are still required to have read all of them).

The discussion question should not be of the simple informational varieties. Instead, these can be wide ranging: things that puzzle you, something you thought was missing or mistaken in the readings, or something that you noticed but are not sure about. Every student is granted two “passes” per semester—two classes when you choose not to hand in a response. Being absent is not a reason not to do the reading or send me a response

Writing and assignments

In addition, you will have a group presentation in week 7 and an individual presentation in week 13 based on your research in online archives.

The conference paper is due Monday, May 10 at 7pm. In case you need an extension, please be in touch with me no less than 48 hours before the deadline.

Week 1 (Feb 1-5): An Introduction to Migration and Refugees

Session 1

Patricia Ehrenkamp, ‘Geographies of Migration I: refugees’ in Progress in Human Geography 41:6 (2017), 813-822
Hein de Haas, ‘What Drives Human Migration?’ in B. Anderson and M. Keith (eds) Migration: A COMPAS Anthology (Oxford: COMPAS, 2014).

Session 2

Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Indiana University Press: Bloomington; 2003), Chap 4, Migration in the Age of Urbanization and Industrialization, 102-160 and Chap 5: 161-197.
Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), Chap 1: 13-30.

Week 2 (Feb 8-12): Citizenship and Statelessness

Session 1:

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004 (1951)), Chap 5: The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, 341-384.
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard UP: Cambridge MA, 1992), Intro and Chapters 1-2, 1-48.

Session 2:

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 48-53.
Fine, Sarah. “The Ethics of Immigration: Self-Determination and the Right to Exclude.” Philosophy Compass 8, no. 3 (2013): 254-268.

Week 3 (Feb 15-19): The Russian Revolution and the Treaty of Lausanne

Session 1:

Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe, Chap 2: 31-48.
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 2^nd, Chap 2: The Nansen Era, 51-121.

Session 2:

Primary Sources:

Tatiana Schaufuss, ‘The White Russian Emigres’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 45-54.
John Glad, Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), Introduction, 1-29; Interview with Roman Goul, 50-68.

Week 4 (Feb 22-26): Interwar: The Emergence of a Regime

Session 1:

Skran, Refugees in Inter-war Europe, Chap 3: 65-100.
Barbara Metzger, ‘League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights’ in Jessica Reinisch and Matthew Frank (eds), Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959: A Forty Year Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 101-119.

Session 2:

Clifford D. Rosenberg, Policing Paris: The Emergence of Modern Immigration Control between the Wars(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), Chap 1: The Evolution of Immigration Control, 17-44.
Sharif Gemie et al, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936-1948(Bloomsbury: London, 2013), Chap 1: The Retirada: Spanish Republican Refugees, 1939, 29-53.

Week 5 (March 1-5): Refugees from Fascism: Voices of the Time

Session 1:

Walter Adams, ‘Refugees in Europe’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 37-44.
Oscar Jaszi, ‘Political Refugees’ in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Socials Sciences 203 (May 1939), 83-93.
Excerpts from James G. McDonald, Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 2009), Introduction; 17-29; 34-51; 138-159.

Session 2:

Marion Kaplan, ‘Sites of Anxiety and Hope: Jewish Refugees in Lisbon, 1940-1945’ in Lessons and Legacies(forthcoming).
Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ in Marc Robinson (ed.), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994), 110-119.
Excerpts from Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra (New York: Knopf, 2015), xi-xxxv; 265-267; 282-289; 300-302; 307-317; 423-439.

Movie: Michael Curtiz, Casablanca (USA, 1942)

Week 6 (March 8-9): The War and the Holocaust (no class on Thursday and no conferences)

Over these two weeks in teams of two to three you will use the Fortunoff Archive (accessible through Sarah Lawrence) and the USC Shoah Foundation Online Video Archive to research the life of a survivor during and immediately after the war. We will do the presentations on Thursday, March 18 during class. Each group will have up to ten minutes for their presentation. We will discuss all of them together in the 30 minutes at the end of class.

As background please read the following texts:

Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Part I: Historical Overview, 3-42.
Ulrich Herbert, History of Foreign Labour in Germany, 1880-1980 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), Chap 4, 127-172.
Atina Grossmann, ‘From Victims to “Homeless Foreigners”: Jewish Survivors in Postwar Germany’ in Rita Chin et al. (eds), After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009), 55-79.
Lukasz Krzyzanowski, Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), Introduction, 1-10

Week 7 (March 15-19): Post-War: Displaced Peoples

Midterm Paper due on Monday at 7pm

Session 1: you can use this time to meet and discuss your presentations

Session 2: In class presentations, 10 minutes per group with a half hour discussion of all presentations at the end.

Week 8 (March 22-26): Expellees and Ethnic Cleansing

Session 1:

Matthew Frank, ‘Reconstructing the Nation: Population Transfer in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944-1948’ in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds), The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Post-War Europe, 1944–9 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 27-50.
Kyrstina Kerstern, ‘Forced Migration and the Transformation of Polish Society in the Postwar Period’ in Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–48(Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefied, 2001), 75-87.
Nick Baron and Peter Gatrell, ‘Violent Peacetime: Reconceptualizing Displacement and Resettlement in the Soviet East-European Borderlands after the Second World War’ in Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (eds), Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 255-268.

Session 2:

Rainer Schulze, ‘The German Expellees and Refugees from the East and the Creation of West German Identity after World War II’ in Ther and Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations, 307-326.
Adam R. Seipp, ‘Refugee Town: Germans, Americans, and the Uprooted in Rural West Germany, 1945—52’ in Journal of Contemporary History 44:4 (2009), 675-695.

Primary Sources:

Numbers of Expellees in the Federal States of West Germany (1950 and 1961)

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2301

Movie: Hans Deppe, ‘The Heath is Green’ (West Germany, 1951)

Week 9 (March 29-April 2): From Volunteers to Agencies

Session 1:

Daniel Cohen, ‘Between Relief and Politics: Refugee Humanitarism in Occupied Germany, 1945-1946’ in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 43:3 (2008), 437-449.
Axel Cunliff, ‘The Refugee Crisis: A Study of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ in Political Studies 43:2 (1995), 278-290.

Session 2:

Katy Long, ‘When refugees stopped being migrants: Movement, labour and humanitarian protection’ in Migration Studies 1:1 (2013), 4-26.

Primary Sources:

UHNCR, ‘Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’
Atle Grahl-Madsen, ‘The European Tradition of Asylum and the Development of Refugee Law’ in Journal of Peace Research (1960), 278-288.

Week 10 (April 5-9): In class presentations

Week 11 (April 12-16): Political Asylum as Democratic Identity

Session 1:

Peter Gatrell, Unsettling Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (New York: Basic Books, 2019), Chapter 3: People Adrift: Expellees and Refugees, 51-68.
Greg Burgess, ‘Remaking Asylum in Post-War France, 1944-1952’ in Journal of Contemporary History 49:3 (2014), 556-576.
Patrice G. Poutros, ‘Asylum in Postwar Germany: Refugee Admissions and their Practical Implementation in the Federal Republic and the GDR Between the late 1940s and the Mid-1970s’ in Journal of Contemporary History 49:1 (January 2014), 115-133.

Session 2:

John Hersey, ‘Journey toward a Sense of Being Treated Well’ in The New Yorker, 1956

Week 12 (April 19-23): Decolonization, Asylum, and “Guest Workers”

Session 1:

Peter Gatrell, Unsettling Europe, Chapter 7: French Revolution: Decolonisation, Migration, Modernisation, 124-141
Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), Chap 8-9, 207-247.

Possible additional reading for the theoretically minded

Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Chap 1: “Border Thinking and the Colonial Difference”, 49-88.

Movie: Ousmane Sembene, ‘Black Girl’, (Senegal/France, 1965) (available on Kanopy through the library)

Session 2:

Peter Gatrell, Unsettling Europe, Chapter 11: A Dual Challenge: Recession and Asylum in Europe, 197-213.
Douglas B. Klusmeyer and Demetrios G. Papademetriou, Immigration Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany: Negotiating Membership and Remaking the Nation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), Chap 13: The FRG’s International Refugee Challenge, 126-143.

Primary Sources:

An Alliance for Tolerance Appeals for Openness toward Foreigners (October 31, 1991)

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=3684

Klaus Brill, “My Children are Burning!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 24, 1992

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=4314

Week 13 (April 28-April 30): In their own voice (no class on Tuesday, no conferences this week)

On the website of the European Union’s online archive initiative eu find a story/object from their “migration stories” collection that relates refugees and migrants in the 1960s and 1980s. Present the object, the story, and what it tells us about the experience of migrants at the time.

Week 14 (May 3-7): Fortress Europe and the Philosophical Challenges to the International Refugee Regime

Session 1: Fortress Europe

Didier Fassin, ‘The Precarious Truth of Asylum’ Public Culture 25:1 (2013), 39-63.
Liza Schuster, ‘A Sledgehammer to crack a nut: Deportation, Detention and Dispersal in Europe’ in Social Policy & Administration 39:6 (Dec 2005), 606-621.
Lilie Chouliaraki, ‘Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news’ in Media, Culture and Society 39:8 (2017), 1162-1177.

Movie: Gianfranco Rosi, ‘Fire at Sea’ (ITA, 2016)

Session 2: The Rights of Others

Giorgio Agamben, ‘Beyond Human Rights’ (1993) in Open 15 (2008), 90-95.
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1-24.
Patricia Owens, ‘Reclaiming ‘Bare Life’?: Against Agamben on Refugees’ in international relations 23:4 (2009), 567-582.

Week 15 (May 10-12): Final reflections

Session 1:

Rogers Brubaker, ‘Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions of the Politics of Belonging’ in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41:1 (2010), 61-78.
Sharif Gemie, ‘Re-defining Refugees: Nations, Borders and Globalization’ in Eurolimes 9 (2010), 29-36.

Philipp Nielsen is an Assistant Professor for Modern European History at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and an Associate Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He received is PhD from Yale University in 2012. His publications include From Heimat to Hatred: Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871-1935 (Oxford University Press, 2019), Architecture, Democracy and Emotions: The Politics of Feeling after 1945 edited with Till Großmann (Routledge, 2019), and Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity edited with Benno Gammerl and Magrit Pernau (Berghahn, 2019). His research interests include German-Jewish history, German political and architectural history, and the history of emotions.