Telling People Apart
Distinguishing, Categorizing and Representing Displaced Persons and Refugees between Europe and Asia in the Twentieth Century
Anne Friedrichs and Kerstin von Lingen
Telling People Apart: Distinguishing, Categorizing and Representing Displaced Persons and Refugees between Europe and Asia in the Twentieth Century
Workshop at Vienna University, November 15, 2024
Global and social distinctions between people are subject to historical change. After the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Japanese Empire in 1945, new categories emerged based on people’s wartime mobility and violence endured. Following World War II, international organizations as well as state and local authorities identified more than 60 million “out of place” people in Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world. As they were registered, categorized, interviewed, recruited, and resettled, those former refugees, displaced persons, and stateless people, along with members of the National Socialist Party, used dominant categories such as “refugee” to assert their notions of belonging and emancipation. As a consequence, tensions developed between self-declared and external evaluations of belonging. As historians, we thus face the challenge of differentiating and contextualizing these many distinctions that we often have to reduce to a single term.
The workshop will gather historians from the Collaborative Research Center “Human Differentiation” in Mainz and the ERC research group “GLORE – Global Resettlement Regimes” and the FWF team “Norms, Regulations and Refugee Agency“ (both at Vienna) to discuss their specific projects and general questions such as the relationship between micro- and macro-perspectives. The workshop will especially explore how local practices of distinguishing, categorizing, and representing displaced persons and refugees have affected human differentiations which, in due course, structured space and time in twentieth-century Europe and Asia.