Historian Naimark offers perspective on proposed memorial to expelled Germans
The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Using firsthand personal accounts and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens - only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland - were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences. Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival. Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.
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Stanford University
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James Sheehan is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a professor of history, and an FSI senior fellow by courtesy. He is an expert on the history of modern Europe. He has written widely on the history of Germany, including four books and many articles. His most recent book on Germany is Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford Press, 2000). He has recently written a new book about war and the European state in the 20th century, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? addressing the transformation of Europe's states from military to cilivian actors, interested primarily in economic growth, prosperity, and security. His other recent publications are chapters on "Democracy" and "Political History," which appear in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (2002), and a chapter on "Germany," which appears in The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2002).
Sheehan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has many won many grants and awards, including the Officer's Cross of the German Order of Merit. In 2004 he was elected president of the American Historical Association. He received a BA from Stanford (1958) and an MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (1959, 1964).
Encina Basement Conference Room
Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe presents research Professor Norman Naimark conducted while working at the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) on cases of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and forced migrations in five cases including Armenians in Turkey, Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars in the Yugoslav lands, as well as Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Such historical comparison dislodges common assumptions to reveal patterns of our modern world.
Without losing sight of relative magnitude or original aggressor, Naimark clarified that crimes occurred in all the above cases, and sets details of atrocities ordered by authoritarian regimes alongside evidence of ethnic cleansing enabled by Europe's democratic powers. In the example of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Naimark demonstrates that the Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaign, with concentration camps and raping of Bosnian Muslim women, had their precedents in ethnic-cleansing campaigns during World War II. Media images of the Serbian camps shocked EU and U.S. audiences, and rightly so; but publics and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic may read in Naimark's work the importance of a fuller historical record.
Naimark's comparison presents evidence for his argument that these instances of ethnic cleansing are "interconnected and embedded in the European 20th century." The notion of interconnected atrocity, with points of comparison across nationalities, ideologies, and territories, leads to provocative insight. Throughout 20th century Europe, victims and perpetrators could become perpetrators and victims. Naimark clearly distinguishes between original aggressors and victims, and does not blur the scale of Nazi atrocity with other modern war crimes. But his research demonstrates that the division of Europeans into fixed categories of victims and perpetrators, and the politics of peace-keeping based on these identities, must be tested against Naimark's seasoned and influential scholarship.
As a work of illuminating history, Fires of Hatred has a history of its own. Naimark has injected penetrating scholarship into Europe's politicized debates over history and memory of World War II. Since its publication in English, some of Europe's political commentators have sought to defend their versions of postwar history with which they identify, against the complex details of Naimark's work. Naimark himself has granted numerous interviews with European journalists seeking his help to set their record straight. Demand in Europe for Naimark's work is finally being met. Five years since it first appeared in English, Fires of Hatred has been translated into Italian, Czech, Russian, Croatian, and German. Further translations are undoubtedly in the works.
FCE is dedicated to consequential thinking about Europe in the new millennium, and Professor Naimark exemplifies the beneficial impact of our programs for public dissemination of Stanford research.
Encina Hall, East Wing, Ground Floor Conference Room E008
Encina Hall, East Wing Ground Floor Conference Room, E008
Encina Basement Conference Room
On January 1 Sweden assumed the rotating chairmanship of the European Union. While serving as the Swedish EU Commissioner from 1995 to 1999, Gradin was in charge of immigration, home affairs and justice. She will discuss Sweden's priorities for the EU, and the results of the December EU summit in Nice, France, with its associated Treaty of Nice. Gradin has a distinguished career: she was Vice-Chair of the national Federation of Social Democratic Women in Sweden, Chair of the Council of Europe's Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography, and Minister with responsibility for immigrant and equality affairs at the Ministry of Labor (1982-86). From 1968 to 1992 she was a member of Parliament and a member of the parliamentary Standing Committees on Education and on Finance, as well as a delegate to the Council of Europe. From 1986 to 1991 Gradin was Minister with responsibility for foreign trade at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and from 1992-94 she was Sweden's ambassador to Austria and Slovenia and to IAEA and UN in Vienna.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Encina Hall, East Wing Ground Floor Conference Room, E008