Beer, Mathias – Beyrau, Dietrich – Rauh, Cornelia (edit.): Deutschsein als Grenzerfahrung. Minderheitenpolitik in Europa zwischen 1914 und 1950. Editura Klartext, Essen, 2009.

 The last decade has seen a proliferation of works with a transnational perspective on German minorities in early twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. Deutschsein als Grenzerfahrung is such a book. It grew out of a conference organized by a research group on the experiences of war in modern history at the University of Tübingen.[1] The volume aims at exploring public policies toward German minorities on the western, southern, and eastern fringes of Germany and Austria between 1914 and 1950; and the experiences of these minorities in those years as a result of these policies. The publication includes a short introduction and seventeen consecutive articles, which are not separated into subsections and follow a more or less geographic and chronological order. The introduction outlines the articles' common themes and compares the many different ways German identities were lived and policed across Central and Eastern Europe in the first part of the twentieth century. The author of the introduction, Dietrich Beyrau, juxtaposes the French "cleansings" (épurations) of the German population in the Alsace (1918/9 and 1945) with the forced migrations of the German population in Poland after 1918 and 1945, discerning a surprising similarity in that the non-native German population was "cleansed" from the Alsace primarily on the basis of their ethnicity. Michael Esch's article situates ethnic cleansings and genocides in history and identifies wars and war-like situations as a central component of the construction of ethnically homogenous nation-states. While he associates such endeavors with both democratic and authoritarian forms of government, in the final section of his article he draws on Alf Lüdtke's concept of self-centeredness (Eigensinn). In doing so, he points toward an ambivalence in ethnic cleansings which, he claims, are being perpetuated not solely in the interest of "high politics" and national fanaticism but also due to more general motives such as greed, material want, or other character traits and group dynamics discussed in this volume’s papers.

Mai multe detalii despre volum pot fi accesate aici.