Suchergebnisse

On 7 March 2022, Catherine Russell, UNICEF executive director, and Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, demanded that 'unaccompanied and separated children fleeing escalating conflict in Ukraine must be protected'.1 They insisted that children should, once they crossed Ukraine's borders, be immediately registered, offered safe spaces, reunified with their families, and receive emergency care.2 Under no circumstances should children who came with their families be separated, and everything should be done to protect children from exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence.3 However, since then, countless children from Ukraine who have crossed the borders unaccompanied have become victims of human trafficking and exploitation. Tens of thousands of children in Ukrainian state institutions or who had been orphaned prior to the war could not be protected. They were deported to Russia, many were interned in reeducation camps, and many were forcefully adopted by Russian families or moved into foster care.4 Since the war started, children have again become a means of warfare. The current war against Ukraine once more demonstrates how vulnerable children can become when they are separated from their families. Children have, once again, become targets of massive human rights violations and of crimes against humanity.

World War I and its aftermath produced a particularly vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans. This group included children whose fathers had fallen in battle, who had disappeared, or who had not (yet) returned home. Most of Europe's war and postwar societies witnessed the massive presence of these child victims, and responded in various ways to rescue them and secure their future survival. This article offers an exploration of the ways in which the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and then later the post-imperial Hungarian state, became invested in providing care and relief to Hungarian war orphans. In contrast to other groups of child victims, whose parents were blamed for neglecting their parental duties, war orphans as the offspring of 'war heroes' profited from the public appreciation of their fathers' sacrifice for the war effort and the Hungarian nation. The public discourse in the contemporary Hungarian media offers a glimpse into the emergence of a new public visibility of these child victims and of a new recognition of the societal obligation to care for them. Exploring World War I and its aftermath as a telling example of political transformation in the 20th century, the article showcases how war orphans were taken to personify essential notions of war- and postwar destruction, while also capturing visions of postwar recovery. It furthermore examines how welfare discourses and relief practices for Hungary's war orphans were embedded in contemporary gender norms, notions of proper Christian morality and ethnic nationalism. On this basis, the article assesses the ways in which the case of Hungary's war orphans not only mirrors the professionalization but also the fundamental transformation of child welfare in the aftermath of World War I.

In recent years, historians have slowly lost interest in depicting the Cold War as a unique ideological contest between the "real existing" socialist East and the capitalist West. In this spirit, this text examines the social practice of literary transfers, i.e., the exchange of literary works across borders. These transfers sought to physically restore an unraveled Europe that had come about as a result of the ideological and often personal division of Europe's (and Germany's) populations. Focusing on the practice of literary transfers across the Iron Curtain permits us to understand borders as symbolic spaces of the Cold War, although they had supposedly been hermetically sealed. Current research on opposition movements in Cold War Europe is still dominated by the widespread notion that oppositional phenomena in thegdrrepresent a research area distinct from other oppositional movements in the Eastern bloc. Possibly due to Germany's singular dividedness, this perception has often led to individual studies of oppositional phenomena, especially in the literary field, in the formergdr, thereby obscuring parallels in Central and Eastern Europe. As a critical response, this text distances itself from the division of the Soviet bloc's cultural history into irreconcilable geographical subareas. In doing so, it exemplifies literary transfers both across the German-German border as well as across the East-West Iron Curtain.

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with thelocalIron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent thelocalIron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that thelocalCzech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities' common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.

The volume discusses the social and cultural history of public health and its influence on state and nation building in East and Southeast Europe, which evolved with the 19th century and stretched throughout the 20th century, including the Cold War period. The national case studies include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, making an original contribution to the debate on the intertwined relationship between health, medicine and state and nation building. The authors challenge the idea of different paths to modernity and late modernity of Europe's western (liberal) and eastern (communist) countries, arguing that--through the perspective of public health--the history of the region stands emblematic for the European history from the late 19th century onwards. The studies explore close links between an evolving professionalizing elite and its understanding and use of scientificprofessional knowledge on the one hand, and the modern state on the other, which in a very ambivalent way makes use of medical knowledge as a political tool for its own advancement. Close reading and dense description of the case studies on public health will contribute to a better understanding of the genuinely European patterns of public health in the state and nation building era of the last two centuries

This volume offers an analysis of the intertwined relationship between public health and the biopolitical dimensions of state- and nation building in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It challenges the idea of diverging paths towards modernity of Europe's western and eastern countries by not only identifying ideas, discourses and practices of "solving" public health issues that were shared among political regimes in the region; it also uncovers the ways in which, since the late nineteenth century, the biopolitical organization of the state both originated from and shaped an emerging common European framework. The broad range of local case studies stretches from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Greece and Hungary, to Poland, Serbia, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Taking a time span that begins in the late nineteenth century and ends in the post-socialist era, the book makes an original contribution to scholarship examining the relationship between public health, medicine, and state- and nation building in Europe's long twentieth century. Close readings and dense descriptions of local discourses and practices of "public" health help to reflect on the transnational and global entanglements in the sphere of public health. In doing so, this volume facilitates comparisons on the regional, European, and global level