Controversial and Silenced Memory?: Displaced Persons and Their Memorials for Victims of World War II in Germany and Austria

• In Event: Cultural Histories of Displaced Persons between World War II and the Cold War

Abstract

While waiting for years in camps, some DPs became energetic “memory activists”. Some, but by no means all of the DPs were survivors of Nazi persecution.. Whereas more research on Jewish DP commemoration has been done, this is not the case for the in size much bigger group of non-Jewish DPs. In fact, there has been a lack of interest and research. This is partly due to language barriers as well as the difficulty of locating sources, but also one might guess, because of the difficulty of the sensitive topic itself: Often non-Jewish DPs were confronted with accusations of being nationalists, war criminals and Nazi collaborators.
Though a large-scale memorial-park in Flossenbürg was one of the first Concentration Camp Memorial Sites in Germany ever built - 1946 and the following years –, these mostly non-Jewish DP activities are largely forgotten. Or more precisely: due to language barriers, ambivalence as well as contested past(s) and narratives, made forgotten.
Despite the fact that today material on this topic is scattered around the globe as DPs emigrated all over the world, a large number of sources on Flossenbürg have only recently been found in community and family archives in the US, Canada, Australia, Poland and the UK. This makes it possible for Flossenbürg to serve an analysis of the internal perspectives of these "other" displaced memory activists. The paper uncovers the uncomfortable history of all involved groups on early memorial projects in Germany and Austria, that have been ignored so far.

Author

• Sarah Grandke, U of Regensburg (Germany)