War Memories. Children, Border Regions & Migrants in Europe

World War II provoked movements of borders and people in Europe. In the early post-war, new nation states undertook efforts to legitimize their national and societal set up by, among other ways, articulating national narratives on war memory that presented WW II as a shared national experience. At the border of nation states, and among migrants, tensions on such an interpretation of past events appeared to manifest themselves more sharply than elsewhere. Because children were seen as a new generation of enthusiastic national citizens who could ensure national belonging, nation states trained both those who had stayed in border territories, as well as those who had moved out of them at the end of the war, to articulate such new narratives. Although narratives in the East and the West of Europe were different, these early post-war renationalisation campaigns spoke the same militant language and the mobilisation strategies of nation states bore resemblances. On the basis of a case study on two border regions, the Eupen-St.Vith-Malmédy region in present-day Belgium and the East Prussia region (Ostpreussen/Warmia i Mazury) in today`s Poland, this project asks whether one can speak of similarities and differences in narratives on war memory among children who associated themselves with these border regions in the early post-war. Contrary to common social historical works with their almost sole focus on structures, this project highlights the complex relationship between structures and the (social) practices children executed to deal with these structures. Children are therefore assumed not to have been only subject to renationalization campaigns, but are perceived as agents who used (social) practices to narrate their war, thereby borrowing both from guidelines coming "from above" and from what they remembered themselves. Ego documents from the early post-war period written by children will be selected and analysed in comparison with interviews conducted today with the authors of these ego documents. Such a cross-check analysis will place the practice of writing in the early post-war social life of each author, as well as shed light on other practices articulating his or her early post-war narrating of war memories. By comparing the results for their similarities and differences in both border regions, the project brings a multiperspective contribution to mainstream historiography, among others criticising the (recently invented) generation of Kriegskinder and pointing to the potential of border and migration studies in contemporary historiography.