Borderland Studies Meets Child Studies

Although the 20th Century experienced a significant number of border changes in Europe and saw European nation-states substantially increasing their interest in children, Europe`s borderland children remain under-researched. This publication carried out a case study about the borderlands of annexation lying in a ring around Germany and switching sovereignty several times over the course of the 20th Century: The French-German borderlands of Alsace and Lothringen, the Belgian-German region Eupen-Malmedy, the Danish-German land of North Schleswig, the Polish-German borderlands, the Czech-German borderland entity of Hlucin, and the Lithuanian-German Memel territory. Germany lost these regions after World War I. All of them, except for North Schleswig, were annexed during World War II, but saw their national borders changing again once that war came to an end. The aim of our case study was to reveal whether comparative research on the history of borderland children can offer us a new understanding of European History. The authors gathered in this edited volume came to various new findings. First and foremost, the case study showed the complexity of nationalisation within various, previously often undiscovered, spheres of borderland childrens lives. Borderland children indeed found themselves at the center of nationalist interests in special programs set up in order to integrate their borderlands into their nation- states. In such programs, the intentions of nationalism can often be read in their purest form. Our comparison revealed how strikingly similar such intentions appeared to be on the Western and Eastern side of the European continent. While investigating how borderland children with different national and local identifications lived in each others vicinity, in addition, the authors detected a demarcation line not between two juxtaposed competing nationalisms, but between the national versus non-national attitude of borderland inhabitants. In this way, the case study marked a major step forward in deepening insights into the dichotomy between the nationalist policies executed towards borderland children and the non-national practices of these children for both the interwar period and the era after the Second World War. Finally, similar mechanisms characterised the national and non-national practices of borderland children on the Eastern and Western half of the European continent, despite, and this is the most surprising, the different conceptions of East and West that had influenced the decisions of peace negotiators after both World Wars while calling the European borderlands of annexation into existence. That is why this reading of European history from below encourages further investigation into the past daily lives of non-hegemonic people on the European continent.