GERM 355 - Advanced Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2018/19b: Dislocated Lives: Refugees and Displaced Persons after World War II. After 1945, around 10 million displaced persons were living in Europe, including survivors of concentration camps, slave laborers from Eastern Europe, and unaccompanied children. While the list of refugees who had been able to leave Germany included some famous people such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, most displaced people were unknown individuals, such as Sinto Heinrich Laubinger, whose wallet remains in the archive of the International Tracing Center in Germany. In this course we set out to understand what it meant to come to terms with experiences of displacement and loss and how to speak about this type of suffering. What role did gender play in this difficult situation? How did the allied forces support these people? What insights do their attempts to document and understand their lives as refugees offer contemporary efforts to work with refugees or understand the intersections of memory, trauma and narrative? In addition to analyzing personal accounts, memoirs, films, and novels, students work with original documents from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the International Tracing Service in Germany. Silke von der Emde.

Prerequisite(s): GERM 260 or GERM 270 , or the equivalent.

Two 75-minute periods.