ABSTRACT

Human displacement has always been a consequence of war, written into the myths and histories of centuries of warfare. However, the global conflicts of the twentieth century brought displacement to civilizations on an unprecedented scale, as the two World Wars shifted participants around the globe. Although driven by political disputes between European powers, the consequences of Empire ensured that Europe could not contain them. Soldiers traversed continents, and civilians often followed them, or found themselves living in territories ruled by unexpected invaders. Both wars saw fighting in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and few nations remained neutral. Both wars saw the mass upheaval of civilian populations as a consequence of the fighting. Displacements were geographical, cultural, and psychological; they were based on nationality, sex/gender or age. They produced an astonishing range of human experience, recorded by the participants in different ways. This book brings together a collection of inter-disciplinary works by scholars who are currently producing some of the most innovative and influential work on the subject of displacement in war, in order to share their knowledge and interpretations of historical and literary sources. The collection unites historians and literary scholars in addressing the issues of war and displacement from multiple angles. Contributors draw on a wealth of primary source materials and resources including archives from across the world, military records, medical records, films, memoirs, diaries and letters, both published and private, and fictional interpretations of experience.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

The No-Man's-Land of Displacement

part |132 pages

Military Displacement

chapter |18 pages

Displacement and the Combat Soldier

Poetic Interpretations

chapter |16 pages

The French Resister in the Maghreb

French North Africa and the Formation of the Forces Aériennes Françaises Libres, 1940–41

chapter |17 pages

The Other Side of the Poison Cloud

Canadian Soldiers as English Patients after the First Gas Attacks

chapter |19 pages

Diluting Displacement

Letters from Captivity

chapter |14 pages

A “Positive” Displacement?

Italian POWs in World War II Britain

chapter |15 pages

A Period in Limbo

Placing People and Punctuation in E.E. Cummings's The Enormous Room

part |119 pages

Civilian Displacement

chapter |17 pages

Renegotiating the Yellow Peril

Cultural and Physical Displacement in the German Colony in China during the First World War

chapter |15 pages

“His Dearest Property”

Women, Nation, and Displacement in Storm Jameson's Cloudless May

chapter |16 pages

“Everything's in a Terrible Mess”

Displacement in the Wartime Fictions of Elsa Triolet and Irène Némirovsky 1

chapter |25 pages

“When Most Relief Workers Had Never Heard of Freud”

UNRRA in the French Zone of Occupation in Germany, 1945–47 *

chapter |23 pages

Fading Childhood Memories of World War II Displacement

Appropriation, Non-Appropriation, and Misappropriation

chapter |21 pages

Prisoners of the Past?

German Refugee Associations Today