Forging Germans under Germany

Abstract

Chapter 3 is dedicated to the German occupation of the Western Banat during World War II. Employing archival and press sources from Germany and Serbia, as well as original oral history interviews, it explores the interplay between Reich-German and local Donauschwaben authorities in shaping institutions that would profoundly affect ethnic German children and young people’s wartime experience and conceptualizations of “Germanness”: the National Socialist Volksgruppenführung (minority leadership), the German-language school, and the Church. As the chapter shows, experiences of violence, the Nazi takeover of virtually all local ethnic German organizations, and the disappearance of any official religious alternatives caused an at least public equation of “German” with “National Socialist”—a definition which would be promoted, ignored, and resisted by individual youth.

The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: border making and its consequences

“…state officials deciding which child was entitled to education in a minority school based on the names of his/her ancestors) was exchanged for a procedure based on what a parent declared their child's mother tongue to be. 16 The creation of a patchwork of small nation-states went hand in hand with an internationalization of rivers. 17 Sarah Lemmen presents the fascinating case of the Czechoslovak right of access to the sea, an illustrative new example of the problem of combining the ideology of self-determination with the need for functional economic structures in newly established states.…”