The History of the Shtetl after 1945

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Magdalena Waligorska-Huhle
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561804187

The History of the Shtetl after 1945 is the first book-length social history of the aftermath of the Holocaust in the Eastern European countryside and of the mass-scale repopulation, domestication and adaptation of vacated Jewish spaces. Transcending national and disciplinary boundaries, and combining methodological approaches of history, anthropology, and memory studies, it addresses a blind spot in the scholarship on the aftereffects of the Holocaust. This book picks up the history of the Eastern European Jewish towns where others declare it for irreversibly finished. After the Holocaust, the shtetl began to be perceived in terms of "an East European Atlantis", as Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern put it. It was proclaimed as "dead", "gone for ever" and "destroyed … once and for all". Against the background of this grand narrative of obliteration and discontinuity, this book argues that the shtetl still has a history after 1945 - a largely overlooked one, but one that deserves to be told. To be sure, the historical social function of the shtetls as predominantly, or in large part, Jewish settlements, living according to the rhythm of Jewish holidays, irreversibly ended with the Holocaust. And yet, the social reality of these towns: their material heritage, their economic condition, and social relations within them have continued to be defined by their history as shtetls. The shtetl also remains relevant to Jews - as a lieu de memoire, a pilgrimage site and, albeit to a small number of individuals, a home. This book acknowledges the radical rupture the shtetls have suffered, but proposes a new, interdisciplinary and transnational perspective on their postwar history that moves beyond the narrative of a total void. Looking at six selected shtetls located in today’s Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, it provides a comparative angle that, taking into consideration the disparate war-time experiences and differing postwar regime structures, allows to see wider transnational commonalities.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants