Vkliuchennoe nabliudenie i/ili interv’iu? Sobiranie kollektivnykh i/ili lichnykh vospominany? Case-study v Bel’gii

Autor(en)

Machteld Venken

Abstrakt

Ostarbeiterinnen were Soviet young women of Ukrainian, Russian or Belarusian
decent, who, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, were deported to Nazi Germany for forced labour. While at work, the young women met Western European deported workers, volunteers and prisoners of war. Although off duty, any contact between them was prohibited, numerous love affairs flourished and after the liberation, about 4,000 of them chose to migrate further to Belgium, were wed, and settled in their husbands’ home towns or villages. Because of the difficulty of their war experiences, many of them in their post-war life kept silent. However, these experiences came to the surface by means of gestures and slips of the tongue. This contribution shows how I gathered and analysed narratives on war memory of former Ostarbeiterinnen in Belgium for my PhD dissertation. Its aim is to portray whether the method I followed can contribute to other research on Ostarbeiterinnen. I used an ethnographical fieldwork approach. Inductive fieldwork, among others, allows one to do interviews as well as to do participant observation during gatherings. The combination of both approaches enables the researcher to highlight which war experiences are more easily verbally or non-verbally presented in group, and which ones are more easily, verbally or non-verbally, touched upon during individual interviews. One of
the results I will present, for instance, goes into ashared but silenced war experience which, nevertheless, stood central during group gatherings of former Ostarbeiterinnen in Belgium. This research question is interesting for many reasons. First, research on Ostarbeiterinnen until now has concentrated on the former Soviet Union, not on Ostarbeiterinnen who migrated to third countries, such as to Belgium. Second, former research has focused on interviews with individuals, as the former Ostarbeiterinnen in the Soviet Union were not allowed to gather. In Belgium, however, formal immigrant organisations of Ostarbeiterinnen existed. Third, the analysis of former researchers has mainly focused on what people said, not on what they did not say.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte

Seiten

64-72

Anzahl der Seiten

9

Publikationsdatum

2010

ÖFOS 2012

601022 Zeitgeschichte, 504014 Gender Studies, 504021 Migrationsforschung

Schlagwörter

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 8 – Menschenwürdige Arbeit und Wirtschaftswachstum

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/86c73e93-736e-48d1-bf85-02473b8abda0