Project description
Looting of Jewish assets in WWII East-Central Europe
Historical research has primarily focused on the Nazi state’s takeover of valuable Jewish assets. However, little is known about the fate of everyday objects that changed hands during the Holocaust and their continued use in small local communities in East-Central Europe. In this context, the ERC-funded PLUNDERED LIVES project aims to document the widespread looting of everyday household items and personal possessions by non-Jewish locals during and after the Holocaust. It investigates how Jewish personal possessions were taken, repurposed, and misused by non-Jewish locals in Jewish townships in East-Central Europe. The project evaluates the impact of this looting on the communities of both the beneficiaries and the victims across generations. It examines eight communities located in three German-occupied East-Central European administrative units.
Objective
This project aims to write the history of the great plunder of small thingseveryday household objects, and personal items, including clothing, looted on a mass-scale by local non-Jews during, and in the aftermath of, the Holocaust. While historical research has focused on the top-down and centralized Nazi states takeover of Jewish financial assets, real estate, businesses, or art objects, we know nothing about the afterlives of unmarked objects of daily use that changed hands in the course of the Holocaust and continued being used for decades in the small local communities of East-Central Europe. The main objectives of the project are to document different modes of how Jewish personal possessions were appropriated by non-Jewish local populations of East-Central European shtetls; examine how they have been redeployed, adapted, and misused by their new owners; and assess the social and psychological trans-generational impact of this kind of plunder on the communities of both the beneficiaries and the victims. Breaking with the top-down view on Holocaust dispossession, this project focuses on eight microstudies of communities located in three different administrative units of German-occupied East-Central Europe. PLUNDERED LIVES novelty is in a combination of a microhistorical analysis with qualitative approaches of social studies and social psychology; extending the typical time frame (1939-1945) to include dispossession practices that continued after WWII; and experimental outreach strategies of digital crowdsourcing, curatorial interventions in public spaces, and cross-generational interviewing to elicit responses from the implicated communities and document hitherto inaccessible material in private possession. Highly interdisciplinary, PLUNDERED LIVES will open avenues for future research into the fields of genocide studies, anthropology of conflict, social psychology, economic history and forensic studies.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences law human rights human rights violations
- humanities history and archaeology history modern history
- engineering and technology materials engineering textiles
- social sciences sociology anthropology
- social sciences psychology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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10117 Berlin
Germany
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