Tara Zahra has managed to uncover a significant but little-known aspect of the Second World War and in doing present new angles and insights on a piece of history that many would assume contains little room for new research. In her exploration of the way in which children and their childhoods were conceptualized, objectified and politicized in the Second World War’s aftermath, she raises the question of whether historians and scholars of other disciplines should be examining the social and economic relations of children/childhood not unlike how feminist scholarship once challenged both conservative and Marxist histories which neglected matters of gender and patriarchy. Especially given the inherent connection between women and children/childhood via motherhood, Zahra’s work causes me to consider what avenues may exist for understanding the development of children’s place within society in relation to broader historical developments, much in the same way that feminist scholars like Maria Mies have investigated the historical development of patriarchy (e.g. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 1986). On the other hand, the book is also a reminder that children themselves are rarely afforded a voice of their own, and therefore their place in history is often accounted for by adult perspectives, with all the challenges this poses for the historian. For example, during the 1980s Guyanese children (as well as children in several socialist and communist countries) were forced to participate in quite rigorous and time consuming training for mass gymnastics displays (as still happens today in North Korea). For years adults had the authority on this history, the children’s experience, its impact, etc. Today, those Guyanese children are adults and sharing their stories (something easier now than ever with the advent of the internet and social media), moreover some of those children have gone on to be scholars. This has completely transformed and broadened the discourse on this episode in Guyanese history, demonstrating that, to put it simply, adults didn’t always know what children thought, how they felt, or how they were being affected by what they were going through.
After reading the introduction to Lost Children I assumed the book would mostly be about how the fate of displaced children after World War II changed ideas about child psychology as a result of psychoanalytic and collectivist theories about proper childhood development that were tested during that time. While it was somewhat disappointing that most of the book was not actually about that (I have an interest in the history of psychology) I thought it was an engaging read that can teach us about the practice of history.
The two most notable things about the book for me were the fact that it explored a very contentious issue without really taking sides, and its exploration of the way different political bodies within post war Europe deployed the same rhetoric to different ends. From my experience, many historical works tend to be partial to certain groups of actors within their narratives. Notably from the readings for this semester, Gegenbach’s Binding Memories took sides in the Mozambique civil war and perhaps more problematically, Steedman demonized her own mother in Landscape for a Good Woman. While there are certainly reasons for historians to take sides, I found Lost Children’s exploration of how children’s welfare was subverted not only by nation states attempting to reclaim children who “belonged to them,” but also by humanitarian organizations who incorporated aspects of scientific racism into their relief efforts incredibly refreshing. I think it serves as a good reminder that no matter what stripes a locus of power wears (even if it is a humanitarian organization) the ideas of the people who control that organization and the assumptions behind how it operates can have incredibly adverse effects on the individuals who are swept up in its activities. I found the way in which Zahra traced how the rhetoric of what was in displaced children’s “best interests” was used in very different ways by almost all of the parties who had a stake in deciding the fate of displaced children particularly compelling. That brings me to my questions for this week:
1. The different uses of what is in a child’s “best interest” is one of the main structural elements uniting the many stories that Zahra narrates in her work. In my opinion, she effectively uses this common element to highlight the hidden interests of the different parties seeking to claim displaced children. How else can explorations of rhetoric be used to structure historical narratives and tease out different actors’ views on a particular matter? One other example I can think of where this strategy might be effective is tracing how the rhetoric of “freedom” has been used over time in American politics.
2. While many of our readings this semester have questioned the idea that historians produce “objective facts” there are certainly different degrees to which we can take sides. Should we take sides? In what cases is it appropriate and to what degree?
I think Zahra’s book is tremendously impressive in its scope – she discusses so many different organizations, situations, people, et cetera. It all makes for a very informative read. Aside from anything else, I sure learned a lot from this book.
I will confine myself to one question here, as I think it’s a pretty central here. Basically, does this book feel overly cynical in places? I am undecided on that right now, but there were passages which made me wonder whether Zahra is overly-fixated upon seeing essentially benevolent child protectionism as a force for implanting, achieving, and enforcing Machiavellian power-political goals. Zahra returned to the connection she sees between nationalism and the humanitarian efforts of various actors quite a lot here and while I think she has a point, some passages struck me as perhaps a little too stark or simplified. Take her contention on page 20: “the rise of humanitarian activism around children and of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe were ultimately flip sides of the same coin.” Now one might be tempted to read that as suggesting that massive ethnic-cleansing led to massive child protectionism efforts, which seems sound, but the rest of the passage makes it clear that the linkage Zahra is making is her assertion that both of these activities served to promote nationalism, and national homogeneity. I don’t know about you folks, but I balked a little at this comparison. It struck me as somewhat unfair, as obviously the goals, practices, means, and impacts of these two things were very different. Her point is not lost on me, but I’m not sure the high-minded humanitarian workers profiled on pages 90-93 really deserve to be lumped into the same category as ethnic cleansers.
All that said, she made some excellent observations here. Yes, rebuilding Europe also involved rebuilding the family from totalitarian norms (or what people thought were totalitarian norms [Chapter Three – specifically 93-95]). Also, I liked her discussion of the shift from material provision to child refugees during and after WW1 to a fixation with their psychological condition after WW2 (57-58). I’m also quite certain people in charge of displaced children after WW2 intended to “remake them in their own image (23, 90).” I just wonder whether the depiction of humanitarian workers and child psychologists as champions of nationalism and the nation-state (returned to very succinctly again on 57-58) felt a little too blunt or unnuanced?
One of the most important aspects of transnational histories that Zahra’s work underlines is that they reduce the solidity of such categories as nation, state and even family, instead showing that they are partially realized goals that are meaningful in producing patterns of behavior, but are equally contested and negotiated on the ground. The case of the Findlay brothers Zahra finds instructive in revealing the fault lines of competing ideas of nation and family. The French republic, Jewish Zionists, and the French Catholic church all had competing definitions of the nation and the family within the post-war conceptual umbrella of national universal human rights. The republic claimed it had its Jewish citizens stolen from it; the Catholic Church did not recognize a family to exist outside of Catholicism and the Zionists conflated family and nation together in a Jewish state. The sites of contest were children as the bio-political future of the nation. This is quite interesting because it fractures the neat organizational lines that “nation” and “state” seem to afford and presents another question: where does the nation begin and end? Zahra seems to indicate that the indeterminacy of liminality is something not easily navigated. Despite the fact the children are turned over to Jewish parents, and one year on they are thought to be assimilating quite well, is that the end of the story? Would they still have some level of identification with France and Catholicism as indicated by the letter? What should historians do with such liminality? With the nation fractured, what explanatory methods do we have to interrogate this?
The narrative she presents is itself a critique of the ideology(ies) of nationalism to provide complete solutions to problems despite its claim to a totalizing capacity to organize politics and society. The cases of the French state attempting to repatriate children with mixed French blood as the rightful national property of the nation highlights this and of those Jewish children in adoptive families. The particular example of Silesian children being assigned a “nationality” so that they can be repatriated is instructive. Hesitation is interpreted as evidence of a non-German identity, and not what the author contends as simply confusion over an organizational principle somewhat foreign to the child. This seems to indicate another theme: the inability of nationalism to provide a total interpretive matrix for the human experience. However, the author does not offer any further interpretation of these sorts of events, merely comfortable to draw the fault lines. I think this is perhaps one of the weakness of the work. Reading this I was hoping for some more extended reflection on the “nation” and is function in transnational history. However, I have to admit this is also one of its greatest strengths: simply the revelations of the messiness of an ideology imposed and the effects on human social geography.
I also found it interesting that with so many of the “lost generation” children still alive, she chose not to record their oral histories, as noted by critics. She explains that “recollections of former refugee children have… been shaped by the culture of memorialization that has developed around World War II and the Holocaust since the 1970s “(235). I wonder if it is advisable to remove the voices of the participants from their own history to achieve her historiographical goal. Does this mean that the only authoritative voice for the peoples’ childhoods is the “objective” historian? This seems to say that because memory is forever being reinterpreted that it is not admissible evidence in the court of “H”istory. Surely, there is a place, even if it requires substantial contextualization and unpacking by the historian. Otherwise, we might need to review the usage of written documents based on memory as well, such as diaries or memories. Ann Soler in her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power strategically uses the oral histories of former domestic servants in the Dutch colonial East Indies. She does this to show how the colonizers on a domestic scale were anxious about the potential for racial and cultural pollution posed by domestic servants, but also how affect appeared differently for colonizer and colonized in the domestic setting. I don’t see why Zahra could not have similarly used oral history strategically, especially for those of mixed national parentage, a site where the post-war discourse of the nation would have been in high resolution, yet contested.
While remaining conscious of the fact that “she could also have talked about x” criticisms are a little unfair, since funding eventually runs out, we have other things going on in our lives, and in the end we all die, I’m struck in my reading by a kind of missed opportunity in Zahra’s book. She spends a lot of time on the fact that “the young were consistently seen as the most malleable immigrants” (171) by states who perceived them as future bio-political resources. This claim to malleability is not without merit, as she shows through her examples of children self-identifying with the nation they were raised in rather than the one they were born in. So there’s a kind of contrast at work here between socially constructed notions of nationality/ethnicity and the yet-to-be-constructed character of children.
The possible missed opportunity is this. She talks about how humanitarian work in the post-war period was heavily informed by ideas of national belonging, writing that “humanitarian workers were…deeply implicated in the campaign to create homogenous nation-states” (21). Yet implicit in the idea of humanitarian work is the idea of broader concern for humanity as such, for people as humans, not necessarily as French, Armenian, Spanish etc. So my question is to what extent the wartime displacement and post-war repatriation of children—in the context of humanitarian concerns—actually represented an opportunity for new notions of internationalism or broader “humanism”? Such would be to delve into history’s unrealized possibilities, and of the use of counterfactuals for activist purposes—hence my worries about being unfair to her—but perhaps the notion of unrealized possibilities is something that is central to the way Zahra talks about children, and perhaps it’s worth exploring what those possibilities were.
I’m reposting my response from earlier as the Reply function is now working! 🙂
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This is a phenomenal book, an example of the kind of scholarship to which all transnational historians, I am sure, must aspire. I am particularly struck by Zahra’s ability to move (seemingly) effortlessly from the nation-state to the international organization to the foster parent’s home, and to concurrently consider the psychological framework operating in each of these spaces. That she can do so while demonstrating proficiency in multiple languages and across various regions and times is all the more impressive. I really had to take a moment to consider this book as a whole—to appreciate Zahra’s cohesiveness and clarity that shine through despite the book’s unassuming complexity. It asks us several questions, and provides a number of convincing answers, about how we should conceptualize the nation-state, nationalism and nationalities, the post-war era, and humanitarianism.
I must admit that I had to remind myself to remain critical while reading this book, which is a testament to Zahra’s writing style. Yet one critique did come out of my reading, and it related, again, to the book as a whole. There are several instances in which the actions and likely thoughts of individual children are considered, but my impression throughout the book was that children were never really the subjects of Zahra’s study. Granted, I don’t think they were supposed to be the subjects, as she was more immediately concerned with the ways that various (adult) institutions and communities imagined, created, and manipulated childhood for sociopolitical purposes. Yet these lost children also underwent this process in Zahra’s book, didn’t they? She treats children more as objects than as subjects, as material things or texts that might be handled or read in certain ways to reveal or modify grander conclusions about Europe and the West in the post-war period. It is a brilliant tactic that Zahra skilfully executes, but it does, in itself, raise a few important questions: At what point do we rob human subjects of their humanness when we use them as objects of study? Should they be used as sources in the way Zahra uses them? (My answer is, I think, yes, but I’m not sure how to resolve these reservations I’m holding.) Are the lost children in this book being doubly robbed of their agency—in the historical sense and in the Historical sense? Should children in their own right be considered legitimate historical subjects, and can this (or should this) be done without having to resort to child psychology?
Moving from Ari Kelman’s Misplaced Massacre to Tara Zahra’s The Lost Children makes me think about argumentation in historical narrative. Although historical writing is often framed in terms of an analytical essay (several shorter narratives and evidence to support points) or a narrative essay (an overarching narrative linked to the points of an argument), historical narratives also may borrow the techniques of storytelling, namely, a narrator, characters, a setting, a plot that typically unfolds chronologically, and a conclusion that gives the story meaning (which I find particularly fascinating, if not controversial).
Of all the pieces we have read so far, I see Zahra’s writing as a textbook example of an analytical essay (I might put Binding Memories and Landscape for a Good Woman in this camp too, though for different reasons). This seems like the safest and perhaps most traditional approach to historical writing, wherein the author is generally not mentioned in the text and her selection process with regard to the evidence is not discussed. From Ruth-Karin Davidowicz to Else Prolsdorff, the short narratives Zahra includes each supports a point that she is making in her broader argument about the nature of ideas about displaced children in (mostly post-WWII) twentieth century. Her argument is clear through her presentation and interpretation of the evidence.
By contrast, Kelman’s piece reads much more like a story. But there is a twist to Kelman’s piece in that he seems to try to tell his story through the evidence, rather than through a grand narrative, and without explicitly identifying his points (so that it is not really a narrative essay). Nor does he use the conclusion to elucidate his argument or give his story meaning (so that it is maybe not really a story by classical standards). Both books offer an abundance of evidence and detail, but I found Zahra’s so much easier to receive. It is not that I was without criticism as I read, but I could appreciate her selection process given the points she was making. Zahra’s narrative is remarkably broad and she compensates for this by providing very specific, often quantitative, evidence. This is an interesting tactic that invites her audience to perceive her argument as trustworthy. But it wasn’t this that I appreciated; it was that she is attempting to say something meaningful… I wonder how Kelman would critique Zahra’s narrative.
Zahra’s work was a good refreshment on my studies on the history of childhood, and I think it is a work that is groundbreaking in its ease to read and its clarity in arguments. While the notion of childhood is (obviously) a central theme, I found it to be the less interesting one compared to the study of nationalism. In fact, I think this work should be used as an example of recent studies of nationalism, as I think it is a sophisticated but clear study into nationalism. I felt this analysis took ideas surrounding the construction of race and nationalism, such as Antoinette Burton, and showed how the notion of “child” and “childhood” is very much like the notion of “race.” Children should be seen as political constructs and should be historicized. The idea of the family was implicated within ideas of childhood, and Zahra provides a brilliant account of the ways families were tied up within nationalism, defied nationalism, and were redefined and restructured by nationalism. The notion of nationalism is difficult to discuss (perhaps I am just not very good at it) because it is part theory and part historical. I must admit that her transnational study strongly reflects my transnational ambitions. I sometimes worry that transnational studies will ignore nation-states and nationalism, and Zahra reassured me that it could be done perfectly.
The criticism Conor brings up is a common one in studies of children and childhood. While children themselves are largely ignored in the narrative, this is usually a practical reason because there are so few sources from the perspective of children. Most are written by adults about children. The history of children and childhood thus has two different methodologies: showing the ways children were regarded and treated by adults, and attempting to understand how children themselves interacted and engaged with the world. Zahra’s work is the former, though the latter does provide a richer, if more challenging, analysis. I agree with Conor’s point, and think that it is important to consider when analyzing and writing the history of children and childhoods. Many historians of childhood have come to argue that children must be treated as a part of subaltern studies. To a large extent there are many parallels between children and subaltern subjects of history. Can children be considered “subaltern”? Does this change their relationship as actors or objects in history? Can we better grasp the study of childhood with writings by Spivak? Can the child speak?
In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself questioning how generous I seem to be as a reader compared to some of my peers: I’ve been giving credit and leverage to writers on aspects that others have found inadequate and questionable. So this week I had decided to put on my harshest reading glasses and write a highly critical blog post, only to find – very quickly – that I could not have picked a worse week for that particular endeavour.
In my opinion, The Lost Children surpasses most of the books we have read thus far in both scope and subtlety of argumentation. That extremely tedious empirical research underlies what we read is abundantly clear and Zahra’s analysis is seamlessly compelling for it. She integrates a vast body of theoretical debates on supremely interesting topics – a central one that I find absolutely fascinating being the debate between family-oriented individualists on the one hand and socialist/Jewish collectivists on the other – demonstrating a mastery of a wide array of approaches to think and write about the past. Indeed, she appears to be is beyond all the “turns” of the discipline: she’s taken it all in and shown how we can weave different things together to write some truly interesting histories.
Her book is simultaneously a gendered social history of emotions and psychology and a “traditional” political history (with a “bio-power” twist, perhaps). Zahra’s grasp on the multiple levels of politics – from the international arena down to the family – allows her to make very confident and convincing statements about what historical actors were actually thinking when they did what they did. On top of that, the book encompasses an entire continent – sometimes more – and is therefore inherently transnational. But what I find to be the most important thing in all of this for Zahra (something that is up for debate: with so many balls thrown in the air, how do we discern which one is truly paramount?) is the issue of constructed identities.
The displacement and subsequent struggle over children is pretty much as messy as political and emotional conundrums get. To the contemporary historian who wants to talk about it, however, there are even more quandaries to deal with. How far, for instance, should the historian go in describing suffering to her readers; how does she activate her readers’ emotions without descending into a “won’t somebody please think of the children!” kind of sensationalist rhetoric. With regards to this specific issue, I believe Zahra makes some wise choices, as in other aspects of the book. She allows the primary sources themselves to do the job of conveying the emotions and drama involved. She avoids falling into the sensationalist pit, in other words, by putting other people in it. But choosing how to deal with this issue is a really a difficult thing to do, I think, and I’d love to hear what other people have to say about it.
Since this book is very well written and deals with an interesting topic; I cannot say that much about it. Also Zahra’s conclusions about the different concepts of education (collectivist vs. indivualist) and the purpose to restore the nation states via reconstructing the families are quite convincing. So I want to share some questions which arose for me while reading this.
First: Were the social workers successful? In the last chapter Zahra spends some lines on this question, at least concerning some individuals. But I would like to enlarge the question: Was the restoration of the families successful? And even further: Helped this to (re)build nationhood? I would doubt that, at least in regard to Germany with the confliction between 1968ers and their parents about the latter’s role in National Socialism.
Second: I’m not sure if these lost children were the starting point of discussions about family and ways of education (probably not, as far as I know already Marx & Engels proclaimed collectivist education), but anyhow the discussion about it did not end in 1950. Until now it is one of the main demands of German conservatives to promote education-at-home to the disadvantage of Kindergartens and pre-Kindergartens. Moreover even nowadays is the help of disordered families one of the main tasks of social workers. However, at least for them this has nothing to do anymore with reconstructing the nation.
Third: I would like to know about the influence of the theories which were developed in the refugee camps on psychology and educational science. As Jacob noted already, Zahra mentions this in the introduction without discussing it in the main body.
After these questions I just want to make this clear: I appreciated reading this book and these questions are not supposed to undermine Zahra’s work. I would rather say that this book is a good starting point to ask and probably also to answer these questions.
The thing that I found particularly impressive about this work was Zahra’s ability to connect ideas and trends across disparate times and places. Using children as a conceptual framework, she traces familiar narratives about children and childhood but contextualizes them in a way that bisects and disrupts our familiar understanding of the “Lost Children” of WWII.
While the main arguments here about children being an imagined symbol of the nation and child welfare aid shifting from material to psychological may not be entirely original, her ability to draw meaningful conclusions and connections from these theses is important. For e.g. when she states in regard to the ambivalent status of the family that “even as abolitionists and Jewish advocates protested the dividing of families in the mid-nineteenth century, the emigration of unaccompanied poor children became a favored strategy of for populating the British Empire and the American West.” So here, we have abolitionists & Jewish groups (surprise surprise) at odds with British and American imperial thrusts. This to me, seems to suggest that Zahra is interested in more than how children were imagined as ‘little Brits’ or ‘little Americans’, but also how class, race, gender, and nationality all converge in varying degrees and with particular intensity to shape childhood during this period.
I suppose my main question would be does the intersectionality of her analysis get lost in the juicy nationalism argument?
Tara Zahra has managed to uncover a significant but little-known aspect of the Second World War and in doing present new angles and insights on a piece of history that many would assume contains little room for new research. In her exploration of the way in which children and their childhoods were conceptualized, objectified and politicized in the Second World War’s aftermath, she raises the question of whether historians and scholars of other disciplines should be examining the social and economic relations of children/childhood not unlike how feminist scholarship once challenged both conservative and Marxist histories which neglected matters of gender and patriarchy. Especially given the inherent connection between women and children/childhood via motherhood, Zahra’s work causes me to consider what avenues may exist for understanding the development of children’s place within society in relation to broader historical developments, much in the same way that feminist scholars like Maria Mies have investigated the historical development of patriarchy (e.g. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 1986). On the other hand, the book is also a reminder that children themselves are rarely afforded a voice of their own, and therefore their place in history is often accounted for by adult perspectives, with all the challenges this poses for the historian. For example, during the 1980s Guyanese children (as well as children in several socialist and communist countries) were forced to participate in quite rigorous and time consuming training for mass gymnastics displays (as still happens today in North Korea). For years adults had the authority on this history, the children’s experience, its impact, etc. Today, those Guyanese children are adults and sharing their stories (something easier now than ever with the advent of the internet and social media), moreover some of those children have gone on to be scholars. This has completely transformed and broadened the discourse on this episode in Guyanese history, demonstrating that, to put it simply, adults didn’t always know what children thought, how they felt, or how they were being affected by what they were going through.
After reading the introduction to Lost Children I assumed the book would mostly be about how the fate of displaced children after World War II changed ideas about child psychology as a result of psychoanalytic and collectivist theories about proper childhood development that were tested during that time. While it was somewhat disappointing that most of the book was not actually about that (I have an interest in the history of psychology) I thought it was an engaging read that can teach us about the practice of history.
The two most notable things about the book for me were the fact that it explored a very contentious issue without really taking sides, and its exploration of the way different political bodies within post war Europe deployed the same rhetoric to different ends. From my experience, many historical works tend to be partial to certain groups of actors within their narratives. Notably from the readings for this semester, Gegenbach’s Binding Memories took sides in the Mozambique civil war and perhaps more problematically, Steedman demonized her own mother in Landscape for a Good Woman. While there are certainly reasons for historians to take sides, I found Lost Children’s exploration of how children’s welfare was subverted not only by nation states attempting to reclaim children who “belonged to them,” but also by humanitarian organizations who incorporated aspects of scientific racism into their relief efforts incredibly refreshing. I think it serves as a good reminder that no matter what stripes a locus of power wears (even if it is a humanitarian organization) the ideas of the people who control that organization and the assumptions behind how it operates can have incredibly adverse effects on the individuals who are swept up in its activities. I found the way in which Zahra traced how the rhetoric of what was in displaced children’s “best interests” was used in very different ways by almost all of the parties who had a stake in deciding the fate of displaced children particularly compelling. That brings me to my questions for this week:
1. The different uses of what is in a child’s “best interest” is one of the main structural elements uniting the many stories that Zahra narrates in her work. In my opinion, she effectively uses this common element to highlight the hidden interests of the different parties seeking to claim displaced children. How else can explorations of rhetoric be used to structure historical narratives and tease out different actors’ views on a particular matter? One other example I can think of where this strategy might be effective is tracing how the rhetoric of “freedom” has been used over time in American politics.
2. While many of our readings this semester have questioned the idea that historians produce “objective facts” there are certainly different degrees to which we can take sides. Should we take sides? In what cases is it appropriate and to what degree?
I think Zahra’s book is tremendously impressive in its scope – she discusses so many different organizations, situations, people, et cetera. It all makes for a very informative read. Aside from anything else, I sure learned a lot from this book.
I will confine myself to one question here, as I think it’s a pretty central here. Basically, does this book feel overly cynical in places? I am undecided on that right now, but there were passages which made me wonder whether Zahra is overly-fixated upon seeing essentially benevolent child protectionism as a force for implanting, achieving, and enforcing Machiavellian power-political goals. Zahra returned to the connection she sees between nationalism and the humanitarian efforts of various actors quite a lot here and while I think she has a point, some passages struck me as perhaps a little too stark or simplified. Take her contention on page 20: “the rise of humanitarian activism around children and of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe were ultimately flip sides of the same coin.” Now one might be tempted to read that as suggesting that massive ethnic-cleansing led to massive child protectionism efforts, which seems sound, but the rest of the passage makes it clear that the linkage Zahra is making is her assertion that both of these activities served to promote nationalism, and national homogeneity. I don’t know about you folks, but I balked a little at this comparison. It struck me as somewhat unfair, as obviously the goals, practices, means, and impacts of these two things were very different. Her point is not lost on me, but I’m not sure the high-minded humanitarian workers profiled on pages 90-93 really deserve to be lumped into the same category as ethnic cleansers.
All that said, she made some excellent observations here. Yes, rebuilding Europe also involved rebuilding the family from totalitarian norms (or what people thought were totalitarian norms [Chapter Three – specifically 93-95]). Also, I liked her discussion of the shift from material provision to child refugees during and after WW1 to a fixation with their psychological condition after WW2 (57-58). I’m also quite certain people in charge of displaced children after WW2 intended to “remake them in their own image (23, 90).” I just wonder whether the depiction of humanitarian workers and child psychologists as champions of nationalism and the nation-state (returned to very succinctly again on 57-58) felt a little too blunt or unnuanced?
One of the most important aspects of transnational histories that Zahra’s work underlines is that they reduce the solidity of such categories as nation, state and even family, instead showing that they are partially realized goals that are meaningful in producing patterns of behavior, but are equally contested and negotiated on the ground. The case of the Findlay brothers Zahra finds instructive in revealing the fault lines of competing ideas of nation and family. The French republic, Jewish Zionists, and the French Catholic church all had competing definitions of the nation and the family within the post-war conceptual umbrella of national universal human rights. The republic claimed it had its Jewish citizens stolen from it; the Catholic Church did not recognize a family to exist outside of Catholicism and the Zionists conflated family and nation together in a Jewish state. The sites of contest were children as the bio-political future of the nation. This is quite interesting because it fractures the neat organizational lines that “nation” and “state” seem to afford and presents another question: where does the nation begin and end? Zahra seems to indicate that the indeterminacy of liminality is something not easily navigated. Despite the fact the children are turned over to Jewish parents, and one year on they are thought to be assimilating quite well, is that the end of the story? Would they still have some level of identification with France and Catholicism as indicated by the letter? What should historians do with such liminality? With the nation fractured, what explanatory methods do we have to interrogate this?
The narrative she presents is itself a critique of the ideology(ies) of nationalism to provide complete solutions to problems despite its claim to a totalizing capacity to organize politics and society. The cases of the French state attempting to repatriate children with mixed French blood as the rightful national property of the nation highlights this and of those Jewish children in adoptive families. The particular example of Silesian children being assigned a “nationality” so that they can be repatriated is instructive. Hesitation is interpreted as evidence of a non-German identity, and not what the author contends as simply confusion over an organizational principle somewhat foreign to the child. This seems to indicate another theme: the inability of nationalism to provide a total interpretive matrix for the human experience. However, the author does not offer any further interpretation of these sorts of events, merely comfortable to draw the fault lines. I think this is perhaps one of the weakness of the work. Reading this I was hoping for some more extended reflection on the “nation” and is function in transnational history. However, I have to admit this is also one of its greatest strengths: simply the revelations of the messiness of an ideology imposed and the effects on human social geography.
I also found it interesting that with so many of the “lost generation” children still alive, she chose not to record their oral histories, as noted by critics. She explains that “recollections of former refugee children have… been shaped by the culture of memorialization that has developed around World War II and the Holocaust since the 1970s “(235). I wonder if it is advisable to remove the voices of the participants from their own history to achieve her historiographical goal. Does this mean that the only authoritative voice for the peoples’ childhoods is the “objective” historian? This seems to say that because memory is forever being reinterpreted that it is not admissible evidence in the court of “H”istory. Surely, there is a place, even if it requires substantial contextualization and unpacking by the historian. Otherwise, we might need to review the usage of written documents based on memory as well, such as diaries or memories. Ann Soler in her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power strategically uses the oral histories of former domestic servants in the Dutch colonial East Indies. She does this to show how the colonizers on a domestic scale were anxious about the potential for racial and cultural pollution posed by domestic servants, but also how affect appeared differently for colonizer and colonized in the domestic setting. I don’t see why Zahra could not have similarly used oral history strategically, especially for those of mixed national parentage, a site where the post-war discourse of the nation would have been in high resolution, yet contested.
While remaining conscious of the fact that “she could also have talked about x” criticisms are a little unfair, since funding eventually runs out, we have other things going on in our lives, and in the end we all die, I’m struck in my reading by a kind of missed opportunity in Zahra’s book. She spends a lot of time on the fact that “the young were consistently seen as the most malleable immigrants” (171) by states who perceived them as future bio-political resources. This claim to malleability is not without merit, as she shows through her examples of children self-identifying with the nation they were raised in rather than the one they were born in. So there’s a kind of contrast at work here between socially constructed notions of nationality/ethnicity and the yet-to-be-constructed character of children.
The possible missed opportunity is this. She talks about how humanitarian work in the post-war period was heavily informed by ideas of national belonging, writing that “humanitarian workers were…deeply implicated in the campaign to create homogenous nation-states” (21). Yet implicit in the idea of humanitarian work is the idea of broader concern for humanity as such, for people as humans, not necessarily as French, Armenian, Spanish etc. So my question is to what extent the wartime displacement and post-war repatriation of children—in the context of humanitarian concerns—actually represented an opportunity for new notions of internationalism or broader “humanism”? Such would be to delve into history’s unrealized possibilities, and of the use of counterfactuals for activist purposes—hence my worries about being unfair to her—but perhaps the notion of unrealized possibilities is something that is central to the way Zahra talks about children, and perhaps it’s worth exploring what those possibilities were.
I’m reposting my response from earlier as the Reply function is now working! 🙂
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This is a phenomenal book, an example of the kind of scholarship to which all transnational historians, I am sure, must aspire. I am particularly struck by Zahra’s ability to move (seemingly) effortlessly from the nation-state to the international organization to the foster parent’s home, and to concurrently consider the psychological framework operating in each of these spaces. That she can do so while demonstrating proficiency in multiple languages and across various regions and times is all the more impressive. I really had to take a moment to consider this book as a whole—to appreciate Zahra’s cohesiveness and clarity that shine through despite the book’s unassuming complexity. It asks us several questions, and provides a number of convincing answers, about how we should conceptualize the nation-state, nationalism and nationalities, the post-war era, and humanitarianism.
I must admit that I had to remind myself to remain critical while reading this book, which is a testament to Zahra’s writing style. Yet one critique did come out of my reading, and it related, again, to the book as a whole. There are several instances in which the actions and likely thoughts of individual children are considered, but my impression throughout the book was that children were never really the subjects of Zahra’s study. Granted, I don’t think they were supposed to be the subjects, as she was more immediately concerned with the ways that various (adult) institutions and communities imagined, created, and manipulated childhood for sociopolitical purposes. Yet these lost children also underwent this process in Zahra’s book, didn’t they? She treats children more as objects than as subjects, as material things or texts that might be handled or read in certain ways to reveal or modify grander conclusions about Europe and the West in the post-war period. It is a brilliant tactic that Zahra skilfully executes, but it does, in itself, raise a few important questions: At what point do we rob human subjects of their humanness when we use them as objects of study? Should they be used as sources in the way Zahra uses them? (My answer is, I think, yes, but I’m not sure how to resolve these reservations I’m holding.) Are the lost children in this book being doubly robbed of their agency—in the historical sense and in the Historical sense? Should children in their own right be considered legitimate historical subjects, and can this (or should this) be done without having to resort to child psychology?
Moving from Ari Kelman’s Misplaced Massacre to Tara Zahra’s The Lost Children makes me think about argumentation in historical narrative. Although historical writing is often framed in terms of an analytical essay (several shorter narratives and evidence to support points) or a narrative essay (an overarching narrative linked to the points of an argument), historical narratives also may borrow the techniques of storytelling, namely, a narrator, characters, a setting, a plot that typically unfolds chronologically, and a conclusion that gives the story meaning (which I find particularly fascinating, if not controversial).
Of all the pieces we have read so far, I see Zahra’s writing as a textbook example of an analytical essay (I might put Binding Memories and Landscape for a Good Woman in this camp too, though for different reasons). This seems like the safest and perhaps most traditional approach to historical writing, wherein the author is generally not mentioned in the text and her selection process with regard to the evidence is not discussed. From Ruth-Karin Davidowicz to Else Prolsdorff, the short narratives Zahra includes each supports a point that she is making in her broader argument about the nature of ideas about displaced children in (mostly post-WWII) twentieth century. Her argument is clear through her presentation and interpretation of the evidence.
By contrast, Kelman’s piece reads much more like a story. But there is a twist to Kelman’s piece in that he seems to try to tell his story through the evidence, rather than through a grand narrative, and without explicitly identifying his points (so that it is not really a narrative essay). Nor does he use the conclusion to elucidate his argument or give his story meaning (so that it is maybe not really a story by classical standards). Both books offer an abundance of evidence and detail, but I found Zahra’s so much easier to receive. It is not that I was without criticism as I read, but I could appreciate her selection process given the points she was making. Zahra’s narrative is remarkably broad and she compensates for this by providing very specific, often quantitative, evidence. This is an interesting tactic that invites her audience to perceive her argument as trustworthy. But it wasn’t this that I appreciated; it was that she is attempting to say something meaningful… I wonder how Kelman would critique Zahra’s narrative.
Zahra’s work was a good refreshment on my studies on the history of childhood, and I think it is a work that is groundbreaking in its ease to read and its clarity in arguments. While the notion of childhood is (obviously) a central theme, I found it to be the less interesting one compared to the study of nationalism. In fact, I think this work should be used as an example of recent studies of nationalism, as I think it is a sophisticated but clear study into nationalism. I felt this analysis took ideas surrounding the construction of race and nationalism, such as Antoinette Burton, and showed how the notion of “child” and “childhood” is very much like the notion of “race.” Children should be seen as political constructs and should be historicized. The idea of the family was implicated within ideas of childhood, and Zahra provides a brilliant account of the ways families were tied up within nationalism, defied nationalism, and were redefined and restructured by nationalism. The notion of nationalism is difficult to discuss (perhaps I am just not very good at it) because it is part theory and part historical. I must admit that her transnational study strongly reflects my transnational ambitions. I sometimes worry that transnational studies will ignore nation-states and nationalism, and Zahra reassured me that it could be done perfectly.
The criticism Conor brings up is a common one in studies of children and childhood. While children themselves are largely ignored in the narrative, this is usually a practical reason because there are so few sources from the perspective of children. Most are written by adults about children. The history of children and childhood thus has two different methodologies: showing the ways children were regarded and treated by adults, and attempting to understand how children themselves interacted and engaged with the world. Zahra’s work is the former, though the latter does provide a richer, if more challenging, analysis. I agree with Conor’s point, and think that it is important to consider when analyzing and writing the history of children and childhoods. Many historians of childhood have come to argue that children must be treated as a part of subaltern studies. To a large extent there are many parallels between children and subaltern subjects of history. Can children be considered “subaltern”? Does this change their relationship as actors or objects in history? Can we better grasp the study of childhood with writings by Spivak? Can the child speak?
In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself questioning how generous I seem to be as a reader compared to some of my peers: I’ve been giving credit and leverage to writers on aspects that others have found inadequate and questionable. So this week I had decided to put on my harshest reading glasses and write a highly critical blog post, only to find – very quickly – that I could not have picked a worse week for that particular endeavour.
In my opinion, The Lost Children surpasses most of the books we have read thus far in both scope and subtlety of argumentation. That extremely tedious empirical research underlies what we read is abundantly clear and Zahra’s analysis is seamlessly compelling for it. She integrates a vast body of theoretical debates on supremely interesting topics – a central one that I find absolutely fascinating being the debate between family-oriented individualists on the one hand and socialist/Jewish collectivists on the other – demonstrating a mastery of a wide array of approaches to think and write about the past. Indeed, she appears to be is beyond all the “turns” of the discipline: she’s taken it all in and shown how we can weave different things together to write some truly interesting histories.
Her book is simultaneously a gendered social history of emotions and psychology and a “traditional” political history (with a “bio-power” twist, perhaps). Zahra’s grasp on the multiple levels of politics – from the international arena down to the family – allows her to make very confident and convincing statements about what historical actors were actually thinking when they did what they did. On top of that, the book encompasses an entire continent – sometimes more – and is therefore inherently transnational. But what I find to be the most important thing in all of this for Zahra (something that is up for debate: with so many balls thrown in the air, how do we discern which one is truly paramount?) is the issue of constructed identities.
The displacement and subsequent struggle over children is pretty much as messy as political and emotional conundrums get. To the contemporary historian who wants to talk about it, however, there are even more quandaries to deal with. How far, for instance, should the historian go in describing suffering to her readers; how does she activate her readers’ emotions without descending into a “won’t somebody please think of the children!” kind of sensationalist rhetoric. With regards to this specific issue, I believe Zahra makes some wise choices, as in other aspects of the book. She allows the primary sources themselves to do the job of conveying the emotions and drama involved. She avoids falling into the sensationalist pit, in other words, by putting other people in it. But choosing how to deal with this issue is a really a difficult thing to do, I think, and I’d love to hear what other people have to say about it.
Since this book is very well written and deals with an interesting topic; I cannot say that much about it. Also Zahra’s conclusions about the different concepts of education (collectivist vs. indivualist) and the purpose to restore the nation states via reconstructing the families are quite convincing. So I want to share some questions which arose for me while reading this.
First: Were the social workers successful? In the last chapter Zahra spends some lines on this question, at least concerning some individuals. But I would like to enlarge the question: Was the restoration of the families successful? And even further: Helped this to (re)build nationhood? I would doubt that, at least in regard to Germany with the confliction between 1968ers and their parents about the latter’s role in National Socialism.
Second: I’m not sure if these lost children were the starting point of discussions about family and ways of education (probably not, as far as I know already Marx & Engels proclaimed collectivist education), but anyhow the discussion about it did not end in 1950. Until now it is one of the main demands of German conservatives to promote education-at-home to the disadvantage of Kindergartens and pre-Kindergartens. Moreover even nowadays is the help of disordered families one of the main tasks of social workers. However, at least for them this has nothing to do anymore with reconstructing the nation.
Third: I would like to know about the influence of the theories which were developed in the refugee camps on psychology and educational science. As Jacob noted already, Zahra mentions this in the introduction without discussing it in the main body.
After these questions I just want to make this clear: I appreciated reading this book and these questions are not supposed to undermine Zahra’s work. I would rather say that this book is a good starting point to ask and probably also to answer these questions.
The thing that I found particularly impressive about this work was Zahra’s ability to connect ideas and trends across disparate times and places. Using children as a conceptual framework, she traces familiar narratives about children and childhood but contextualizes them in a way that bisects and disrupts our familiar understanding of the “Lost Children” of WWII.
While the main arguments here about children being an imagined symbol of the nation and child welfare aid shifting from material to psychological may not be entirely original, her ability to draw meaningful conclusions and connections from these theses is important. For e.g. when she states in regard to the ambivalent status of the family that “even as abolitionists and Jewish advocates protested the dividing of families in the mid-nineteenth century, the emigration of unaccompanied poor children became a favored strategy of for populating the British Empire and the American West.” So here, we have abolitionists & Jewish groups (surprise surprise) at odds with British and American imperial thrusts. This to me, seems to suggest that Zahra is interested in more than how children were imagined as ‘little Brits’ or ‘little Americans’, but also how class, race, gender, and nationality all converge in varying degrees and with particular intensity to shape childhood during this period.
I suppose my main question would be does the intersectionality of her analysis get lost in the juicy nationalism argument?