Reckoning with Refugeedom is an ongoing project conducted by the University of Manchester.
The project aims to put refugees more firmly and centrally into modern history by accessing the perspectives of refugees from different backgrounds, through petitions and letters to those in positions of authority, but also personal correspondence and other source material.
It looks at how refugees engaged with the history and circumstances of their displacement. It also assesses how they understood and negotiated the personal and political consequences of ‘being a refugee’.
Professor Peter Gatrell: “My name is Peter Gatrell. I teach history at the University of Manchester and I'm currently directing a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and we've called it ‘Reckoning with Refugeedom: Refugee voices in modern history’. Fundamentally, we're interested in putting refugees more firmly and centrally into modern history.”
Dr Kasia Nowak: “In our project we are trying to focus on refugee’s self-representations through letters, drawings, diaries, and to think about how they talk about themselves and how they communicated with those in power.”
Dr Alex Dowdall: “So in my period, 1919 to 1939, one of the major organisations is the League of Nations. So refugees are writing letters and petitions to the League of Nations in Geneva. All of those letters and petitions, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them, are stored in the archives of the League of Nations, and they've never really been utilised before. So it's always a wonderful thing to go into that archive to, to uncover these voices that haven't really featured all that much in the historiography to date.”
Dr Kasia Nowak: “I'm looking at refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War, and particularly at Polish displaced persons. I looked at different archival collections and I used collections of the diasporic archives in the United States, in Germany, in Poland, and in the UK.”
Professor Peter Gatrell: “I think what surprised me, because I'm primarily looking at the archives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in the 1950s through to the 1970s, is there are thousands of individuals who are trying to make themselves heard in front of a kind of bureaucracy, and sometimes they do this very directly. They approach the, the High Commission in person or they or they write to the High Commission, asking to be recognised as refugees, asking to be assisted.”
Dr Kasia Nowak: “Refugee history and history of immigration is our history, people’s history, our shared heritage. I believe that this is something that tells us not only about the refugees, but about the very construction of our world. It makes us rethink issues such as nationhood, borders, citizenship. I think to understand contemporary refugee crisis, we have to historicise it to understand that such situations happened previously in various contexts and that it's, in a way, not a new phenomenon, that we have big pool of, of knowledge and experience to use.”
Dr Alex Dowdall: “A recent story I came across is the case of a man named Herman Rosen, who was twice a refugee in the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in Russia. He was an anti-Bolshevik and he was originally a refugee as a result of the Civil war which erupted in Russia in the years after 1917, he moved to Germany. Then again, in the early 1930s, he was made a refugee again because he was Jewish. Following the rise of the Nazi Party, and he moved to France in 1933, and he wrote to the League of Nations to petition their help and he described the, the brown wave of anti-Semitism which had arisen in his new home in Germany and forced him to flee again. But he appealed to the league in a very hopeful manner. We don't know the outcome of his case, but what we're left with is the tragedy of his story but also the hopeful aspects of his story and the language of common humanity that he developed in that letter.”
Professor Peter Gatrell: “The next steps of our project are to work towards a collective piece of work which is going to be both an article and a book in which we're thinking about the issues at stake, both for historians and for members of the public who encounter these stories, but also, of course, for refugees themselves. We want it to be a book that speaks to an academic audience but beyond an academic audience to people who have an interest in the broad history of the 20th century.”
Dr Alex Dowdall: “We're also trying to publicise some of the stories so we have a blog on the website where we try to, I suppose, tell the stories of some of the refugees that we're encountering in the archives.”
This project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
For more information about the research projects featured in Refugees: Forced to Flee, explore this guide from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.
About the exhibition
War turns people's worlds upside down, from the First World War to the present day, countless lives have been affected by conflict. Ordinary people are forced to make extraordinary decisions – should they stay or go?
Refugees: Forced to Flee at IWM London explored a century of refugee experiences, from Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and the Kindertransport, to the Calais Jungle and the treacherous Mediterranean crossings.
