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44 | 2025
Retour à la normale ?

Déplacés et réfugiés face aux normes de la sortie de guerre (1945-1951)
A return to the Normal? Displaced Persons, Refugees and Postwar Norms (1945-1951)
Edited by Marianne Amar , Laure Humbert and Célia Keren

The capitulation of the Third Reich in May 1945 did not mean the end of violence and population displacement. Despite the mass repatriations that took place in the summer, nearly a million ‘displaced persons’ remained in Germany, Austria and Italy. They refused to return ‘home’ and were soon joined by new refugees.

This special issue explores the meanings and paths of their ‘return to normality’. After years of extreme violence, what could a ‘normal’ life mean? For the DPs themselves, it simply meant having a roof over one’s head, a job, a family, and a sense of security. But this common-sense normality was shaped by a variety of underlying norms, both explicit and implicit, that defined the ‘appropriate’ behaviour expected of DPs.

This special issue thus casts a critical light on the often variable and contradictory norms that influenced the efforts of DPs and all the authorities that sought to ‘regulate’ their lives in their efforts to return to normality. The articles bring together four lines of inquiry into how these norms were articulated in the public and private spaces inhabited by DPs: using a transnational micro-historical approach of migratory trajectories; integrating new methodological approaches forged outside the historiography of DPs; highlighting the diversity of actors and new sources; and questioning the effectiveness of norms in the face of refugee strategies. Together, they show that, beyond the liberal ideals of the Allied victory over fascism, conservative moral and gender values, racism and anti-Semitism, and even ableism played a key role in the solution of the “refugee problem” and in the refugees’ own trajectories.

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