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2016, No. (9), Cultural Heritage

Maren Röger, Lu Seegers
Missing fathers: experiences and memories of Polish war orphans and Polish-German Children Born of War

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Keywords: “Children Born of War”, Second World War, history of the Polish People’s Republic, experience, oral-history

Abstract:
Whereas “war children”- broadly defined here as children affected by war - received a great deal of attention in Poland directly after 1945, they have been less of an issue in recent historical debates. This essay focuses on two groups of children that have hitherto been largely neglected in research as well as by the broader public: Polish war orphans and the children born out of Polish-German wartime sexual relations. While the lack of attention that war orphans have received is surprising, as the population losses in Poland were particularly high, the insufficient consideration of “children born of war” comes as less of a surprise. Until recently, sexual contacts between the German occupiers and Polish women were under researched and a taboo subject for the broader public. Against this background, Maren Röger and Lu Seegers present their research on those two groups of “war children”, mainly based on 22 oral-history-interviews. They analyze how the war-related fatherlessness of half-orphans and children born of German-Polish contacts has been experienced subjectively or interpreted in retrospect in different biographical stages of life. Similarities and differences can be worked out by considering them collectively: both groups of children grew up without their natural fathers, whose activities—for very different reasons—were kept secret in families. This silence had consequences for the children: while female war orphans in particular were extremely loyal to their mothers and geared their own lives to this relationship, “children born of war” were often denied any form of positive identification. For the majority of Poles, their parentage was unacceptable. Moreover, they also met with their mothers’ inner rejection, at least in part.

About Author:
MAREN RÖGER - cultural studies specialist, historian, professor for the history of Germany and Eastern Europe at the University of Augsburg. E-mail: maren.roeger[at]philhist.uni-augsburg.de. LU SEEGERS - historian, political scientist, member of the academic staff of the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg (FZH). E-mail: seegers[at]zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de.

References
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