Visited by violence and wars, border changes and political instability, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes as well as ethnic conflict, cleansing, and genocide, East-Central Europe in the twentieth century seemed an unlikely place of protection for refugees. This volume challenges this widespread view and explores a variety of forms of refugee protection, humanitarianism, and refugee agency in settings beyond the perceived stability of “Western” liberal democracies. Analyzing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia over the twentieth century, the contributors provide a multi-faceted picture of refugee reception and aid, or its absence, across very different political regimes.

Michal Frankl is the Head of the Department of “Knowledge and Participation” of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO). He was the Principle Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Project Unlikely Refuge? Hosted at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the Twentieth Century: Introduction to an Unlikely Refuge? - Michal Frankl
1. Jewish Refugees, Encampment, and the Humanitarian Paradox in Austria-Hungary during the First World War - Doina Anca Cretu
2. Places of Passage or Precarious Sanctuaries? The Negotiations between Refugees and State Authorities in an Upper Adriatic Borderland - Francesca Rolandi
3. Refugee Temporalities: Time Displacement in the Flight of Polish Jews from Nazism (A Conceptual Study) - Lidia Zessin-Jurek
4. The Construction of a Political Refugee: Foreign Comrades in 1950s Socialist Czechoslovakia - Nikola Tohma
5. The “Stomach Question”: Food and Refugee Children from Greece in East Germany and Poland - Julia Reinke
6. From Refugees to Labor Migrants: Cold War Austria in the East-Central European Context - Maximilian Graf
7. (Not So) Temporary Refuge? Navigating Multiple Temporalities among 1990s Bosnian Refugees to Czechoslovakia and Czechia - Karla Koutková
8. Toward a Conceptual History of Refugees in Hungary - Ágnes Katalin Kelemen
Conclusion: (Un)Likely Refuge and (Un)Known Refugees - Michal Frankl