Martina Koegeler-Abdi will present her new research project with the title "Echoes of War in the Family Histories of Swedish ‘Children Born of War’"

Summary

This project explores the histories of children born to Swedish women and German soldiers or officers during WWII – a generation of so-called “children born of war” (CBOW). We know that some Swedish mothers secretly returned from Germany to Sweden with children who were CBOW in 1945. The journalist Christoph Andersson published a book about the lives of 22 of these so-called ‘Swedish SS wives’ in 2021. However, we know little about the children themselves and the role their paternity played throughout their lives. And there may be other kinds of Swedish German CBOW family histories that remain to be explored. I thus seek to interview children or grandchildren in Swedish families with ties to Nazi German soldiers to explore the following key questions: How did these children experience family secrecy, discrimination, shame or perhaps pride around their parents’ war-time choices, within their families and in relation to society around them? How did these experiences and their ways of sharing their family histories with ties to Nazi Germany change over time? And how do they pass on their stories today? The immediate goal of this project is to document these children’s memories through Oral History interviews to create an empirical foundation for further studies on the experiences of Swedish children of German soldiers who have come-of-age and lived in Sweden after WWII. In the long-term, I hope to establish the study of ‘children born of war’ in Sweden.

 

NB: This is a lunch seminar that takes place 12am-1pm in Blå Rummet. Feel free to bring your own lunch.