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Rosemarie Bovier spent her childhood in the shanty town of a refugee camp in Germany, surrounded by numerous families who had fled from the Red Army in 1944 as descendants of Danube-Swabian colonists from Brestowatz in Batschka in present-day Serbia. The author is one of the few eyewitnesses who still knows from first-hand experience the collective memory, language and thought patterns of this former ethnic German minority, which was settled in south-eastern Europe by the Habsburgs in the 18th century. Against this background and after years of research, she describes the eventful history of the colonist village of Brestowatz and follows the traces of her ancestors from the settlement in the 18th century to the involuntary return to the former home of their ancestors in the 20th century. Bovier sheds light on the colonists in the tension between migration and integration, the coexistence of different ethnic groups and dealing with minorities and discrimination. The history of the emigrants shows how the life of homogeneous groups in a foreign environment can lead to isolation and the development of parallel societies in which social rules solidify into a code that makes people susceptible to ideological blindness.

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9783205215578

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