A Fragile Home in the Waiting Room: The Ambivalent Postwar Relationship between Americans and Jewish Displaced Persons in U.S.- Occupied Bavaria
The thesis will contribute to the burgeoning scholarship that has attempted to recover the lived experiences of the Jewish displaced persons (DPs) in Germany by focusing on the three largest Jewish displaced persons camps in U.S.-Occupied Bavaria?Föhrenwald, Feldafing, and Landsberg?in the fall of 1945. The transient space of the displaced persons camps will be approached through a new lens: evaluating the complex and poorly understood relationships and interactions between the Jewish DPs and the Americans working in the DP camps. Through the synthesis of various micro and macro-level perspectives, the interactions between Jewish DPs and Americans will be reinterpreted to yield fresh historical insights about the DP camp experience in all of its complexity and ambiguity.