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›Twice Displaced‹: Queeres ›Displacement‹ im Europa der Nachkriegszeit, Vortrag vom 4. Juni.
4th Alfred Landecker Lecture with Samantha K. Knapton (University of Nottingham)
When Pierre Seel, having returned to Alsace in 1945 after the camp and the Wehrmacht, wrote decades later about his liberation, he arrived at a sobering conclusion: true liberation had applied only to others, not to him. Seel had been denounced, persecuted, interned, and silenced as a homosexual man. Recognition as a victim of National Socialist persecution was never granted to him during his lifetime. It is precisely at this rupture — between a war’s end that promises liberation and a postwar order that organises continued persecution — that the lecture by Samantha Knapton begins.
In the fourth Alfred Landecker Lecture, opened by Sebastian Musch and co-hosted with IMIS and the CRC 1604 ‘Production of Migration’, the Nottingham-based historian — whose first monograph is devoted to Polish ‘Displaced Persons’ in British-occupied Germany (Knapton 2023) — developed an analytical concept she terms ‘twice displaced’. The lecture unfolded this concept in three movements: a conceptually critical definition of double ‘displacement’, a methodological reflection on the legibility of queer history in the archive, and a microhistorical deepening through the case of Seel.
The first thesis is simultaneously a lacuna: a history of queer ‘displacement’ in the immediate European postwar period has thus far barely existed. Knapton fills this gap not merely by locating previously unread sources, but through a conceptual operation. ‘Twice displaced’ means that those who were simultaneously queer and affected by ‘displacement’ by no means reached the end of their ‘displacement’ with the war’s conclusion. The reconstruction order of the late 1940s and 1950s, framed by contemporaries as a project of ‘re-civilising’ society, excluded them a second time: not from a territory on this occasion, but from recognition and from their own lives. The 1950s, the ‘straightest’ decade of the twentieth century, erected a normality in which no place was envisioned for queer survivors. Their ‘displacement’ was therefore not solely physical in nature; rather, it became entrenched as a permanent exclusion from their former biographies.
The second thesis concerns the archive and strikes at the heart of our own methodological debates in historical migration research. Histories of queer ‘displacement’ are, according to Knapton, not absent but illegible: not because the sources are missing, but because the conventional empiricist reading fails when applied to them. In the files, those affected appear as a category of repression: as ‘asocial’ or ‘political’ in concentration camp registers, as deviance in medical-psychological assessments, as curiosity or criminal offence in the records of humanitarian organisations, Allied occupation authorities, and labour market policy programmes. Recovering these histories therefore demands three things: the ‘voices in the middle’ (welfare personnel, liaison officers), the reconstruction of physical trajectories, and a cultural-historical re-reading of almost every source. Those who treat these files solely according to the standards of classical empiricism are, in Knapton’s view, practising a form of ‘epistemic violence’. What is required instead is the capacity to endure a fragmentary, gap-ridden, and frustrating history — an attitude she describes, drawing on Žižek, as ‘enthusiastic resignation’: we will not arrive at a linear narrative, yet we may not withdraw from the archive.
The thesis becomes particularly incisive where it renders visible the production of administrative categories. The status of ‘Displaced Person’ was an eligibility artefact: displaced as a result of the war, not originating from former enemy territory, entitled to claim international assistance. Many queer persecutees never reached the camps at all, because the unrepealed Paragraph 175 kept them imprisoned. After 1945, the Allies did not annul this paragraph; rather, they read it as a continuity of German criminal law and continued to prosecute on its basis until the founding of the two German states. This makes clear that the absence of queer persecutees from the ‘DP’ camps is not an empirical gap but a positive effect of the category itself.
Knapton’s argument reaches its greatest density in the case of Pierre Seel. As a sixteen-year-old, Seel reports the theft of a pocket watch and, because the scene of the crime is known as a queer meeting place, finds himself placed on a police list. Following the annexation of Alsace and the application of Paragraph 175, he is arrested by the SS in 1941, tortured, and interned at the Schirmeck camp; there his lover Jo is murdered before his eyes, an event that henceforth organises his memory. The regime ties his release to two conditions: silence and German citizenship. Forcibly naturalised, Seel is conscripted into the Wehrmacht as a ‘Malgré-nous’ [‘against our will’], whose gaps in memory from the Eastern Front continue to raise questions about complicity to this day. It is not until the early 1980s, prompted by Heinz Heger’s ‘Die Männer mit dem rosa Winkel’ [‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’], that he breaks his silence. Recognition by the French state as a person deported on account of his homosexuality is never granted to him. Seel dies in 2005, stateless by his own understanding.
Knapton frames this case with two points of reference that also sustained our discussion. Joanna Ostrowska demonstrates for the Polish context how ‘number, nationality, and violence’ are mobilised to mark queer histories as not worth telling — to the point of her own research being relabelled as sociology or anthropology, thereby denying queer pasts their very historical existence. Anna Hájková, in turn, with her concept of ‘historical citizenship’, makes witnessing the constitutive act: those who bear witness become citizens of history. Both perspectives shift the question from the state of the sources to the act of reading, and both thereby address a concern shared by the NGHM, IMIS, and CRC 1604: to take seriously the long-term, often transgenerational consequences of forced mobility, particularly for marginalised groups.
What Knapton demonstrates is less a completed finding than a programme. Whether ‘displacement’ performs the same analytical work for both movements — the wartime deportation and the postwar social closure — remains productively open, as does the question of what criterion distinguishes a disciplined reconstruction from the act of reading meaning into silence. Seel’s case in particular — simultaneously victim and possible instrument — constitutes the hardest test of this method. Those who read such files as though they demanded nothing but empirical certainty forget the persecuted a second time.