A presentation and panel discussion on a new double special edition on wartime internment in Britain.
Between April and May 1940, as Germany occupied Norway and then marched into France, the British government decided to reanimate the policy of internment for ‘enemy aliens’, which had first been introduced in the First World War. A large proportion of the interned were Jews from Germany, Austria, and other parts of the Continent occupied by the Third Reich. Only in 1990, when David Cesarani and Tony Kushner organised a landmark conference on the subject, did a broader public begin to reflect on the phenomenon of mass alien internment and its ambivalent legacies in Britain. This discussion was published in 1992 as a special issue of Immigrants & Minorities and in 1993 in book form as The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain.
Following in their footsteps, in 2022, a group of historians at LSE, FU Berlin, and Sheffield Hallam, have returned to the subject, assembling a collective of scholars who shifted the perspective towards a more global and comparative framework in both World Wars. Contributing to the emergent field on the cultural history of wartime internment, they felt encouraged to use the history of internment camps so as to elucidate the effects of wars on societies at large, and to link the diversity of war experiences to more complex understandings of the history of statehood, violence and law.
This has led to the production of a double Special Issue of Immigrants & Minorities, the first journal to introduce the subject to an interdisciplinary readership. The presentation, given by a panel of five experts including Tony Kushner, and the follow-up discussion of the two issues will reflect on the history of internment in both World Wars, as well as on the way conferences, journals, and new media such as VR can help understand this complex phenomenon as an aspect of the political, cultural, and social history of two world wars.
Speakers:
Professor Heather Jones (UCL)
Dr André Keil (Liverpool John Moores University)
Dr Rachel Pistol (University of Southampton)
Professor Matthew Stibbe (Sheffield Hallam University)
