USC UPSTATE

Spartanburg, S.C. - Dr. Brigitte Neary, associate professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina Upstate, has distinguished herself among her fellow faculty members by becoming the first to publish two books in two languages on two continents.

Frauen und Vertreibung, scheduled for release this month from Stocker/Ares Verlag, Graz, Austria, is a socio-historical research project that contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the wounds of women in both war and peace. This book is an extension of Dr. Neary’s 2002 English-language U.S. publication.

Frauen und Vertreibung provides poignant materials on the suffering of East European German women caught up in the cauldron of flight and forcible expulsion from their homeland in the aftermath of World War II. Neary invites inter-subjective understanding as she captures the trauma and violence unleashed on these women, including mass rapes. Her women’s centered studies, focused on the waning months of World War II through 1950, can be extrapolated to the carnage confronting the women in Chad, the Congo, and Darfur. However, the German case has largely been excluded from the embrace of sisterhood and attacked by historians and feminist scholars.

 Neary’s first book was a co-authored collection and analysis of personal narratives of German women from East Central Europe, displaced from their homeland in the aftermath of World War II. Voices of Loss and Courage: German Women Recount Their Expulsion from East Central Europe, 1944-1950, allowed the women to be taped as they recollected their forced departure from home when they were girls, young women or young mothers.

Both of Neary’s parents were among the estimated 14.5 million Germans who were either expelled from their homeland or fled the Russian front -- 2.1 million perished.

“I grew up with the consequences of the displacement, initially experiencing absolute deprivation,” said Neary. “The shadow of the tremendous loss to my parents lingered on and was like a concrete presence in our lives.”

Since her 2002 publication, Neary learned the hard way that her scholarship challenges the Nazi stigma of collective guilt still imposed today on all manner of German. Paradoxically, this stigma of group belonging functions to simultaneously legitimize and nullify the most inhuman treatment of millions of German women. These women, as well as all messengers, who provide them a voice, are targets of “racial discrimination.” 

According to Article 1 of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), “the term `racial discrimination’ shall mean any distinction, exclusion or preference based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

In addition to contributing to the body of scholarship on women and armed conflict, the purpose of Neary’s work has increasingly become to foster “recognition” and establish an “equal footing of human rights” for these women that can be generalized to all manner of German – nothing less.

For more information, contact Dr. Brigitte Neary at (864) 503-5834.