With the demise of four multinational empires at the end of the First World War (Russian, German, Habsburg and Ottoman), nationalist forces all over Europe claimed the right to a territory for what they considered to be their own people. The peace treaties resulting from the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 caused a major redrawing of the map of Europe. As a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany handed over a considerable amount of its territory at its Western, Northern and, most significantly, Eastern borders, to neighbouring states. This edited volume focuses on the regions lying in what one could call a ring around Germany lost by Germany after the First World War. The European border regions of an-nexation, as I call them, switched their sovereignty as follows: Alsace-Lorraine became French, Eupen-Malmedy Belgian, North Schleswig Danish, various former Prussian Eastern provinces became Polish, the Hlučin region Czechoslovakian, and the Memel region Lithuanian. By set-ting up a historical comparison of the living conditions of children in European borderlands of annexation throughout the 20th Century, this edited volume provided the context for an encounter of a new combination of categories from different disciplines: Borderland Studies meets Child Studies.
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