Meet Other Members

I am currently a member of the ERC research group “GLORE. Global Resettlement Regimes” and a postdoctoral researcher at University of Vienna’s Institute of Contemporary History. In my current research, I’m exploring the global intersections of post-World War II refugee aid and labour migration by investigating policies targeting so-called ethnic German expellees. Previously, I wrote my PhD thesis on German-speaking migrants from the former-Habsburg world in 20th century Austria, and efforts by German nationalists and Austrian state builders to mould them into cohesive groups of immigrants. There are different levels that my work fits into GUHP’s profile. On the one hand, my work engages with the organisation of migrant communities based on Germanness that largely depended on the existence of transnational networks clustered around a number of urban hubs. These channels not only allowed the transfer of information and goods but also helped people to migrate onwards. These networks, on the other hand, are also interesting, because they unveil an understanding of belonging, kinship, and nationality, that do not align with given notions of the nation state, but rather emphasise the traditional connections between specific urban centres and remote rural localities created through migration.

Aro, Pauli. ‘Looking for a Viennese Swabian Village. Landsmannschaft Migrant Activism and Its Limits in Interwar Vienna’. In Ethnicizing Europe. Hate and Violence after Versailles, edited by Éva Kovács, Raul Cârstocea, and Gábor Egry. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2025.
A related article will appear in German: „Bleibt Banater Schwaben! Landsmannschaften, Kinderfürsorge und die Mobilisierung deutscher Einwanderer im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit“. This will be part of an edited volume by the organisers oft he digital workshop „Transnational Germans“, part of the conference of the German Studies Association in 2021.
I am currently working on an article with the provisional title: “‘As any other Landowner. Ethnic Germans, Private Property, and Integration in post-1945 Austria”. This is bound to appear in a special issue, edited by the organisers of the conference “Making Refuge. Place and Space in Refugee History“ (Prague 2024)

In the past I have presented at the “Österreichischer Zeitgeschichtetag”, the conference of the Austrian Studies Association and the Vienna Wiesenthal Conference.