Die „Waldmenschen“. Eine emotionale Gemeinschaft im deutsch besetzten Polen 1939–1945
"Forrest People": An Emotional Community in German Occupied Poland 1939-1945

Summary/Abstract: Historians are increasingly turning their attention to the role that emotions have played in history. It is curious that World War II, with its omnipresent history of violence, has hardly ever been studied from this point of view. This essay aims to help remedy this research desideratum and uses Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities to work out the correlation between individuals’ and collective emotions and community building. I exclusively used contemporary diaries as a source, which, as snapshots, provide a good insight into the emotional state of the writers. The analysis of the concepts and manifestations of feelings in the language and in the imagination of the respective writers makes it possible to identify the emotional community of the “forest people.” These were partisans in rural Poland who, in their diaries, express hatred and patriotism in a similar way and use them to legitimize their acts of sabotage and resistance against the German occupiers.

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