Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyses how history is folded into care relations, (re)articulating phantom borders in entangled regions in Europe. It draws on a project which investigates the relocation of seniors from Germany to Poland and Czech Republic where care is more affordable.

Paper Abstract:

Bringing together the personal and the political, the private and the public, care distinctly relates to history. In most European welfare regimes entitlements to care build on past activities: provisioning roles, employment histories and contributions into solidarity funds and insurances. The histories of people and places related to care at first sight appear to be idiosyncratic but at a closer look include collective histories as well.

This paper is based on research conducted by a multilingual team in commercial care homes in Poland and the Czech Republic which recruit seniors from Germany as clients at a third of the costs as compared to the home context. The regions where we conducted fieldwork in Upper Silesia, Poland and the former Sudetenland, Czech Republic, have been subjected to shifting state affiliations. Hirschhausen et al. (2019) suggested the term “phantom borders” to describe how earlier, mostly political demarcations or territorial divisions restrict and enable agency in the present, despite their institutional abolishment. We build on this term to understand how borders that have shifted in the past are built on, re-emerge in, or influence biographies of places and people related to care. We discuss when and how history and care become related in constructions of care entitlements, care infrastructures, and subject positions of care workers and clients. We argue that care relocation in this case expresses the complexity and multiplicity of historical entanglements of the regions rather than representing an easy option for solving the care crisis in Germany.