Paper short abstract

This paper examines how intergenerational silence among Sudeten German refugee families shapes contemporary European imaginaries. It shows how inherited atmospheres of displacement and forgetting influence perceptions of Europe’s political and legal futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how intergenerational silence among Sudeten German refugee families shapes contemporary European imaginaries, focusing on the atmospheric dimensions of displacement and political belonging. European integration has long relied on affective atmospheres that privilege unity while marginalizing disruptive histories. Such atmospheres of selective remembering and forgetting do not simply frame political narratives—they govern which experiences become speakable, legitimate, or politically actionable.

Drawing on ethnographic research with second- and third-generation descendants of Sudeten German refugees expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II, the paper examines how these families inhabit and reproduce atmospheres of silence surrounding their past. In East Germany, socialist narratives dissolved refugee experiences into a homogenized collective identity, while in West Germany, initial recognition gradually shifted into an atmosphere in which refugee claims were treated as politically inconvenient. Across both contexts, affective governance worked to mute memories of loss, flight, and contested belonging.

For younger generations, these inherited silences create an ambivalent sense of Europe: not simply a space of integration, but an affectively charged landscape marked by unresolved displacement and uneven legal protections for those who fall outside dominant narratives. By analysing how such atmospheres are created, sustained, and subtly transformed within families and political discourse, the paper highlights the role of affect in shaping legal and political possibilities.

Foregrounding these atmospheric histories of displacement offers new insight into the crisis of memory at the heart of the European project and its implications for imagining more inclusive political futures.