Buchvorstellung
Budapest's Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War

Dr. habil. Friederike Kind-Kovács will present her latest book entitled Budapest's Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War. This event will open the 2022 conference "In Search of the Migrant Child" organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies and the German Historical Institute Washington/DC with its Pacific Regional Office, hosted by the Institute for European Studies at the University of California in Berkeley.

Abstract:

In the aftermath of World War I, international organizations descended upon the destitute children living in the rubble of Budapest and the city became a testing ground for how the West would handle the most vulnerable residents of a former enemy state.

Budapest's Children reconstructs how Budapest turned into a laboratory of transnational humanitarian intervention. Friederike Kind-Kovács explores the ways in which migration, hunger, and destitution affected children's lives, casting light on children's particular vulnerability in times of distress. Drawing on extensive archival research, Kind-Kovács reveals how Budapest's children, as iconic victims of the war's aftermath, were used to mobilize humanitarian sentiments and practices throughout Europe and the United States. With this research, Budapest's Children investigates the dynamic interplay between local Hungarian organizations, international humanitarian donors, and the child relief recipients.

In tracing transnational relief encounters, Budapest's Children reveals how intertwined postwar internationalism and nationalism were and how child relief reinforced revisionist claims and global inequalities that still reverberate today.

Register for the Zoom meeting here.