Table Of ContentIntermarriage from Central
Europe to Central Asia
Borderlands and TransculTural sTudies
Series Editors:
Pekka Hämäläinen
Paul Spickard
Edited and Introduced by Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer
Intermarriage from Central
Europe to Central Asia
Mixed Families in the
Age of Extremes
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln
© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Edgar, Adrienne Lynn, 1960– , editor.
Title: Intermarriage from Central Europe to Central
Asia: Mixed families in the age of extremes / edited and
introduced by Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer.
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2020. | Series: Borderlands and transcultural studies |
Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary:
“Edgar and Frommer bring together international and
interdisciplinary scholarship to analyze interethnic and
interracial marriage in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet
Union, and Central Asia”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: lccn 2019030192
isbn 9781496202116 (hardback)
isbn 9781496220844 (epub)
isbn 9781496220851 (mobi)
isbn 9781496220868 (pdf)
Subjects: lcsh: Intermarriage— Europe, Eastern—
History. | Intermarriage— Asia, Central— History.
Classification: lcc hq1031 .i5686 2020 |
ddc 306.840947—d c23
lc record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2019030192
Set in Sabon Next LT Pro by Mikala R. Kolander.
Contents
Introduction | 1
Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer
Part 1. Central and Southeastern Europe
1. Boundary Crossings and the Evolution of German Identity:
Protestant- Catholic and Jewish– Non- Jewish Intermarriage,
1875– 1935 | 23
Eric Garcia McKinley
2. Privileged Victims: Intermarriage between Jews, Czechs, and
Germans in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia | 47
Benjamin Frommer
3. Sporadically Mixed: Lowering Socialist Expectations and
Politicizing Mixed Marriage in 1960s Yugoslavia | 83
Fedja Burić
4. Being Mixed and Showing It: Ethical Dilemmas of Self-
Presentation in Bosnia | 111
Keziah Conrad
Part 2. The Soviet Union and Its Successors
5. Memory and Asymmetry in Russian- Estonian Intermarriages in
Estonia during Late Socialism | 137
Uku Lember
6. Maintaining, Dissolving, and Remaking Group Boundaries
through Marriage: The Case of Khujand in the Ferghana
Valley | 163
Sophie Roche
7. The Dynamics of Interethnic Marriage in the Aftermath of the
Osh Conflict, Ferghana Valley | 201
Aksana Ismailbekova
8. Of Intermarriage, “Hats,” and Identity in Georgia | 225
Milena Oganesyan
Part 3. Transnational Marriages
9. Wedding the “Enemy”: Unions between Russian Women and
“German” Prisoners of the First World War | 253
Lena Radauer
10. Choices Made in Times of Rising Nationalism and National
Socialism: Intermarriage between Germans and Eastern
Europeans, 1871– 1945 | 279
Maren Röger
11. Divided Spouses: Soviet- American Intermarriage and Human
Rights Activism during the Cold War | 309
Rósa Magnúsdóttir
Contributors | 333
Index | 337
Intermarriage from Central
Europe to Central Asia
Introduction
Adrienne Edgar and Benjamin Frommer
In February 1947 a leading Czech weekly featured a “Conversation
with a Child of Mixed Marriage,” who faced an uncertain future in the
wake of the Nazi occupation and Soviet liberation of her homeland.
The girl’s father, who was Jewish by religion and Czech by national-
ity, had lost his entire extended family in the Holocaust. The child’s
mother, a Christian and a German, had just witnessed the expulsion
of her close relatives in the so- called Transfer of the Sudeten Germans
from Czechoslovakia. The distressed father told his daughter, “One
grandmother was gassed by the Nazis because of prejudice; your other
grandma has been expelled and delivered to hunger.” After nearly a
decade of flight and threats to their existence, only their nuclear fam-
ily remained alive in their native land. Her father concluded that there
had been no chance for mixed marriage: “That form of union can
survive only in a democratic world which knows no racial, religious,
or other prejudices.”1 Although the family captured in the vignette
may have been a fictional composite, the father’s lament would have
resonated with intermarried couples and their children throughout
the ideologically charged era that Eric Hobsbawm termed the “age
of extremes.”2
In her seminal article, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Com-
parison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies,”
2 Edgar and Frommer
anthropologist Ann Stoler called for the comparative study of inter-
racial intimacy, noting that those working on the topic in North
America rarely communicated with those who specialized in colonial
and postcolonial regions.3 Scholars focused on the Americas and Asia
have heeded Stoler’s call.4 But the lands of the former communist bloc
have for the most part been left out of this burgeoning global con-
versation on ethnic mixing. With that in mind, this volume brings
together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who
are currently conducting research on intermarriage in the region that
stretches from Central Europe to Central Asia.
For more than a century, political activists and state officials through-
out this region have viewed the institution of marriage through the
lens of loyalty and allegiance. Countries have encouraged and sup-
ported some forms of mixing, while condemning or even banning
others. On a more intimate level, parents and other relatives have
often viewed mixed unions with dismay, but such familial and social
strictures have waned in an age when most individuals choose their
own partners. Intermarried couples have navigated changes in offi-
cial policy and social mores and sought to provide for themselves and
their children.
For exclusionary nation- states intent on enforcing homogeneity,
intermixing represented an existential challenge. For multinational
socialist states such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, by contrast,
ethnic intermarriage could provide the basis for a new, integrated citi-
zenry free of the conflicts of the past. Whether governments endorsed
such unions or explicitly banned and persecuted them, intermarriages
have loomed large in both public policy and the public eye. After all,
as the struggle to legalize gay marriage in the United States and else-
where has vividly illustrated, a state’s endorsement of a particular type
of marriage often has significance to far more people than those who
actually speak the vows. In particular, the children of such unions
were and are the concern of both public and private actors who ques-
tion and seek to shape their identities.
The authors in this collection examine the practice of intermarriage
in a diverse set of countries over a span of more than a century. From
