Homeless at a new home: How German Balts and Latvians found their coping strategies after 1939 and 1945

Abstract

Similar to modern analogies, in the years1939 and 1944 both groups of „homeless home seekers“ had to copewith the lost homeland and with finding a new one, but in a particular way: the German Balts with the traumaticexperiences of Bolshevism 1919, the Latvians and Estonians with the trauma of Soviet occupation. Following theirexperiences, the paper evaluates and compares, how both groups were and are coping with lost relationships by buildingnew ones, how they were coping with displacement, and how they find a new kind of well-being by these coping strategies