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This paper reflects on post-memories of the children to political refugees escaping the Nazi-terror and coming to Sweden in the 1930s. While the parent generation was fleeing continental Europe and crossing the border to Sweden as grown-ups, the children generation has no conscious memories of the border crossing. Nevertheless, both the parental decision to flee and the parental narratives of the event have had a decisive influence on the children generation who today is confronted with the boarder crossing event as decisive turning point in their family history.

 “Peoples’ Friendship” as a Domestic Speech Act. Ambitions, Limita-tions, and Consequences of the Concept for Intercultural Encounters in the GDR.

With a specific focus on labour migrants from other socialist countries whocame to the GDR from the 1960s onwards, this article explores how intercul-turality and integration were addressed in East German society, both political-ly and in daily life. Against this backdrop, the concept of “peoples’ friendship”,originally employed within the scope of foreign affairs, became increasinglyimportant. The article analyses the ambitions and limitations of this conceptas manifested during the Honecker era, discussing its possible consequencesbeyond the historical watershed of 1989-90. In doing so, it links research on aspecific GDR context with the broader question of the power and powerless-ness of language in intercultural communication and integration.

When National Socialists came to power, many political opponents in Germany, Austria and Sudetenland fled to Scandinavia and ultimately to Sweden thanks to their ties with the Nordic labor movement. Several of these political refugees were Jewish and hence also for this reason in mortal danger on the continent. The end of the war and the final downfall of the Nazi regime in 1945 opened up for the possibility to return. Those who did, the most famous among them Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky, have for some while been catching the interest of researchers, not least because these returnees often exported Nordic ideas on social policy to the continent. The stories of those who stayed, however, have only been told for the first generation, again with a focus on single famous members of this group (i.e. Rudolf Meidner, Harry Schein, Nelly Sachs). The second generation of German-speaking political refugees, whose members are born in the 1930 and 1940s, has hardly gained any attention by researchers, since their members appear to be fully assimilated to Swedish society. Yet, it is this group which embodies the transition between post-1945 replacement and Cold War resettlement in a fascinating way. This paper highlights the hybridity of cultural belonging among members of this second generation. It discusses in what way family narratives and post-memories of persecution, flight and exile have been shaping their life-stories and asks which communities of remembrance this generation has been turning to.