We published the second expanded edition of On the Trail of the Danube Swabians in Vojvodina in German in 2023.
At the initiative and in cooperation with the Apatin Community in Germany (Apatiner Gemeinschaft), this edition included additional introductory texts and photographs from the exhibition that accompanied the publication.
There was also an additional text about the exhibition held in Apatin in 2018 under the same title as the publication – “On the Trail of the Danube Swabians in Vojvodina”.
Our associates from the Apatin Community in Germany, as well as Dr Josef Sayer who invited us, would like to see this publication reach as many people in their community in Germany and also to connect different fields of work on the past and peacebuilding. The Foreword by the Apatin Community quotes Dr Sayer, who has himself gone through the experiences described in the publication: “Remembering is not just about digging yourself deep into the past. Remembering also includes the present, but only when it becomes open to steps of reconciliation.”
From the Introduction:
This second edition comes out amidst new wars and ongoing migration crises, but also surrounded by problematic revisionism, both in the former Yugoslav space and elsewhere. There is still no room for unpopular victims.
I hope that, despite everything, the second edition of this book will find its readers, that it will help to shed light on what happened to the Danube Swabians and make these disappeared people at least a bit more visible. The witnesses and participants in these events are slowly disappearing, and I hope that lost contacts will be re-established on the personal level, between old and new neighbours, relatives, their descendants, that their paths will become interwoven as they once were.
Helena Rill
