Earlier this month, Professor of History flew to Germany to accept a prestigious honor for his book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War.
Awarded by the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe, the Georg Dehio Book Prize is funded by the German government and honors exemplary scholarly or literary work that addresses the themes of shared culture and history of the German people and their Eastern neighbors.
Published in 2012, Douglas’s chronicles the relocation of German-speakers from their birthplaces in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania to Germany during a five-year period after the Allied powers’ victory in World War II.
“Although [the deportations] occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world’s most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself,” Douglas wrote in a 2012 article titled “The European Atrocity You Never Heard About” for The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community.”
Presented every other year in Berlin, the Georg Dehio Prize of Honor was conferred on Douglas by Günter Winands, commissioner for culture and media in the German government.
In his speech, Winands said that Douglas’s work “is more than a historiographical masterpiece,” but also an appeal against the use of methods inconsistent with human rights as solutions to complex minority problems.
“The book for which I received the award concerns a very sensitive topic in European history,” said Douglas. “I was especially pleased by the selection committee’s emphasis on the importance of transcending, rather than reopening, the divisions of the past, and am humbled by their assessment that my own work contributes, in however small a way, to that goal.”
In addition to the Georg Dehio award, Orderly and Humane has won several other honors including the 2013 George Louis Beer Prize given by the American Historical Association. It was also named one of the by The Atlantic.
Douglas is the author of four other books. At vlog, he is the chair of the where he teaches modern 20th century European history and regularly leads the London history and Geneva study groups.