Franziska Exeler is Lecturer in History at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include twentieth-century East European, Russian and German history; war and society; (international) legal history and war crimes trials; myth, memory and trauma; and empire, migration, and border regimes.

Her book Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus was published in 2022 with Cornell University Press. It is the recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. The book also received Honorable Mention for the 2023 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

Related research analyzes how the Soviet prosecution of treason and war crimes fit into the global moment of post-Second World War justice. Ongoing, collaborative research explores comparative and transnational approaches to the Second World and its legacies in Europe and Asia. Her current book-in-progress, titled The Three Empires' Corner: Migration, Industrialization, and the Development of Modern Border Regimes in East-Central Europe, examines German-Russian-Austrian imperial border regimes and microhistories of migration in the Upper Silesian/Małopolska/Galician border triangle, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

Franziska Exeler's research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the European University Institute (Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship), the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Postdoctoral Fellowship at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences), and the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge (Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship). She was also a visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia.

She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in History from Princeton University, and an MA in History, Political Sciences and Economics from Humboldt University Berlin.

Together with Diana Kim (Georgetown University), she is curating the Invisible Histories website, a platform for researchers to present photographs in context and explore hidden narratives. The project is supported by the Joint Center for History of Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.

Winter Semester 2022/23

War Stories. Myth, Memory, and Trauma in the Twentieth Century

Empire, War, and Migration in Modern East European, Russian, and Eurasian History

Summer Semester 2022

Grenzen in Europa. Konzepte, Wahrnehmungen und Erfahrungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.

The Age of Empire. Conflicts, Encounters, and Exchange in the 19th and Early 20th Century.

Summer Semester 2021

Borders. Concepts, Perceptions and Experiences in Modern History.

Der Zweite Weltkrieg in globaler Perspektive. Eine Einführung.

Summer Semester 2019

War Stories. Myth, Memory and Trauma in the Twentieth Century.

Das Rote Imperium. Einführung in die Geschichte der Sowjetunion.

Summer Semester 2018

Empire, War and Migration in Modern Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

War and Society in the Twentieth Century. A Global History.

Summer Semester 2017

War, Crimes and Law. A Global History of International Law and War Crimes Trials. 

Summer Semester 2016

Empire, War and Migration in Modern Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

War and Society in the Twentieth Century. A Global History.

Trained as a historian of modern Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia, Franziska Exeler’s research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century East European, Russian and German history; war and society; (international) legal history, war crimes trials and transitional justice; myth, memory and trauma; and empire, migration, and border regimes.

Her award-winning book Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (published in 2022 with Cornell University Press) examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over this East European borderland, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war?

Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. Ghosts of War draws on archival fieldwork conducted in Belarus, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Israel, and the United States, and a wide range of personal and autobiographical material in multiple European languages. It is often assumed that in societies that experienced war, occupation, or violent conflict, the act of seeking justice and accountability contributes to the development of free public spheres and democratic societies (a process also known as transitional justice). In contrast, the book examines how efforts at "confronting the past" played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.

A second research focus, developed as a post-doc project, lies on the history of international criminal law and war crimes prosecution in the twentieth century. Published work examines how the Soviet prosecution of treason and war crimes fit into the global moment of post-Second World War justice, which saw hundreds of thousands of individuals around the world prosecuted for their (real, alleged or surmised) wartime activities. Ongoing, collaborative research explores comparative and transnational approaches to the Second World War and its legacies in Europe and Asia.

Her new book project, The Three Empires' Border, explores the imperial Russian-Austrian-Prussian/German border. Following the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, Imperial Russia came to share, to the south, a border with Habsburg Austria and, to the north, with Prussia (and from 1871 on with Imperial Germany). After some back and forth, the three states’ international boundary was established at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. It lasted for more than a century, until the First World War witnessed the dissolution of these three European empires. Politically contested throughout its existence, the border cut through multiethnic and multilingual lands, in which the majority population was often Polish-speaking. Depending on the geographical location, other languages included Yiddish, German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and other Slavic languages, as well as numerous dialects (and borderland populations usually spoke more than one language anyhow).

The imperial Russian-Austrian-Prussian/German border arguably served as a laboratory for the development of modern border regimes as we know them today. While the increasing regulation of labor migration, the introduction and standardization of different types of identity documents needed to cross the border, and the creation of special border guards occurred elsewhere, too, these developments were particularly evident along the imperial Russian-Austrian-Prussian/German border. By the end of the nineteenth century, mobility across this border was more heavily regulated than at other European borders. At the same time, the border could be just as porous. The project thus examines the development of modern border regimes and microhistories of migration through an analysis of four types of migration – transatlantic, agricultural, coal-mining, and illicit trade and sexual trafficking – that greatly shaped and transformed the so-called “Three Empires’ Corner,” the region in Upper Silesia (Prussia/German empire), Małopolska (Kingdom of Poland within the Russian empire) and Galicia (Austria-Hungary) where the international border of the three states met. 

Book:

Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022)

Recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library London

Honorable Mention, W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize 2023, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) 

• Ernst Fraenkel Prize Lecture
• Podcast interview with the CEU Review of Democracy
• Podcast interview with the New Books Network: New Books in History
• Book Talk at the Jordan Center, New York University
• Reviewed in: Russian Review, H-Soz-Kult, Journal of European History, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Belaruski Histarychny Ahliad, Istoricheskaia Ekspertiza, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Cahiers du monde russe, Slavonic and East European Review, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Sehepunkte, Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, Einsicht. Bulletin des Fritz Bauer Instituts, H-Diplo / H-Net
  

Edited Special Issues:

After the Void. The Afterlife of the Shtetl in Postwar Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. Co-edited with Magdalena Waligórska. Holocaust Studies, published online 4 November 2024

Journal Articles:

“Death and Destruction in Davyd-Haradok. German Crimes, Local Complicity in the Holocaust, and Survivor’s Search for Justice in a Former Polesian Shtetl,” in: Holocaust Studies, published online 4 November 2024

“Round Table Discussion: After the War – Beginning Life Anew in the Aftermath of Violence,” with Natalia Aleksiun, Yechiel Weizman and Magdalena Waligórska, in: Holocaust Studies, published online 4 November 2024.

“Introduction: After the Void. The Afterlife of the Shtetl in Postwar Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine,” with Magdalena Waligórska, in: Holocaust Studies, published online 4 November 2024

"Filtration Camps, Past and Present, and Russia's War Against Ukraine," in: Journal of Genocide Research 25, no. 3–4 (2023), 426–444.

• Reprinted in: “Filtration Camps, Past and Present, and Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” in: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine – Victims, Perpetrators, Justice, and the Question of Genocide, edited by Diana Dumitru and A. Dirk Moses (London: Routledge, 2024).

"Patrons and Partisans. Soviet State-Rebuilding, Informal Networks, and Hierarchies of Trust in Post-Nazi Occupation Belarus," in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 70, no. 3-4 (2022), 481–509.

“What Did You Do during the War? Personal Responses to the Aftermath of Nazi Occupation,” in: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17, no. 4 (2016), 805–835.

“The Ambivalent State. Determining Guilt in the Post-World War II Soviet Union,” in: Slavic Review 75, no. 3 (2016), 606–629.

“Gewalt im Militär. Die Rote Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg” (Violence inside the Military. The Red Army in World War II), in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 3 (2012), 228–246.

Book Chapters:

“Nazi Atrocities, International Criminal Law, and Soviet War Crimes Trials. The Soviet Union and the Global Moment of Post-Second World War Justice,” in: The New Histories of International Criminal Law. Retrials, edited by Immi Tallgren and Thomas Skouteris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 189–219.

“L’Expérience de la guerre: violence et violence extrême” (The Experience of War: Violence and Extreme Violence), in: Encyclopédie de la seconde guerre mondiale, edited by Jean-François Muracciole and Guillaume Piketty (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 2015), 1379–1385.

“Kogda okonchilas’ voina. Sovetskaia Belorussiia v seredine 1940-e – 1950-e gg” (When the War Was Over. Soviet Belarus from the mid-1940s to 1950s), in: Belarus’ i Germaniia. Historyia i suchasnasts’. Materyialy mizhnarodnai navukovai kanferentsyi, edited by A.A Kavaleniia and S.Ia. Novikaŭ (Minsk: MGLU, 2012), 85–92.

Academic Blog Posts and Essays:

"'No Entry:' A Road Trip to Southern Belarus Reveals the Hidden Impact of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster." Published in The Dial, an online magazine of culture, politics and ideas, February 2025.

"Bely Berag – Or What a Small Village Reveals About the Greatest Nuclear Power Disaster to Date." Published on Visualizing Climate and Loss, Joint Center for History and Economics, Harvard University and University of Cambridge, September 2024.

“The Three Empire’s Border. Imperial Practices, Knowledge Transfer, and Everyday Experiences of Borders in East-Central Europe, 1815–1921.” Published on Barriers & Borders, Columbia Worlds Project and the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, May 2023.

"Absences." Published on Invisible Histories, a project supported by Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, November 2019.

“Soviet Collaboration Trials.” Published on Compromised Identities: Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism, University College London, March 2019.

“Staging Justice. Trial Photography.” Published on Invisible Histories, a project supported by Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, June 2017.

Webinars and Online Discussions:

Villages of Fire in Belarus (Спаленыя вёскі ў Беларусі / Feuerdörfer in Belarus), December 2024, with Alexander Friedman (University of Düsseldorf), Victor Shadurski (University of Wrocław), Thomas Weiler (FU Berlin), Nina Weller (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, ZfL) and Franziska Exeler (FU Berlin), moderated by Adam Kerpel-Fronius (Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), in Belarusian and German, co-hosted by the Forum für historische Belarus-Forschung, DGO, and the ZfL.

Russia's Rule in Occupied Ukraine, February 2024, with Tatiana Zhurzhenko (ZOiS, Berlin), Oleksandr Melnyk (University of Toronto), David Lewis (University of Exeter) and Franziska Exeler (FU Berlin), co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center.

After the War - Beginning Life Anew in the Aftermath of Violence in 1945, May 2022, with Natalia Aleksiun (University of Florida), Yechiel Weizman (Bar Ilan University) and Franziska Exeler (FU Berlin/Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge), moderated by Magdalena Waligórska (Humboldt University Berlin), hosted by the Forum für historische Belarus-Forschung, DGO.