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Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For almost one hundred years, educators have used model deliberative bodies (e.g., Model United Nations) as a pedagogical tool to teach students about the complexities of diplomatic negotiations. We argue that this type of classroom simulation activity may also serve to illustrate specific historical realities and, more broadly, provide a model of student-centered instruction focused on investigation and decision making. Employed in social studies classrooms, this tool has the potential to foster historical thinking and empathy by calling on students to engage in the act of deliberation as experienced by contemporary actors of a particular negotiating body. The lesson activity we outline in this article charges students to wrestle with the multiplicity of complex dilemmas and conflicting claims that characterized the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Assuming the role of actual delegates, students not only discuss pertinent issues but also deliberate. That is to say, just like the representatives who convened at the meeting, the students will not have the luxury of merely reflecting on and talking about key geopolitical questions. They will have to reach concrete decisions for a world finding itself in a terrifying, yet hopeful, flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]