Denis Kolesov is a first-year Master’s student in the Cultural and Intellectual History: Between East and West program of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. He has graduated from the Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod with a Bachelor’s degree in international relations. The area of his expertise includes collective memory about World War II in Germany and in Russia, denazification policy, German minorities, refugees and asylum-seekers in the international and national law systems.

The Communities of the Expelled Germans After the World War II in the 1950s-2010s: Cultural and Historical Transformations and the Ways of Conversion of Symbolic Capital

The research project “The communities of the expelled Germans after the II World War in the 1950s-2010s: cultural and historical transformations and the ways of conversion of symbolic capital” is dedicated to the problem of the evolution of communities of expelled Germans, such the Sudeten Germans and Prussian Germans. The study of these phenomena is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields applied to the collective memory. The study examines the evolution and transformations of strategies of reproduction of symbolic capital within communities. The project scrutinizes the ways of conversion of symbolic capital into other forms as well as the cultural capital in its objectified state as a mean of accumulation of symbolic capital.