Caroline Mezger is a PhD Candidate at the European University Institute’s Department of History and Civilisation.
Originally from Zurich, Switzerland, she completed a Bachelor of Arts in history at Yale University. Thereafter, she received a Master of Arts in the comparative history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe from Central European University, Budapest.
Her dissertation explores Southeastern Europe’s post-Habsburg borderlands, looking in particular at the mobilisation of ethnic German children and youth into National Socialist projects during the 1930s and early 1940s. Her main areas of interest include the twentieth-century history of Central and Southeastern Europe, the history of Germany and National Socialism, World War II, the history of childhood and youth, and oral history.
Mezger has researched extensively in Germany, Hungary, and Serbia. She has presented her work— on topics including National Socialist youth organisations, nationalisation processes among Europe’s German-speaking minorities, Waffen-SS recruitment, and the post-World War II “expulsion” of ethnic Germans— at conferences in Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, Florence, Athens, Valencia, and Nottingham. Her work has been published with the De Gruyter Oldenbourg Press and the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth (Johns Hopkins
University Press). Her newest article is set to appear with the Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung.