Synopsis

On 17 May 1946, the American social worker Charles Schermerhorn arrived in Greece. He arrived at a critical time: Greece had just come out of a brutal Nazi German Occupation and was about to engage in a three-year-long and devastating civil war (1946-1949). Charles was appointed by UNNRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), subsequently by the Near East Foundation, and eventually by UNICEF. That means that, in the course of a mere five years, Charles saw a tremendous amount of American-influenced administrative and logistical planning for Greece, which was a focus of intense early Cold War friction and scrutiny. Charles’ own appointment as an UNRRA child welfare specialist attests to a Western-imported and hegemonic humanitarian model, which had to serve as an antidote to the rise of Soviet-style communism in Southern Europe and the Balkans. The global focus of the time was on children: they held the future of their respective societies and, as adults, would determine whether a nation would align itself with the West or with the East.

Bio

‌Gonda Van Steen holds the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature in the Department of Classics at King’s College London. She also directs King’s Centre for Hellenic Studies. She received her PhD degree in Classics and Hellenic Studies from Princeton University. Van Steen is the author of five books: Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece; Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire; Theatre of the Condemned: Classical Tragedy on Greek Prison Islands; and Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967-1974. Her latest, single-authored book, Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece (2019), takes the reader into the uncharted terrain of Greek adoption stories that become paradigmatic of Cold War politics and history (Greek translation Ζητούνται παιδιά από την Ελλάδα, Athens: Potamos, 2021). Van Steen most recently published an edited volume titled The Battle for Bodies, Hearts and Minds in Postwar Greece: Social Worker Charles Schermerhorn in Thessaloniki, 1946-1951 (Routledge, 2024).

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