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The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970
Abstract
A fifth of West Germany's post-1945 population consisted of ethnic German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe, a quarter of whom came from Silesia. As the richest territory lost inside Germany's interwar borders, Silesia was a leading objective for territorial revisionists, many of whom were themselves expellees. The Lost German East examines how and why millions of Silesian expellees came to terms with the loss of their homeland. Applying theories of memory and nostalgia, as well as recent studies on ethnic cleansing, Andrew Demshuk shows how, over time, most expellees came to recognize that the idealized world they mourned no longer existed. Revising the traditional view that most of those expelled sought a restoration of prewar borders so they could return to the east, Demshuk offers a new answer to the question of why, after decades of violent upheaval, peace and stability took root in West Germany during the tense early years of the Cold War.
... This means that people lived in a kind of 'memory vacuum' because the process of transmitting memory about their place of origin was interrupted, as were memories of the place where they came to live. Each forced migration was slightly different, but all of them, as noted by Andrei Demshuk (2012), that were linked in some way to the memory of displaced Germans shared some common components. Individual human experiences were also very similar because after each forced migration, the victims had to come to terms with the fact of their own loss. ...
... During communism, it was not only the memory of both ethnic and national conflicts that were relegated to the realm of social oblivion but also other elements of the past, such as the question of large-scale population resettlement and the memory of territories lost after the war. However, after the countries of East-Central Europe joined the EU, national trauma slowly began to change into nostalgia, as in the case of memory of the Hungarian territories lost after the First World War (Gerner 2007) or the German territories of Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia that were lost to Poland or memory of the Polish eastern borderlands lost after the World War II (Demshuk 2012, Traba 2007. Gradually, the issue of national and ethnic minorities has also been addressed in individual countries in East-Central Europe, although the approach to this varies widely across Europe. ...
In the paper the activities of three international organizations concerning inter-state conflicts are analyzed. Taking into consideration countries included in the framework of DisTerrMem project (Great Britain, Poland, Armenia and Pakistan), the authors focused on the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Union (EU). These organizations differ in the extent of their activities and in the intensity of these activities in resolving territorial conflicts. They also use different methods based on the values shared by member states. However, these methods have a common feature - they are based primarily on diplomatic, social and cultural activities that make these organisations primarily 'soft power', which is particularly evident in the case of organizations based in Europe. The authors of books and articles discussed in this literature review focus primarily on the analysis of the moral, social and political background of the activities undertaken by these organizations, on assessing their effectiveness and on the possible ways of resolving conflicts between states.
... People engaging in "homesick tourism" to Ghimes are primarily Csángós and Szeklers who have been separated from their homeland. One of the reasons for their visit is to collect relics devoted to their bygone past (religious symbols mostly) and to use them as sanctified objects on their return (Demshuk, 2012). These "icons" to their deceased world though seldom of great material value become priceless for their sentimental value and facilitate integration in the new world. ...
... Multiple studies appeared after years of forced silence or science deformed by propaganda. The ones worth mentioning are historical monographies (Wrzesiński and Goliński 2006;Herzig et al. 2012), articles on the post-war times of Lower Silesia and its inhabitants, and creation of the identity or regional heritage (Demshuk 2012a(Demshuk , 2012bZborowska 2017;Walkowiak 2019). ...
The article focuses on the phenomenon of pottery produced in Bolesławiec, a town that underwent a shift in state affiliation: after World War II the formally German town became Polish. Nowadays, Polish Bolesławiec ceramics is widely recognised as a trademark, part of the Polish heritage and a national symbol. The article was initiated by a simple question: how is it possible, considering that only a couple dozen years before, Bolesławiec pottery was in fact Bunzlau pottery, made by German craftsmen for hundreds of years? The authors analyse the process of creating heritage by reconstructing the biography of the ceramics and emphasising two coexistent forces that influenced the course of cultural production: political ideology and neoliberal mechanisms. Finally, they propose two terms: 'multi-heirs heritage' and 'economics of (non)memory' that enable them to grasp the complexity of the actors (people and institutions), attitudes and strategies that affected the researched case.
... How was the image built in Federal Germany of the Donauschwaben as a distinct group, different from other much more numerous groups, like the three million expelled from Silesia? In contrast to the Silesian refugees, the Donauschwaben came from a territory separate from the late German Reich (Demshuk, 2012), but within the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was also inhabited by other populations: Serbs, Rumanians, Hungarians and Italians. The name Donauschwaben came in use only after the end of the First World War, to better differentiate Germans from other national groups, after their common homeland was partitioned between Serbia, Rumania and Hungary (Dragan, 2010: 918;Magris, 1986: 345-362) There was a need for a new collective memory after the Second World War. ...
Historical films constitute an important source of knowledge about the past and of historical representations among young people. Students, however, often consider them as mirrors of the past instead of constructed representations. Therefore, it is very important to get students acquainted with audio-visual grammar, by analysing and questioning films in a critical way, in order to foster their historical and critical thinking skills. This paper examines how students and teachers in Flanders perceive historical films, and how teachers use them educationally in their classroom practice. Secondly, based on an extensive literature study and on our own analyses of historical films, it presents a model, distinguishing eight layers in historical films that can be discerned and are worthwhile to question, to foster students’ historical thinking skills.
... How was the image built in Federal Germany of the Donauschwaben as a distinct group, different from other much more numerous groups, like the three million expelled from Silesia? In contrast to the Silesian refugees, the Donauschwaben came from a territory separate from the late German Reich (Demshuk, 2012), but within the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was also inhabited by other populations: Serbs, Rumanians, Hungarians and Italians. The name Donauschwaben came in use only after the end of the First World War, to better differentiate Germans from other national groups, after their common homeland was partitioned between Serbia, Rumania and Hungary (Dragan, 2010: 918;Magris, 1986: 345-362) There was a need for a new collective memory after the Second World War. ...
The teaching of history has always sought a reasonable balance between the expansion of knowledge and the development of skills, between different dimensions of teaching history (political, economic, social, cultural, history of ideas) and emphasis (distant past or recent history). The question of what the local, national and global historical relationship should be, has been an important point in the development process of the national curriculum, as well as in history syllabi, since the re-independence of Estonia. All three levels have always been supported by various arguments, but with slightly different emphasis, content and examples. There have always been those among teachers and students, who sympathise with the local or global level, and those, who praise the importance of the national history. The national curriculum represents an agreement, which was reached after weighing different opinions. It was influenced particularly by the history of education and experience in history teaching in Estonia, social developments and processes in Europe and the world beyond.
... Only a few studies provided some clues about relationships between forced migration and tourism (destinations) (McGuckin 1996;Russell 2003;Demshuk 2012;Fierens 2007;Ho 2013;Irazabal and Gomez-Barris 2008;Wallenberg 1998 (Gould 1994;Head and Ries 1998;Mundra 2005;Rauch 1999;Hall 2005;Williams and Hall 2002). ...
This thesis uses constructivist grounded theory, including field research and
interviews, to posit a new theory of mobility as seen in the tourist-refugee
nexus in Europe in 2015-2016. Current encounters between those involved in
involuntary mobility with few limited movement choices and those traveling
for leisure criss-cross at many sites with implications for theoretical
understandings of tourism. Themes uncovered include the mobile nature of
mobilities and immobilities, immobility as a condition, the co-construction and
negotiation of the condition of immobility, the recreation of human mobilities,
intermobility effects and deficits, unmitigated paradoxical immobility,
reinforcement of socio-geographic inequalities, and the unsustainable
resilience of tourism. Three cases suggest various conditions and outcomes of
each theme, as stakeholders from all walks of life were interviewed in three
important and diverse sites to the refugee experience: Lesvos, Greece, Åre,
Sweden, and Germany. The case studies demonstrate that tourism is not a
solution to stresses on site from refugee movement. Instead, tourism as an
industry is reconstituted through refugee mobility, but not always toward a
resilient future. Sites themselves are transformed as well and this change alters
tourism within spaces, often threatening that movement by different types of
bodies might be considered the same as tourist movement.
... Essa ideia já está presente nas cartas aqui analisadas, muito embora ainda não esteja carregada pelo tom nostálgico de momentos posteriores. Sobre a "cultura da pátria" perdida desenvolvida entre os expulsos do Leste, Centro e Sudeste europeus na Alemanha, vide, entre outros, Hahn & Hahn (2005); Kossert (2009); sobre a "pátria da memória", vide Demshuk (2012). ...
O artigo analisa a “escrita de si” em cartas-pedido (Bittbriefe) enviadas entre 1946 e 1948 da Alemanha à prefeitura municipal de Blumenau-SC, Brasil. Os pedidos de donativos ou informações eram acompanhados de justificativas fundamentadas nas condições de vida e/ou histórias de vida dos remetentes e a situação do país. Analiso as estratégias retóricas empregadas na interlocução com o destinatário, o imaginário existente acerca da cidade, a mobilização da identidade étnico-nacional e a configuração de narrativas trágicas da guerra e do pós-guerra.
Palavras-chave: Cartas; Escrita de si; “Narrativas de vítimas alemãs”; Alemanha pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial; Brasil.
“Barysz was such a vibrant, such a lively and companionable town,” said 92-year-old Pole Władysław Kowcz with regret while being interviewed in his home in Lower Silesia in Poland in 2020. His Ukrainian peer Mariia Kliotsko, who still lives in Barysh, echoed him: “We had everything in this town before the war.” Kowcz left Barysz in 1945, and Kliotsko stayed, but the town of their childhood ceased to exist much earlier, for both of them. Until 1939, it had been a small multi-ethnic community located in eastern Galicia, populated by approximately seven thousand inhabitants, mostly Poles, Ukrainians, and a small Jewish minority. Between 1918 and 1939, it was a part of the Second Polish Republic, while today it is located in Ukraine (and is spelled Barysh, as distinct from Polish Barysz).
Romani victims of Nazi persecution and German expellees developed as distinct memory communities after 1945, but the pre-war integration of Sinti and gadje in East Prussia has left traces in their memory texts. Non-Romani texts and photos contain rare evidence for aspects of Sinti life before the genocide, much of it now available (only) on the internet. Conversely, Sinti were among the Germans who were forced to leave East Prussia after 1944, and awareness of dual trauma and nostalgia for the Heimat they shared with other Germans is apparent in their memory texts. The article explores these points of contact between the two memory communities and their implications for more solidary forms of remembering and re-visioning the region’s multiethnic past.
Forced population migration is not a modern phenomenon. It is often an integral part of totalitarian policies and has been used repeatedly to ensure the survival of political regimes or achieve specific political ambitions. Violent migration is present practically throughout history when considering the time scope and everywhere, practically in all continents of the world, with a specter of variations depending on the context imposed by the political circumstances, we can encounter it under different names. These variations have also reflections in the terminology used, among others, they are also indicators that speak of the different methods applied in order to achieve particular policies.
Individuals, families, or even whole peoples are forced to migrate violently, abandon their homes and leave behind them all their lives, including the material goods created up to that moment. Seen from a normal retrospective, forced migration represents the culmination of a regime's goals to dominate the territory without hindrance from any possible resistance. This fact has brought so many tragedies to humanity, and even worse, it has often ended with "legitimization" by international treaties or has even been the product of inter-state agreements. Forced population migration has clearly brought to the surface the evil purpose and has revealed territorial ambitions.
Keywords: Deportation, Ethnic, Treaty of Lausanne
Trading Power traces the successes and failures of a generation of German political leaders as the Bonn Republic emerged as a substantial force in European, Atlantic, and world affairs. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, West Germans relinquished many trappings of hard power, most notably nuclear weapons, and learned to leverage their economic power instead. Obsessed with stability and growth, Bonn governments battled inflation in ways that enhanced the international position of the Deutsche Mark while upending the international monetary system. Germany's remarkable export achievements exerted a strong hold on the Soviet bloc, forming the basis for a new Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt. Through much trial and error, the Federal Republic learned how to find a balance among key Western allies, and in the mid-1970s Helmut Schmidt ensured Germany's centrality to institutions such as the European Council and the G-7 – the newly emergent leadership structures of the West.
Romanian Germans, mainly from the Banat and Transylvania, have occupied a place at the very heart of major events in Europe in the twentieth century yet their history is largely unknown. This east-central European minority negotiated their standing in a difficult new European order after 1918, changing from uneasy supporters of Romania, to zealous Nazis, tepid Communists, and conciliatory Europeans. Migrating Memories is the first comprehensive study in English of Romanian Germans and follows their stories as they move across borders and between regimes, revealing a very European experience of migration, minorities, and memories in modern Europe. After 1945, Romanian Germans struggled to make sense of their lives during the Cold War at a time when the community began to fracture and fragment. The Revolutions of 1989 seemed to mark the end of the German community in Romania, but instead Romanian Germans repositioned themselves as transnational European bridge-builders, staking out new claims in a fast-changing world.
This study examines decisions of the Permanent Court of International Justice and their impact on the German-Polish dispute. It considers how international jurisdiction approached the question of minority protection and how the efficiency of this experiment in international justice was extremely influenced by political motives and contrasting political visions. The fragile balance between legal and political aspects was evident, and despite the efforts of the Court, political interests prevailed. It will be argued that the problems of the minority system and the German-Polish controversies proved that the international institutions could only provide the states with a support in settling their disputes: international stability could only be guaranteed by sincere mutual cooperation among the members of a community of states.
Nel calendario civile italiano le recenti celebrazioni del Giorno del ricordo, 10 febbraio, si sono caratterizzate per le polemiche politiche fra destra e sinistra, per i discorsi ideologici, per gli usi strumentali e contrapposti delle memorie. Va rilevata infatti la crescente difficolta della destra di governo di accogliere nella narrazione pubblica i risultati della storiografia sul tema delle foibe del 1943 e 1945 e dell'esodo degli Istriani e Dalmati nel secondo dopoguerra. E infatti in corso una rivisitazione degli eventi, che vede nuovamente presenti nella narrazione pubblica discorsi, stereotipi e linguaggi propri dell'anti-slavismo e dell'anti-comunismo, con una rimozione delle colpe del fascismo. Il saggio si incentra su questi temi con un focus sul caso di Trieste, luogo simbolico di memorie contrapposte del Novecento, in grado di sollecitare anche l'interesse della storiografia internazionale.
Building on recent investigations into children as historical actors, this article examines the experiences of ethnic German ( Donauschwaben ) expellees from northern Yugoslavia’s Vojvodina region. Using original oral history interviews, the article embeds these individuals’ childhood experiences of World War ii and expulsion into their greater life stories, thereby highlighting children’s multifaceted wartime roles and opportunities for agency. Contrary to prevailing (German) historiographic and popular imagination—as encouraged particularly by postwar expellee organizations—young ethnic Germans were not the mere passive victims of war and expulsion. Rather, even during their expulsion, they actively participated in Nazi youth organizations, accompanied columns of Jewish camp evacuees, worked in Nazi munitions factories, and fought in the Third Reich’s final desperate military “storm.” At different occasions, children and youth thus became both witting and unwitting agents of wartime destruction. As the article concludes, a more concerted investigation into questions of childhood agency in war is central to the analysis of such contested topics as German victimhood and perpetration during World War ii , the Vertreibung (expulsion), and Germany’s transgenerational postwar reckoning with the crimes of its past.
Chapter 8 of the book:
8.1 Urban Memory: Past, Present, and Future of the place
8.2 Place and Perception: From urban memory to place identity, or vice versa?
8.3 Spatial Syntagma and Mental Maps of Cities and Places
8.4 The Significance of Place in Mind
8.5 The Role of Urban Memory in City Transitions
8.6 A Brief Insight on Future Research
This article traces changes in Polish administrative approaches toward indigenous Upper Silesians in the 1960s and 1970s. By commissioning reports from voivodeship leaders in 1967, the Ministry of Internal Affairs recognized that native Silesians held reservations toward Poland and, moreover, that postwar “Polonization” efforts may have backfired. These officials further understood the need to act quickly against “disintegration” trends. Although administrators in Katowice and Opole noted that relatively few Silesians engaged in clearly anti-Polish activities, these leaders still believed that West German influence threatened their authority in Silesia. Increasing West German involvement in the area, particularly through care packages and tourism, seemed to support this conclusion. In response to fears of West German infiltration and the rise in emigration applications, local authorities sought to bolster a distinctly Silesian identity. Opole officials in particular argued that strengthening a regional identity, rather than a Polish one, could combat the “tendency toward disintegration” in Silesia. This policy shift underscored an even greater change in attitude toward the borderland population: instead of treating native Silesians as an innate threat to Polish sovereignty, as had been the case immediately after the war, the administration now viewed them as essential for maintaining authority in western Poland.
The historiography of the postwar Germanys often examined the Nazi legacy and the remarkable efforts needed for economic and social recovery after 1945. In both the FRG and GDR, the consequences of the war and resulting “flight and expulsion” featured prominently in public discourse and were among the most pressing challenges in the early postwar years. Examining how the competing regimes in East and West Germany attempted to solve the humanitarian crisis caused by the forced migration of 10 to 12 million German refugees in the first years after World War II reveals that the discourses and policies started from common points of departure yet diverged into competing narratives underpinning the states’ political and social agendas. Reconstructing the evolution of how the forced migrations were discussed and leveraged in the neglected period immediately after the war opens new perspectives on how Germans shouldered the burdens of dictatorship and defeat.
Fojtik explores connections between hunger, territorial loss and identity in postwar Germany by examining the documents and correspondence of the food administrations in the western zones of occupation. She argues that Germans’ understanding of “home” (Heimat) was critically tied to agricultural productivity since the early years of German nationhood. Accordingly, hungry Germans after 1945 understood food shortage as a direct consequence of territorial division and land loss to Poland—the Heimat had nourished them, both spiritually and nutritionally. Shortage signaled, moreover, that the German future would not be an agricultural one, a change that had been a long time coming but that the Nazis postponed with their elevation of the farmer and their rhetoric about “the soil.”
This essay will submit three arguments which will sustain this thesis respectively: 1) the incorporation of expellees, the expellee movement, and their irredentism which romanticised the Nazi period, saw a form political extremism rise as a direct consequence of the breakup of Germany after World War II (WWII); 2) the decline of the German Communist Party (KPD) and National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) reflected Germans becoming critical of the political extremism prevalent between the 1919 until 1945; 3) influenced by both the War and German history wholistically, the
Allies and Germans crafted a Basic Law (Grundgesetz) which embodied a strong parliamentary and federal system. With all this in mind, the first argument to highlight how Germany drew upon its history to craft new political institutions and a new culture, is the incorporation of the expellees and their irredentism.
The introduction outlines the relation between intergenerational transmission of memory, women’s narratives, and the active listener. Remembering the past is not an isolated, individual process, as it includes postmemory, which is formed during and based on interactions with others, and the process of listening and becoming witnesses to their narratives. The lines that both unite and separate these strata of memory offer valuable clues about how one remembers the past. No narrative of the past is ‘written’ in isolation, not the personal, public, nor the gender-determined narratives; all are interrelated and influenced by past and present historical frames. Presenting the core concepts of the volume as being the multi-layered memory/postmemory and women’s narratives of displacement, the introduction underlines that the narratives of the past are the result of the extremely elaborated process in which memories are correlated and permanently negotiated between different agents of memory. The introduction points out the volume focus on the complex and fascinating relationship between the testimony and the act of listening, as it sustains the act of witnessing the past and determines its remembrance.
In this chapter, Ursa explores multiple forms of displacement in Herta Müller’s prose. Identified as crucial ways of remediating the author’s autobiography and postmemory, linguistic estrangement, autobiographical mediation, and non-human displacement are central to the analysis. Based on two best-known novels by Müller, The Land of Green Plums and The Hunger Angel, the chapter shows how meaning is transferred throughout the narrative between speech, material objects, humanness, and animality. Focusing on the individual-collective interplay and on the human–non-human ambivalence, and dwelling on theoretical input from memory and postmemory studies, Ursa contends that the writer uses identity displacement to mediate and remediate different places of memory, where the non-human takes part in being human.
The chapter focuses on the memory of displacement from eastern Polish borderlands (called ‘Kresy’) which were not included in the Polish state after the World War II. Analysis is based on interviews conducted among members of Kresy-related organisations in contemporary Poland. Głowacka-Grajper shows that memory of lost lands and displacement is transmitted mainly within families and local non-governmental organisations and women became the main ‘memory makers’ in this sphere. Most interlocutors recall stories from their mothers and grandmothers as a way of establishing a link with the family’s past. The narratives often focus on the everyday aspects of family life culturally ascribed to women’s sphere, for example, various family stories, neighbour relations, the immediate surroundings and ordinary working days. The reasons for the domination of women’s narratives for the memory of displacement in contemporary Poland and its consequences are analysed in the chapter.
Considérant d’une part le décalage entre le temps politique et les processus mémoriels, et d’autre part la remise en question des rapports entre les politiques officielles de la mémoire et les représentations ordinaires du passé, cet article analysera l’émergence ou non dans la société allemande d’une mémoire des Heimat perdues. Il s’agit d’un type de mémoire qui est propice aux échanges avec les voisins, favorise la compréhension mutuelle et contribue à la réappropriation d’un passé partagé, conduisant ainsi à un regard plus favorable vers un avenir européen commun. Basé sur un corpus d’oeuvres littéraires contemporaines traitant des voyages patrimoniaux dans les territoires d’où les Allemands ont été expulsés après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, cet article vise à étudier les récits de traversée des frontières et de (re)découverte de la Heimat perdue à l’Est. Il propose d’examiner les représentations de l’espace véhiculées par ces récits, et leur rapport aux récits plus anciens tels que ceux de fuite et d’expulsion. L’hypothèse qui se dégage de cet article est que, malgré une histoire partagée de violence, la confrontation active d’une Heimat perdue avec la réalité d’aujourd’hui renforce la capacité de surmonter une construction auto-centrée de la mémoire et des souffrances endurées par les Allemands pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. En conséquence, il devient possible de reconsidérer la complexité des événements et d’aller au-delà d’une vérité régionale limitée, en les inscrivant ainsi dans un cadre historique plus large.
O artigo apresenta uma análise de entrevistas produzidas com membros de três gerações de uma família da Colônia Entre Rios, localizada no município de Guarapuava, Paraná. A Colônia foi constituída no início da década de 1950 com chegada de cerca de 500 famílias de refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial, identificados como suábios do Danúbio (Donauschwaben), oriundos, em sua maioria, de campos de refugiados da Áustria. O foco da análise são as formas como os entrevistados constituem suas histórias de vida e a relação que estabelecem com o “lugar de origem”, na antiga Iugoslávia, representada como antiga pátria, e Entre Rios, a nova pátria construída no Brasil.
Palavras-chave: História Oral. Suábios do Danúbio. Imigração. Refugiados. Entre Rios (Guarapuava, PR).
This article demonstrates the connection between the ideology and activities of the Jewish Territorialist Movement and broader geopolitical trends and discourses during the late interwar and immediate post-war period. The Territorialists, active from 1934 within the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation, were representative of such contemporary trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Freelanders relied on accepted notions and practices such as colonialism and colonisation, ‘whiteness’, race, biopolitics and agro-industrial science, as well as (empty) spaces and un(der)developed territories. The Territorialists’ alignment with geopolitics makes the movement's little studied history a relevant chapter in the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, the continuities in Territorialism's aspired social engineering project help to problematise the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.
Intergenerational transmission of the memory of the Eastern Borderlands of Second Polish Republic
In the article the author analyzes the way of thinking of NGO’s representatives on transmission of the memory of the lost eastern borderlands of the Second Republic of Poland (called Kresy) in contemporary social and cultural conditions. Basing on interviews with acti vists from three different generations the author presents social division of mnemonic labor of Kresy – roles played by people from different generations, their motivations, emotional attitudes and their diagnosis of the process of memory transmission and its social and individual aspects.
The article explores ways in which the nineteenth-century Prussian military architecture has been used and promoted as a part of the local heritage in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Accommodation of the old fortification buildings to tourism and museum work has been publicly discussed since the beginning of the 2000s, but neither local nor federal authorities have proposed a plan to adapt them to non-military purposes. As a result, these structures, which are protected by federal heritage laws and uniformly built of characteristic red bricks, have become an arena for various initiatives, experiments, and games with the past. Strategies of virtualization discussed in the paper reveal a lack of open public discussion about dark episodes of Russian and Soviet history. Consequently, it is important to learn more about how and why contemporary Kaliningraders appropriate the local German legacies, use globally accepted strategies of heritage construction, and develop cooperation with the EU countries, while remaining receptive to official historical narratives promulgated by the national center.
The forced migration of twelve million Germans was central to German memory after 1945, and reflects fundamental changes in remembering the Second World War, that is, refocusing from German victims, such as expellees, to the victims of Germany in the Holocaust. Within this discourse, ‘flight and expulsion’ demonstrates Germany’s entangledness with her eastern neighbours and is turned into a European and transnational mnemonic discourse with the debates over a ‘Centre against Expulsions’ in the 2000s. This article studies ‘flight and expulsion’ between two mnemonic patterns, that is, the loss of the homeland against migration. After the collective imagination of a lost homeland in the east, the emerging Holocaust memory both marginalized ‘flight and expulsion’ in the late 1970s and introduced new patterns of commemoration. These patterns enabled a turn toward individual victimhood and the decontextualization of ‘flight and expulsion’ from the Second World War. The ‘Centre against Expulsions’ project demonstrates the coordination of the German example with other cases of forced migration and the claim for a universal commemoration of past expulsion and the condemnation of any future attempts. The case of Syrian civil-war refugees, however, reveals that such forms of decontextualization only in part transfer into humanitarian imperatives.
This introduction identifies the ubiquitous, but controversial, public and academic debate on European Memory as a key for articulating assumptions and expectations about an enhanced process of European integration via references to Europe’s past. The authors outline contradictions that constitute this discourse by pointing to its inherently conflictive potential and carve out the implicit and explicit normative assumptions of European Memory. Albeit acknowledging differences in memories of twentieth-century mass violence, references to European Memory promise to overcome the conflicts inherent in the historical experiences of such violence. Confronting this bias, this special issue postulates an understanding of European Memory as a discursive reality rather than a normative ideal. European Memory becomes manifest whenever actors refer to ‘Europe’ in their interpretations of the past. Further developing an understanding of ‘entangled memory’, the contributions of this special issue share a common interest in the universalizing potential of references to European Memory. They demonstrate how mnemonic practices may lose contextual references and link or even transfer to other memories in order to articulate claims of relevance on a European level.
From the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, the production and consumption of German things played critical roles in delineating and connecting a wide variety of German places in Latin America. Such places became ubiquitous in Chile and Argentina. They flourished because there was ample room in the German imagination for the multiplicity of German places and the cultural hybridity that accompanied them to extend beyond Imperial Germany's national boundaries and colonial possessions. They also flourished because host societies found virtue in having those German places in their states. This essay uses German schools in Argentina and Chile as a window into the emergence of such German places and the soft power that accompanied them. Scholars often overlook that power when they focus on colonial questions or formal and informal imperialism in Latin America. More than any other institution, German schools became sites where the production and consumption of German things were concentrated and multilayered, and where the consistencies and great varieties of Germanness that arrived and evolved in Latin America gained their clearest articulation. Because those schools were both centers of communities and nodes in a global pedagogical network that thrived during the interwar period, they provide us with great insight into a nexus of motivations that created German places in Latin America. Life around these schools also underscores the importance of studying immigrants and their things together.
The migratory processes in East Germany can be characterised by two great waves of exodus. According to estimates, around a fifth of the population left the country between the end of the Second World War and 1961. Among those who turned their backs on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in this first phase of migration were an estimated 36,000 entrepreneurs and their families (Hefele 1998). Entrepreneurs’ decisions to migrate were very closely related to the sequestration and expropriation of their businesses at the time. Many saw no further chances for themselves or their companies in a socialist state, where they would be victimised and criminalised (Hefele 1998; Hennecke 2008).
The making of maps of the "German East" precedes the "flight and expulsion" of Germans from eastern Europe after 1945, a prototype being the Alldeutscher Atlas in 1900. The postulate of the "soil of the German people and culture" (1925) marks a very important step. The maps presenting claims by the Weimar Republic, territorial gains under the Nazis and then, after 1945, demands from German refugee organizations are but variations on these drawings. Maps representing the "flight" and "eastern menace" fit into the same picture, with variations depending on the context of production.
The chapter cites some notable examples in global and transnational history and discusses how they reshape our understanding of the past. The 2009 publication of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History is a good illustration of the way historians are thinking globally and transnationally. The chapter focuses on the recent scholarship in such topics as environmentalism, inter-racial and inter-cultural encounters, migrations, human rights, economic and cultural globalization, cultural dimensions of geopolitical phenomena such as wars, regional communities, and non-governmental organizations. The chapter concludes by discussing how such new works add to the more traditional perspectives in national and international history and help reperiodize the past.
The expellees were the millions of Germans who were forced to flee their homelands or were sent to the Western part of Germany at the end of the Second World War. At the time of the Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945), the Allies established new German borders, and the German populations that lived on the east side of the Oder-Neisse line were deported to what remained of German territory (the Allied occupation zones, the future Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and German Democratic Republic (GDR)). The legal uncertainty concerning the definitiveness of these borders elicited hope of return to their regions of origin among the expellees (for some of them up until the reunification of 1990). In 1949, the new German state of the FRG included millions of expellees who organized themselves in several associations on local and national levels. The associations pursued various objectives, including political demands, calls for relief programs and efforts to preserve their cultural heritage.
For a viewer familiar with the Western genre, the first East German Western, The Sons of Great Mother Bear, may not seem initially to differ from any traditional American Western.1 In the opening scene, a group of Anglo-Americans are playing cards and drinking in a saloon. There are also two Native Americans present, sitting in a remote corner. The older Native American agrees to join the Anglo-Americans, while his son refuses even to acknowledge their presence. The son is also the only person in the saloon who is not drinking. His father, it appears, must have known and trusted the leading white gambler who calls him “my red brother.” The friendship between Red Fox, an experienced Anglo-American frontiersman, the white frontiersman, and the older Indian proves to be fleeting once the frontiersman discovers a gold nugget in the hand of the Indian. Red Fox kills the Indian when the Indian refuses to tell him where gold can be found. Then the story follows the well-known pattern: as more and more gold-hungry whites arrive, the Indians must either leave their homeland or fight off the invaders. War appears imminent. Indeed, “if this were a Hollywood Western, John Wayne would fight off the ‘redskins’ single-handedly before riding off into a prairie sunset.”2 Instead, not only does Tokeiihto manage to avenge the death of his father, but he also manages to protect his tribe from extermination by leading them to a new homeland.
The movie Grün ist die Heide (The Heath is Green, 1951) is a paradigmatic creation of post-World War II popular culture in West Germany, showing an idyllic world with no reminder of the previous Nazi period. In a famous scene from that movie, filmmaker Hans Deppe (1897–1969) portrays a hunter who meets a group of Silesian expellees during a local feast on the Lüneburger Heide (Lüneburg Heath). When he starts singing the Riesengebirglers Heimatlied (Homeland Song of the Giant Mountains), suddenly the whole group accompanies him — an expellee group caught in its ambiguity between integration and homesickness.
After 1945 and 1962, Germany and France witnessed immigration movements of unprecedented scale and type. Military defeat and the loss of significant parts of their territory pushed millions of refugees and expellees from Central and Eastern Europe and from North Africa to the two neighboring countries: the Germans from the East (Vertriebene) and the French of now independent Algeria (rapatriés, later often referred to as Pieds-Noirs). This demographic influx from former national provinces and imperial borderlands posed serious financial, logistical, and administrative challenges for both societies. Since many of these immigrants and their ancestors had lived far away from the core regions of postwar Germany and France — speaking unfamiliar dialects or different languages, practicing different cultural and religious traditions — they were perceived as culturally different, if not inferior, and were rejected by many of their fellow citizens.
Since the mid-1990s, historians of Germany have rediscovered ‘empire’ as a category of analysis that permits a deeper exploration of the multiple meanings of ‘Germany’ and its territorial fluctuations over time. They have looked especially closely at the maritime empire of the Second German Empire from 1884 to 1918, its impact on German identity, its earlier roots, and its relevance to subsequent periods in German history. Although research and debate on the imperialism of the Kaiserreich continues to thrive, German aspirations to a continental European empire inspired in part by the German migrations eastward from the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages have received increased attention. As David Blackbourn argued recently, Mitteleuropa, or alternatively Osteuropa, was as important to Germans as India was to Great Britain and Algeria to France. Compared to the desire to colonize the ‘East’, Imperial Germany’s short-lived ‘blue water’ empire paled in significance.1 Not surprisingly, the need to assess the Nazi regime’s murderous Drang nach Osten, its continuities and ruptures with earlier imperial imaginings, contribute to this trend. Yet if the defeat of Nazism ended German expansionism, the ‘East’ left its traces in the forced migrations of ethnic Germans to what remained of the Reich. The destruction of the Nazi empire and the rediscovery of past precedents to cope with defeat shaped the most critical issue that the postwar Germanys had to confront as postcolonial societies: who indeed was ‘German’?
In the humanities and social sciences, the politics of memory and related culture of remembrance increase their significance, affecting legislation, historiography, and political science. This article aims to present key approaches to studying the politics of memory and employ them to the analysis of the politics of memory on the territory of the former German province of East Prussia. The author shows different research perspectives on the key concepts of memory studies. Some researchers identify the notion of the ‘politics of memory’ with that of the ‘politics of history’, while others distinguish between them. The author evaluates the effects of using the category of ‘memory sites’. Applying the method of historiographical analysis, the author examines similarities of and differences between approaches to the politics of history and the politics of memory. The author evaluates the effects of using the notions of ‘memory sites’ and ‘memory conflicts’ in the Baltic Region states, and reviews recent works of historians and political scientists on the changes in the culture of remembrance in Russia in general and the Kaliningrad region in particular during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Modern historiography is used as an example to demonstrate that ‘memory sites’ and the ‘politics of history’ are the most relevant concepts in the study of the culture of remembrance and identity, whereas a comparative analysis proves to be effective for the identification of the main features of the politics of memory on the territory of the former East Prussia.
The introductory essay engages with recent work on the myriad groups of German speakers that flourished outside the borders of the German nation-state between the 1880s and the 1930s. Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have treated the notion of the Auslandsdeutsche (German expatriates) with considerable ideological suspicion. This essay, however, argues that a German history that moves : beyond those prejudices and integrates these communities of German-speakers into a more inclusive historiography offers us the chance to create a dialog between German national history and the histories of the nations and regions in which German cultures took hold and, to-use the language of the times, where German colonies were founded. The integration of these German spaces and their diverse communities into our historical narratives offers us the chance to fashion a more inclusive notion of German history, one that effectively decenters the role of the German nation-state by recognizing the inherently polycentric character of German nationhood during this period.
In 2013, Russia’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) soared and the OFDI stock exceeded $ 500 billion. However, a year later, Russia’s OFDI dropped by nearly 15 per cent. Rapid upward and downward swings make it necessary to analyze the motivation of Russian firms to invest abroad as well as to assess the impact of sanctions on Russian OFDI. The author points out that a significant part of Russia’s outward FDI stock is accounted for by the operations of Russian corporations in their home market. It is concluded that although Western sanctions target a relatively small number of Russian citizens and companies, they nevertheless affect some of Russia’s key people, largest banks, and hydrocarbon producers. Therefore, their direct impact could be substantial. Alongside the direct impact, one should consider their indirect impact, such as the tumbling rouble exchange rate and Russian banks’ increasing interest rates, which decrease Russian firms’ capability to invest abroad. Moreover, a less amicable political atmosphere in the West may push some Russian corporations out of the Western markets and diminish the enthusiasm of new ones to enter them. Today, Russia’s counter-sanctions do not directly restrict the country’s OFDI, but Russian state-owned enterprises may reach a decision to hold foreign investments to support Russia’s sanction policy.
At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to ‘cleanse’ these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as ‘native Poles’ and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.
This article explores the little-known history of German-German exchanges between East Germany and Romania during the Cold War. It reveals a complex picture of tourism, travel and information exchange in which Germans from both countries were able to construct socialist escapes. While the Cold War history of Germans in East-Central Europe has tended to either ignore their presence or focus mainly on expulsion and emigration, this article highlights the vibrant existence of a ‘German sphere’ in Cold War East-Central Europe.
The Curonian Spit, formerly part of East Prussia and divided today between Lithuania and the Kaliningrad Oblast (Russian Federation), is one of the iconic landscapes in the German collective memory of the territories lost after the Second World War. Using examples from the popular genre of photographic books (Bildbände) from the 1930s to the 1960s, this article discusses to what extent previous representations (textual and visual) informed the photographic reservoir of images of the Curonian Spit as the ‘most famous landscape of East Prussia’ and explores how in the environment of the homeland societies the Curonian Spit finally transformed from an image of a national discovery into an icon of loss.
We know that Germans moved very quickly from the Endsieg propaganda of the Nazis to a victimization rhetoric in early post-World War II years. Yet even before the extent of the mass murder of Jews had penetrated average German's consciousness, expelled ethnic Germans in 1948-1949 used Holocaust metaphors to present their desperate case. In the context of a hunger strike staged by expellees, and the subsquent trial of the strike's leader, expellees living at a refugee camp at Dachau consciouly used the proximity of their camp to the former concentration camp to strengthen political agency.
This book focuses on how Britain perceived the mass movement of German populations from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on a wide range of British archival material, it examines why the British came to regard the forcible removal of German populations from Poland and Czechoslovakia as a necessity, and evaluates the British response, both in official circles and in the public domain, to developments in central Europe once mass expulsion became a reality in 1945. Central to this study is the concept of 'population transfer': the contemporary idea that awkward minority problems could be solved rationally and constructively by removing the population concerned in an orderly and gradual manner, while avoiding unnecessary human suffering and economic disruption. The book demonstrates that while most British observers accepted the principle of population transfer, most were also consistently uneasy with the results of putting that principle into practice. This clash of 'principle' with 'practice' revealed much not only about the limitations of Britain's role, but also the hierarchy of British priorities in immediate post-war Europe.
This book connects two central problems encountered by the Federal Republic of Germany prior to reunification in 1990, both of them rooted in the Second World War. Domestically, the country had to integrate eight million expellees forced out of their homes in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the lost war. Externally, it had to reestablish relations with Eastern Europe, despite the burdens of the Nazi past, the expulsions, and the ongoing East-West struggle during the Cold War. This book shows how the long-term consequences of the expellee problem significantly hindered West German efforts to develop normal ties with the East European states. In particular, it emphasizes a point largely overlooked in the existing literature: the way in which the political integration of the expellees into the Federal Republic had unanticipated negative consequences for the country's Ostpolitik.
When World War II came to an end, vast portions of Germany and Poland lay in rubble. And, as if this were not enough, both countries were immediately inundated by large waves of migrants. In the years from 1944 to 1949, displaced persons, refugees, and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany. For the purpose of this article, expellees (or forced migrants) are Germans or Poles who had been living in the eastern territories of both countries as defined by their borders in 1937 and who were forcibly and permanently removed from their homelands between 1944 and 1949.
The focus of this article is the introduction of the category of historical legacy as the most adequate heuristic device in approaching and describing historical regions. Its central argument is that the notion of historical legacy, insofar as it allows more c1early to articulate the dynamism and fluidity of historical change, has numerous advantages over other more structural categories of analysis utilized thus far in the literature, such as borders, space, territoriality, etc. It therefore appears to be the most appropriate category for analyzing long-term regional developments by avoiding the reification of latter-day regions. The case is made for historical legacy as an analytical tool both theoretically and concretely, by applying the category to Europe in general, and in particular to Eastem Europe and the Balkans. Finally, some practical issues of spacing are addressed, both analytically and politically.
This article focuses on the discourse of backwardness as an aspect of what has been recognized as the dominant trope in east European historiography until the end of the twentieth century, namely nationalism. Through a survey of east European historiographies, it demonstrates how different notions of temporality are employed. Eastern Europe as a whole and the particular problem of east European nationalism have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects, through structural models of "timeless" theory and method and bracketing out time as a dimension of intercultural study. The article proposes a way to circumvent the trap of origins, which carries backwardness as its corollary, by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework. This allows the description of a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but also as a dialogical process without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, and diffusion.
Twenty years and a day after Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender, Hanover county administrator Helmut Janssen declared to an assembly of East Prussian expellee leaders that Germany was still destined to recover all of the territory it had possessed in 1937. One day, he claimed, the roughly twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from the lost eastern territories and eastern Europe in the wake of the war would return home. Although by 1965 this political goal seemed “further away than ever before,” he repeated an expellee declaration of March 1960, which pledged that all expellees “still want to return to the Heimat [homeland]—now, in the future, and forever.”
This article presents an analysis of the Polish-German scholarly and public debate of the last decades dedicated to the fate
of the German population in Upper Silesia after the ending of the Second World War. In the introduction, three determining
factors of the current discussion are mentioned: first, the public debate on this topic, which evolved especially after the
turning point of the democratization in Poland in 1989, and which created a certain social climate for these scholarly debates;
secondly, the history of the Polish-German conflict in Upper Silesia, which conditioned the post-war situation in the region;
and thirdly, the main historiographical paradigms to the subject before 1989 in both countries, whose fixation and whose deficits
weighed heavily upon the research direction chosen in this period.
From among these three aspects—the camps built for the German population, their resettlement, and the politics of nationality
towards former German citizens, who were then recognized as owners of Polish nationality and who could remain in their homes—the
article concentrates on the first one. The last few years saw the most fundamental revision concerning the camps for the German
population, and our knowledge is here relatively complete. It is worth underlining that most advances here have been achieved
by Polish historians from various disciplinary directions.
The waves of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s and 1940s uprooted millions of East-Central Europeans and forced them to make sense of new surroundings. The Polish settlers who replaced over three million Germans in the borderland of Silesia created a layered palimpsest of new, generally nationalized meanings on an unfamiliar territory. After exploring how and why Polish leaders and settlers reinscribed formerly German and Jewish sites of memory with Polish meanings, this article investigates how, when former residents returned to visit their lost homeland, both populations confronted the palimpsest's conflicting layers and unwittingly engaged in a transnational exchange of meanings.
'History, more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a stopped up toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.' Since February 2002 Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Günter Grass's latest book, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Walking like a crab: a novella), has offered these words of wisdom to several hundred thousand readers who have made Grass's book an immediate bestseller in Germany. With plans for the book to be translated into no fewer than thirty-one languages, Pokriefke's insights will soon be available to an international audience.