During his state visit to Warsaw in the winter of 1970, Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt down in front of the Ghetto monument and paused in a gesture of humbleness. This surprising image came to symbolize Germany's new Eastern Policy, which was based on the willingness to accept responsibility for the Nazi crimes and to recognize the inviolability of the borders drawn in 1945. At home, Brandt was accused of throwing away German claims to the lost eastern territories and betraying the millions of Germans expelled from the east after the war. Astoundingly, however, he found enough social support to continue his policy of reconciliation with Germany's eastern neighbors, as a consequence of which the country broke out of a long tradition of anti-Slavic resentments and imperial ambitions in central Europe. When and how did the change of perspective occur within the German society, without which Brandt's policy would have been impossible?

Two young scholars, Christian Lotz and Corinna R. Unger, have each in his or her own way asked this very question, and they have come to important observations. Within postwar Germany, a new vision regarding the relationship with eastern Europe developed far earlier than commonly assumed—namely in the second half of the 1950s, i.e., during a period of German history commonly perceived as politically and socially conservative and marked by a denial of any collective responsibility for the Nazi crimes. The books by Unger and Lotz suggest that this image of the 1950s needs to be reevaluated and differentiated.

Unger deals with the DFG, West Germany's central research funding organization, and the DFG's changing attitude toward the Ostforschung (eastern research), the heavily politicized research tradition developed after the Treaty of Versailles to support German territorial and political claims in eastern Europe with scholarly arguments. The book starts by demonstrating the almost seamless reestablishment of the Ostforschung in West Germany despite the fact that many of its protagonists were deeply compromised by their collaboration with the Nazis. Against the backdrop of the emerging Cold War and Germany's insistence on the illegitimacy of the Oder-Neisse line, their expertise regarding eastern Europe was still in demand. Most of them were able to continue their academic careers thanks to the support of the government and the academic community, including the DFG.

The DFG policy soon changed, however. Concerned with the reestablishment of high academic standards and the organization's political independence in reaction to universities' politicization during the Nazi period, the tradition of the Ostforschung was increasingly seen through critical eyes. Using the inside knowledge of the scientific community, DFG functionaries and referees began in the 1950s silently to marginalize representatives of the Ostforschung compromised by their support of the Nazis. In addition, they deprived certain methodological approaches and thematical preferences typical for the Ostforschung of further funding. In the end, the traditional Ostforschung had to retreat to some rather obscure institutions outside the universities, whereas inside German academia Ostforschung was transformed into east European-area studies, based on high scholarly standards, and the willingness to reflect on the discipline's problematic history and to overcome the anti-Slavic and Germanocentric approaches of the past.

Unger raises the interesting question of whether this process should be seen as a “de-politicization.” After all, research regarding eastern Europe remained political in Germany, only now its goal was no longer the support of German territorial claims in eastern Europe but of Brandt's policy of reconciliation with Germany's eastern neighbors—a positive but nevertheless political goal. With her impressive, thoroughly researched, and richly detailed study, Unger is very convincing that the transformation of the Ostforschung during the 1950s and 1960s was a small but important part of the general transformation of postwar Germany.

Choosing the same time period for his investigation, Lotz examines the changing historical interpretation of the lost east German territories and the loss itself both in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. For that purpose, he takes a closer look at three institutions: the Silesian Homeland Society (Schlesische Landsmannschaft) in West Germany as the largest political organization of expellees from Silesia; the GDR sponsored Helmut-von-Gerlach Society, founded in both German states to promote German-Polish reconciliation; and the successor organization of Silesia's Protestant Church that was also present on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The pragmatic focus on Silesia instead of the former east German territories as a whole makes sense despite the quite distinct character of the various regional expellee organizations. This limitation, however, should have been indicated more clearly in the book's title.

Like Unger, Lotz takes the mental continuities over the rupture of 1945 as the starting point for his discourse analysis. When the Silesian Homeland Society referred in 1952 in an official document to the expulsion of the Germans as “the most brutal crime against humanity” and to the Poles as “a people of a lower culture,” little seemed to have changed since the Nazi times. Yet, as Lotz demonstrates, not only representatives of GDR-sponsored institutions attacked these attitudes, which were so typical for many of the functionaries of the expellee organizations and presumably shared by many within the German society, but they also increasingly met criticism in both parts of Germany. In particular, representatives of the Protestant Church began early openly to address the question of German guilt and to promote the development of peaceful relations with Germany's eastern neighbors.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, these voices represented only a minority. According to Lotz, however, the tides changed in the decade between 1956 and the mid-60s. The process was supported by the fact that the “German question” lost part of its international importance and initial attempts were made to ease the conflict between east and west. In Germany itself, the integration of the expellees showed significant progress, and the generational change made it easier in West Germany to face up to the Nazi past. The German expellee organizations did not stop to fight for a revision of Germany's eastern borders and continued to deny any connection between German war crimes in eastern Europe and the expulsion of the Germans. Yet, less and less, they expressed a majority opinion. Instead, the support grew for those who called for a more honest approach toward the Nazi past, and who promoted the acceptance of the postwar territorial order and reconciliation with Germany's eastern neighbors. As a consequence, German society ceased to be split between east and west regarding the historical interpretation of the expulsion and the lost territories. Instead, the dividing lines within the related discourses began to run across West and East Germany (with the East Germans, of course, deprived of the possibility of openly expressing views that deviated from the GDR's official position).

Lotz's solidly researched and well-argued analysis offers important insights regarding the early process of coming to terms with the loss of Germany's former east, the expulsion of the Germans, and the relationship with Germany's eastern neighbors. He can also demonstrate that the discourses in both German societies on these questions should be seen as a single one. Particularly enlightening is Lotz's observation that the debate's two most opposing poles, the GDR government on the one hand, and the expellee organizations on the other, were structurally surprisingly similar when it came to their understanding of Silesia: by perceiving each statement regarding Silesia as either an argument for or against the postwar order, both sides clung to a highly national interpretation of the region's past. As stubbornly as the expellee organizations insisted on Silesia's historical Germanness, GDR functionaries insisted on the region's historical Polishness. Yet neither interpretation permitted the integration of the authentic but much more complex memories of Silesia's former and later inhabitants.

Through the lens of German perceptions of east central and eastern Europe, both books offer important new insights into the early stages of the mental and political transformation of postwar German society. They both make a strong point for the value of more research on the 1950s, which is a sometimes underrated, yet formative period of postwar German history. Given the solidity of their scholarship and the originality of their interpretations, one might ask whether a more narrative, less academic style would not make it easier for scholars such as Unger and Lotz to find the wide audience for their research that they deserve.