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.”Footnote 1
After the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in May 1949, expellee Landsmannschaften and Ostforscher (regional associations and scholars devoted to former German territories) regularly proclaimed that all expellees were united in the struggle for their Recht auf die Heimat (their “right to the homeland”). In official parlance, this Recht could only be satisfied through Heimkehr (or Rückkehr): literally the physical “return home” of millions of exiled Germans into territories on the other side of the Iron Curtain. East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and other lands that had constituted one-quarter of Germany's prewar territory had to revert back to the control of a reunified, noncommunist German state and be repopulated with their former inhabitants. While the 1937 borders appeared the most realistic legal demand, since they preceded Hitler's occupation of other countries, even this “minimal goal” was seldom enough for those such as Sudeten leaders, whose Heimat had been outside the 1937 borders. As Mathias Stickler observed, “the Memel region, Danzig, and West Prussia were also on the political Heimat wish list,” territorial objectives distinctly “rooted in the revisionist thoughts of the 1920s.”Footnote 2
Although such a strident revisionist platform can appear quixotic in the context of the time (with Berlin itself divided by Cold War superpowers), it is hard to overstate the political weight that these two phrases, Recht auf die Heimat and Heimkehr, carried in postwar West Germany. At rallies across the republic, at intimate meetings devoted to lost Heimat towns and regions, on the headlines of hundreds of expellee newspapers, spokespeople for the expellee cause demanded the satisfaction of their constituents' “right” to “return home.”Footnote 3 Revamping interwar rhetoric about national self-determination, they upheld Heimkehr as a fundamental human right.Footnote 4 Until the late 1960s, this platform enjoyed considerable attention from policy makers in Bonn, who believed that expellees, one-fifth of the West German population, really supported the demands of their spokespeople. Though in private Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had little interest in the return of Germany's East-Elbian lands, his administration and its successors routinely advocated for the expellee cause.Footnote 5 On the basis of human rights, his government pronounced in 1957 that Poland's western frontier on the Oder and Neisse rivers could not be recognized as the current or future border of Germany—an outlook that he and other political leaders regularly affirmed at expellee rallies.Footnote 6 At the annual East Prussian convention in 1960, Adenauer gave his usual speech that “the annexation of the German Eastern Territories and the expulsion of the German population are serious violations of human rights” and promised that, until a peace treaty was signed by a unified German government, “no one has a right to decide anything about this part of Germany.”Footnote 7 Even Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic chancellor who later signed the 1970 treaty confirming Poland's postwar borders, affirmed at a 1961 Silesian convention that “Silesia remains a German land in our consciousness,” meaning that West Germany would keep up the struggle for a “just border and the right to the Heimat.”Footnote 8 With the regime apparently behind them, thousands of revisionist lobbyists kept up their rhetoric that the expellee desire for Heimkehr would never die. “Should we ourselves never experience the day of the reunification” of Germany in its 1937 borders, Janssen continued in his speech of May 8, 1965, “the next generation will stand in our place.” All that was needed, he concluded, was “courageous and unflinching personalities, knowledgeable of the historical facts, convinced of our rights, and ready to be guides for our godchildren [unseren Patenkindern] until their return [Rückkehr] into the Heimat, however long and miserable this path may be.”Footnote 9
Taken on their own terms, the leadership's oft-repeated mantras raised the specter of imminent conflict over German irredenta, a repeat of Weimar in Bonn, whose consequences were terrifying to consider. Even with Allied troops on West German soil, could any form of stability have remained if one-fifth of the West German population had arisen as one to demand immediate Heimkehr? And if the expellee platform had succeeded, if millions of vengeful Germans had flooded back into eastern lands already resettled by Poles, Czechs, and Soviets, the cycle of violence between Germans and their eastern neighbors would have been perpetuated and possibly escalated to the next extreme: nuclear war. Peace in Europe depended upon the fact that expellees did not desire Heimkehr as leaders such as Janssen claimed. An examination of available expellee periodicals, correspondence, and archival materials demonstrates that in fact the concepts of Recht auf die Heimat and Heimkehr—the very slogans used by the expellee leadership—possessed divergent meanings among expellees and even the leaders themselves. By understanding the complex and at times even apolitical content of these terms, it becomes easier to explain the behavior of millions who helped to steer the course of postwar history.
Virtually all of the roughly nine million expellees who settled in West Germany insisted throughout their lives that they had a Recht auf die Heimat. Based on the ubiquitous boasts of expellee leaders in their periodicals, at rallies, and in the halls of power, most onlookers at the time simply presumed that this inalienable “right” had to mean Heimkehr, and that Heimkehr must be defined as a physical reverse-migration back to the lost German East. The paternalistic and openly revanchist claims of the expellee leadership were ascribed to all expellees. In July 1950, American historian Franz Neumann predicted that expellees would mass behind “Germany's new demagogues” to overthrow stability in central Europe.Footnote 10 By 1960, a columnist for the popular left-leaning magazine Der Spiegel feared a cataclysmic result if Adenauer and expellee leaders kept promising expellees that their Heimat would return to Germany. In his view,
not a single expellee leader would ever want to go back to the Heimat as it is now. Far more, “Recht auf die Heimat” signifies that the territories that were taken away from us must be stripped again of their present government and their present state. When it's more than an empty phrase, “Recht auf die Heimat” means the hope of violent upheaval,
which the writer was convinced would destroy Germany in nuclear war. In sum, “career expellees [Berufsvertriebenen] indisputably use hundreds of thousands of people as background scenery to stir up an unrealizable claim and instill in the masses the feeling of permanent injustice.”Footnote 11 Had their Recht auf die Heimat driven them to the same wild demands as their leaders, the masses could have made mayhem for the Federal Republic and world peace; into the 1970s and 1980s, millions of middle-aged and elderly expellees retained a strong sense of attachment to the world they had lost, and could still march and vote. Yet by 1970 only a few thousand expellee leaders marched to protest the essential end of West German claims to their lost Heimat in the East. Why did the expellee “background scenery” remain so docile as the political winds changed and the old Heimat was given away? The following article offers a new cultural-historical response to this political question, which has often elicited only an unsatisfactory economic answer. For though scholars have disproven the supposed “success” of expellee integration via the economic miracle, they have found insufficient alternative explanations to take its place in clarifying the lack of expellee radicalization.Footnote 12
In fact, when they reminisced with old relations at rallies, expellees were hardly massing to espouse the Heimkehr demanded by their demagogues. Not only did the phrase Recht auf die Heimat encompass far more than the territorial-revisionist claims of their supposed spokespeople, it even had the power to help them cope with the permanence of their exile. In the first place, Heimkehr was seldom implied when expellees invoked Recht auf die Heimat to demand recognition of the perceived injustice of expulsion or economic aid to satisfy their “right” to construct a new Heimat in the West. Recht auf die Heimat even served as a ground for domesticating the new Zuhause expellees found in the West—to plant islands of Silesia or East Prussia in Westphalia or Schleswig by striving to retain or invent old regional practices. When expellees did include Heimkehr as a part of their “right,” the desired “return home” seldom meant the reconquest of lost lands, much less a fresh wave of ethnic cleansing. More often, Heimkehr evoked politically unserviceable understandings, such as a figurative return to an idealized world of the past (insubstantial in the present and only capable of being possessed in memory) or the “return home” of ethnic Germans still living in the East to the remaining German lands in the West (a place few of them had ever seen). In essence, at least by the Spiegel columnist's politically charged definition, “Recht auf die Heimat” had become an “empty phrase” for a great many expellees long before 1960—“empty” of territorial-revisionist intentions, but rich in meanings that helped expellees grapple with loss amid their new environment.
These findings contribute to a small but growing collection of scholarship that has rejected Spiegel's unflattering view of the expellees. In his largely political analysis, Mathias Stickler revealed that, though expellee leaders retained much influence with West German politicians, they had already begun losing voters in the 1950s.Footnote 13 In his assessment of East and West German state and church responses to Silesians, Christian Lotz demonstrated that, by the mid-1960s, increasing economic integration and generational change had diminished the popular appeal of the politicized memory of flight and expulsion, leading to the expellee movement's increasing isolation.Footnote 14 In her assessment of more than two hundred expellee Heimatbücher, Jutta Faehndrich argued that expellees idealized their lost Heimat in diverse ways that seldom spoke to the leadership's politicized memory. Taking stock of a broad swathe of recorded cultural memories, she concluded that “the expellees did not exist and never existed. To speak here of a unified group is to reproduce a merely expedient, but hardly substantial construct of the media, political circles, and interest groups.”Footnote 15
Building on these works, I wish to help to rewrite the long-standing scholarly presumption that a “silent majority” of expellees had merely thought like the “career expellees” by distinguishing expellee leaders from the masses they claimed to represent.Footnote 16 In so doing, I also seek to reintegrate one-fifth of the postwar population's memories into the larger West German attempts to find a usable past after Nazism. Rejecting the notion that Germans ignored the past, I apply Alon Confino's useful observation that, rather than focusing entirely on what Germans chose to forget after the war, it is also important for scholars to analyze “what in fact they did remember.”Footnote 17 The influence of expellees on postwar West German memory was given initial treatment in Robert Moeller's illustration of the West German culture of victimhood. For Moeller, stories about expellee suffering infused popular culture in the early years of the Federal Republic and helped to shape “a public memory that permitted West Germans to acknowledge the war as part of their history and at the same time to distance themselves from the National Socialist state—a state that most Germans had supported and that bore complete responsibility for the war in Europe.”Footnote 18 While Moeller assessed how seven postwar West German Heimat films fostered victim narratives, Johannes von Molkte devoted a full monograph treatment to Heimat films as an escapist genre in Germany's violent twentieth century. Paralleling my own observation that the fantastic imaginary of the lost Heimat became an abstract object of desire among “homeless” expellees, von Moltke found that Heimat films allowed expellees to “indulge in nostalgia for a lost Heimat” at the same time that they helped them to imagine themselves “as the vanguard of postwar modernization” in their areas of settlement in West Germany.Footnote 19 As will be shown, expellee dreams of Heimat usually featured a bygone local world bounded by the contours of the neighborhood or village—in contrast to official narratives, which defended physical Heimat spaces lost in the East as an integral territory for the German Volk. While seldom a fully honest recollection of the past (like the broader postwar German Heimat culture, conspicuously avoiding references to larger historical events such as Nazism), the intimate Heimat imagery expellees chose to remember had the potential to scar over the wounds of forced migration.
Looking past the monolithic official narrative generated by the politically charged backdrop of Cold-War tensions and ethnic displacement, one discovers that the popular catchphrase Recht auf die Heimat contained a myriad of overlapping and even mutually exclusive meanings for the larger expellee population. This should not be surprising: German exiles from the East came from the full spectrum of society. They were former Nazis, communists, and adherents of every political color in between; Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; mothers, prisoners of war (POWs), infants, and old people; workers, pastors, farmers, and politicians. Each of these homesick individuals possessed a unique view on the “right to the homeland”: a returning POW typically overlooked wartime German racial violence but lacked firsthand experience of the Heimat's loss; an East Prussian housewife often fixated on her own suffering amid expulsion in 1945; and many Jewish Holocaust survivors recalled that the loss of their German-Jewish Heimat had begun in 1933, not 1945.Footnote 20 Despite their diverse pasts, however, all of them shared the common fate of exile, combined with often wistfully idealized memories of what the Heimat had been.
The fact that Recht auf die Heimat was open to multifaceted interpretations helps to clarify why statistical “proofs” relating expellee interest or disinterest in Heimkehr proved contradictory and unreliable. Depending on how questions were phrased, expellees might very well agree to Heimkehr in one poll, reject it in the next, and all the while presume that they had upheld their Recht auf die Heimat. Poll results in 1959 led two liberal central European émigré political scientists to assert that “expellees want to regain their former lands, properties, and social positions; about one-half seem willing to settle there again; and their aspirations have the approval, mild or strong, of many German voters.”Footnote 21 Two years later, the editors of Der Spiegel assessed another set of polls to conclude that “the ‘Recht auf Heimat’ has long been a trifling declamation: experts estimate that at most a million people would actually be ready to return back to the East. . . . What remains is a theoretical claim to the territory, which from year to year must become more questionable.”Footnote 22 Had millions of expellees simply given up on Heimkehr in the space of two years? What did it mean in 1959 when a mere thirty-five percent out of “1,000 eligible voters” declared their belief “that Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia will one day belong to Germany again” and were not “lost forever,” while that same year sixty-seven percent from a similar sampling of 2,000 by the same pollsters voted that West Germany “should not recognize” the Oder-Neisse border?Footnote 23 What was the point in refusing to recognize the border if the provinces themselves were lost forever? What did nine million West German expellees really want when they considered the lands they had lost in the East? By breaking down the expellee leadership's vaunted slogan Recht auf die Heimat and unraveling the many meanings of Heimkehr, this article approaches an answer.
To begin, it will be shown that, for both “career expellees” and their alleged constituents, Recht auf die Heimat always implied two fundamentally contradictory objectives: the right to a dignified existence in the West where expellees had settled, and the right to the lost Heimat in the East. As career expellees themselves feared at the time, each “right” tended to cancel the other out, and only the latter had the potential to encourage Heimkehr. To make matters worse, Heimkehr itself could imply any number of mutually incongruous meanings.
First, Heimkehr in its most popular form was restricted to the realm of the imagination: expellees regularly returned to the Heimat that only survived in their memories rather than to the physical provinces now under foreign rule. In poetry, diaries, and Heimat periodicals, expellees conjured up fantasies of return to an idealized past, which they preferred to an actual return to eastern spaces they imagined as alien, ravaged by war and neglect. In their minds, real Heimkehr would only spoil the warm memories they sought so hard to sustain.
A second meaning for Heimkehr was shared by hundreds of thousands of German-speaking “autochthons” in southern East Prussia and Upper Silesia, who unlike their expellee brethren did not leave the Heimat in the aftermath of the war. Turning the idea of Heimkehr on its head, they espoused their Recht auf die Heimat as the right to leave the homeland they had watched turn into a foreign country around them and to achieve Heimkehr to West Germany, a place many of them had never seen before.
Finally, although career expellees propounded the doctrine that Heimkehr must result in a return to the East, in their correspondence and publications outside mainstream society their public front of unity quickly broke down; career expellees themselves failed to concur on what Heimkehr would actually mean. By the early 1950s, small-time leaders were contending that a restoration of the 1937 borders would be unrealistic and protested the movement's conspicuous hesitance to discuss what was to become of the region's new Polish inhabitants. At times advocating Heimkehr to a land also inhabited by Poles, at times demanding fresh ethnic cleansing to fashion a segregated racial order in German favor, at times even envisioning Heimkehr to a new buffer state outside German or Polish jurisdiction, these extreme versions of Heimkehr were usually marginalized and ignored both by career expellees and expellees in general. “Realistic” schemes for Heimkehr desecrated the memory of what had been lost and could only truly be restored if it fantastically resurrected as it was imagined to have been before 1945.
As will be shown in the conclusion, dozens of other interpretations undermined the expellee political movement from within. So versatile was the “right to the Heimat” that many expellees continued to voice their sense of injustice for years after the 1970 treaty, even though over the preceding decades they had already adapted the notion of Heimkehr into forms that demonstrated their lack of interest in actual return and resettlement.
Two Versions of Recht auf die Heimat
The roots of the expellee political project were nourished in the ashes and ruins of the postwar western partition zones, where shared hardships after flight and expulsion stimulated a common sense among expellees that they were unheeded by West German society.Footnote 24 This was exacerbated by the westerners themselves, who felt that the influx of outsiders threatened their traditional status and values; with racism reminiscent of recent Nazi slurs against non-Germans, they derided expellees as inferior, cowardly, and antisocial “Gypsies” and “Polacks.”Footnote 25 As Allied observers noted at the time, this compelled expellees to cluster among themselves “to protect their interests and native ways.”Footnote 26 Church leaders and relatives sheltered expellees as best they could, but frustration and social instability were common over the first decade after the war.
To curtail potential radicalization and unrest among these millions when they became politically enfranchised in 1949, the fledgling West German government chose to allow overtly anticommunist expellee organizations to serve as spokespeople; most prominent were the twenty Landsmannschaften, each of which mobilized its own press, lobbies, and publications to pursue the interests of one of the lost eastern lands.Footnote 27 During the early years of the Federal Republic, the rising caste of career expellees enjoyed widespread support from an expellee constituency bereft of other advocates. By 1950, expellee leaders claimed that roughly one-quarter of West Germany's Silesian expellees had joined a Landsmannschaft.Footnote 28 Though revelations from Landsmannschaft archives have since shown that the number was much smaller (as of 1952, only 293,564 were members of the Silesian Landsmannschaft, and fewer of the Upper Silesian Landsmannschaft), it still represents a considerable crowd of people.Footnote 29 Meanwhile, a new expellee political party, the Block der Heimatvertriebenen (BHE), captured 23.4 percent of the vote in expellee-saturated Schleswig-Holstein in 1950 and 5.9 percent at the federal level in 1953.
If fewer and fewer expellees actually planned to undertake Heimkehr to the lost East through the late 1940s and 1950s (to say nothing of the 1960s), why did so many join expellee organizations, read their papers, attend their rallies, and vote for their politicians? Even if an expellee was offended by official rhetoric about border revision and mass resettlement, two principal (and contradictory) traits in the Recht auf die Heimat led many to grant at least mild, short-term support to “their” movement, especially during the first ten to fifteen years when it was by far at its strongest: economic questions and the commemoration of Heimat. Not only were both of these questions often perceived as separate from the idea of Heimkehr—contrary to the intentions of the leadership, they also competed with and weakened it.
Economic questions were regularly framed by career expellees as an integral part of their constituents' Recht auf die Heimat wherever they landed in the West. As Federal Expellee Minister Hans Lukaschek observed at the first federal meeting of Silesians in September 1950, “we will never forget our Silesian Heimat; we will always hold it faithfully in our hearts. This will help us to stand firm with both feet on the ground of reality and muster all of our strength for the construction of our new West German Heimat. Only when we have succeeded in this are we justified in expecting our common German fate to turn for the better.”Footnote 30 Having lost virtually all of their property in the East and suffering poverty in the West, expellees' first priority had to be the right to a roof and sustenance, and later economic means on par with West German natives. It was a goal that elicited broad support from expellees across the country, and career expellees worked tirelessly to achieve it. Perhaps their most momentous action was their highly visible part in the parliamentary debates over the Equalization of Burdens Law. Passed on September 1, 1952, the Lastenausgleichgesetz ordered a drastic redistribution of wealth: those who had lost less during the war were compelled to contribute resources federally redistributed principally for the benefit of refugees. By 1982, more than one hundred billion German marks had been generated to help millions of destitute West Germans start building a new Heimat in the West.Footnote 31 Shortly thereafter, the dawning of the West German “economic miracle” further improved expellees' economic standing, a turn of events Michael Schwartz claimed to have been even more decisive in the achievement of expellee economic integration.Footnote 32 While in actuality expellee politicians' typically unyielding rhetoric impeded the Lastenausgleich's smooth passage, they were nonetheless quick to take credit for its achievement. It was to be a brief moment of glory.
Henceforth, as expellees' most desperate material needs were met, their membership and enthusiasm in the expellee movement waned. While the CDU proved increasingly adept at appearing to be the mainstream alternative (e.g., through promoting aid such as the Lastenausgleich), support for the BHE in Schleswig-Holstein had dropped to fourteen percent by 1954, and federal support followed suit. By 1961, the BHE had to combine with another party and steadily faded from view. Support for the Silesian Landsmannschaft had dropped by more than half from 1952–1957, falling to only 117,000.Footnote 33 That same year, regional and Landsmannschaft organizations had to regroup and unite into the League of Expellees (BdV), which even at its founding (and high-water mark) could boast only 2.5 million members; as the BdV itself conceded that only 1.5 million members paid “full dues,” it is highly probable that these numbers were severely inflated.Footnote 34
For most expellees, the economic Recht auf die Heimat in the West did not merely trump the right to return to the East—the two “Rights” became “contradictory politics.”Footnote 35 Why should expellees desire a return to the East if their advocates had already helped them satisfy their right to a Heimat in the West? Career expellees strove in vain to overcome the negating effect of their economic program. On the eve of the Lastenausgleich legislation in 1952, Lukaschek lauded the coming economic help that he and his colleagues were said to have won for their constituents, but lost no time in adding that Germany's reacquisition of its lost eastern territories remained a matter of economic and historical necessity.Footnote 36 That such rhetoric failed to convince expellees to plan for physical Heimkehr to the lost territories should not, however, imply that they forgot the lost East as they settled in across the West. Expellees regularly agreed that the loss of their former homes constituted a grave injustice (though seldom naming the German wartime atrocities that had caused it), a precept that remained entrenched in their second conception of the Recht auf die Heimat: the need for vigilant commemoration of the world they had lost.
Alongside their hopes for help amid economic woes, many expellees welcomed the emergence of their organizations in 1949 as a means to ensure that their culture was still alive and important.Footnote 37 In recognition that expellee commemorative needs were just as vital as economic wants, the 1953 Federal Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) included federal and state support for the transmission of “cultural materials about the regions of expulsion into the consciousness of the expellees and refugees, the whole German people, and foreign lands.”Footnote 38 Thus from the start, the “right to the homeland” in the East became grounded in commemorative symbols and practices, a means to sustain a sense of identity amid everyday uprootedness in a foreign western environment. In histories, picture books, schoolbooks, and Heimat books devoted to intimate spaces lost across the Iron Curtain, career expellees sought to embed the commemorative Recht auf die Heimat with the politically useful notion that an idyllic and well-ordered German East lived on, just waiting to be recovered and resettled. Even after the profound political setback of the Berlin Wall in 1961, expellee leaders published a textbook to “educate” all Germans, especially the youth, about an inherently German East, which they contrived into an image more vibrant and utopian than it had ever been.Footnote 39 A 1963 picture book of Germany Yesterday and Today presented regions beyond the Oder and Neisse rivers as devoid of human habitation and frozen in the ether of memory—a gorgeous German world of natural wonders, order, and culture where Grünberg's Silesian wines were still better than Saxon varieties, and the Schneekoppe mountain retained its immortal German essence.Footnote 40
By the late 1960s, expellee groups had erected almost five hundred monuments across West Germany to commemorate the expulsion and lost territories; street names, town squares, newly constructed neighborhoods and cities, and even commemorative postage stamps adopted the names of people and places from the East.Footnote 41 West German states and cities also took on Patenschaften (sponsorships) for lost regions and cities. To promote its Patenstadt Jauer in Silesia, Herne in the Ruhr region promoted the creation of Jauer street, a large wall mural with a silhouette of the Jauer townscape, Jauer Heimat maps, a Jauer Heimat room, and a “German East” bookstore.Footnote 42 The word Paten, more typically translated as “godparent,” also implied a sanctified meaning. By calling expellees his Patenkinder or “godchildren,” Janssen was evoking the intimate bond he felt between Silesian, East Prussian, or Pomeranian exiles and their new “godparent” lands in the West. Expellee “godchildren” stranded in the West often came to appreciate the very soils of specific West German “godparent” towns as surrogate Heimat spaces.Footnote 43
Ultimately, the monuments and commemorative practices supported through the Patenschaften did as much to root an uprooted population in its new western Zuhause as it did to keep alive invented traditions about the lost Heimat in the East—traditions that themselves offered a sense that the continuity of Heimat could be recovered in exile without ever resorting to a reverse migration. In this light, to claim that expellees' commemorative Recht auf die Heimat embodied a firm belief in Heimkehr as reconquest and resettlement would be to entirely misunderstand how most expellees saw this other half of their “right.” Certainly career expellees urged their “godchildren” at rallies in Patenstädte never to surrender their right for Heimkehr to the East; but those gathered tended to use the venue as a way to find old friends and cherish traces from the old Heimat around them in the West. Through speeches, histories, and monuments, career expellees sought to stimulate a desire for physical return; but they could not control how diverse individuals in the mass of expellees interpreted and used this raw material. This was only fair, and to be expected—the career expellees themselves had twisted varied grassroots depictions and traditions of the old Heimat for their own political purposes. Expellees had little trouble adapting them again for their own needs, often to find consolation and healing after the trauma of loss and displacement.Footnote 44 Gazing at picture books, they repossessed the lost Heimat in the fondness of their memories. Adopting surrogate Heimat spaces in their “godparent” cities, they felt new rootedness in the West due to their sustained spiritual ties with the East. Looking upon a sapling from Silesia replanted at an expellee ceremony in Siegburg or strolling down the Sudetenstraße in Marburg, expellees could steadily grow accustomed to exile, consoled that they could retain all of the most pleasant aspects they remembered without ever having to face the grim realities of change in their old Heimat. So it was that, by facilitating commemorative gatherings and creating icons devoted to the lost East, career expellees unintentionally helped their constituents believe that it was still possible to possess the Heimat they most desired—the Heimat of their idealized memories—without ever leaving the West.Footnote 45 In the end, each expellee's cherished Heimat of memory could only be truly threatened if he or she attained what the leadership claimed they most wanted: physical return.
Heimkehr #1: Returning Home to the Heimat of Memory
For decades after their flight and expulsion from Breslau in Silesia, alumnae from a girl's high school used circular letters to keep in touch and exchange memories. In her entry for August 15, 1958, Eva-Maria Schlaak implored her former classmates never to return to their lost homeland, but rather to preserve it,
beautiful in your recollection, as it resides in your memory. I went through the streets of Breslau [in 1945] and must confess that I only cried, because everything that was beloved and valued has been annihilated. Our beautiful, beloved dormitory was totally burned out. From the marketplace to the southern park, only the town hall, the opera house, and the postal administration building still stand! Can you imagine that?! No, [you should] prefer to indulge in memories.Footnote 46
For Schlaak, who had seen the changes in Breslau with her own eyes, only a figurative Heimkehr could be desirable. Only through regular returns to the safe and intangible Breslau of her dreams could she and her classmates possess the world they still yearned for in their hearts.
After leafing through thirteen hundred letters and thirty-three volumes of circular letters she had solicited from aging Breslau classmates such as Schlaak, Juliana Braun noticed that “Rückkehr to Silesia was ruled out very quickly, along with the hope of seeing the Heimat again, though their homesickness didn't die away for some time.”Footnote 47 Though it was not Braun's objective to analyze this curious concurrence of homesickness and disinterest in Heimkehr, my own examination of expellee publications and memoirs has left me convinced that an expellee's ardent longing for lost spaces actually diminished his or her desire for physical return. While like their leaders expellees routinely rejected any “renunciation” (Verzicht) of the Heimat, their commemorative Recht auf die Heimat carried them into a collective memory world that counteracted the official view on Heimkehr. Much as Svetlana Boym has observed that “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy,” so, too, the expellee “Heimat of memory” became a collective nostalgia ever colored by the shared trauma of loss, the constant yearning for a dear world they had only idealized once it was gone.Footnote 48 Artifacts such as old stories, photographs, and costumes remained the only tactile connections with this world they could never touch again—a timeless utopia in the East cleansed of the stain of Nazism, a realm that had never really existed. Retreats into the Heimat of memory became that much more urgent when images, stories, or travel exposed them to its inverse, the “Heimat transformed” in the former areas of German settlement. Just as invented, the contemporary, physical realm of the lost East loomed larger than life in expellee imaginations as a foreign and undesirable space of communist and Slavic mismanagement where they would never want to reside again.Footnote 49
The advent of Heimkehr as a figurative desire can be traced to the time of the expulsion itself, when millions of expellees such as Schlaak witnessed the drastic changes in the East firsthand and spread word among old neighbors in the West that there could be no return to the Heimat they had cherished.Footnote 50 Meanwhile, in western exile, pastoral circular letters documented evolving views on Heimkehr on a monthly, even weekly, basis. Before political associations were legalized in 1949, church groups forged the strongest sense of community for expellees. Without any sign of a future economic miracle and with the memory of expulsion still fresh, Catholic and Protestant pastors alike observed a prevalent sense of uprootedness and nostalgia in their communities that constantly prompted questions about Heimkehr and what it could mean. Responding to letters he had received by May 1947 that “spoke urgently time and again of the burning wish and cry of yearning for the Heimat,” Norbert Hettwer urged his Silesian flock to remember that
as justified and understandable as this wish may be, for the time being its fulfillment remains uncertain . . . we mustn't give in to false, exaggerated hopes, we don't want to lose ourselves in reveries and castles in the air. And we must never forget that, if we were ever allowed to return, our Heimat is no longer the land that we hold in our memories. Our Heimat no longer looks as it did when we had to leave it.Footnote 51
To face the “inexorable facts” of exile and the Heimat's transformation, he urged his old congregation to forge new ties as exile communities in the West.Footnote 52 The picture was similar for Leo Machinek. During a gathering of his old Upper Silesian congregation near Kassel in October 1948, he often heard the question, “when can we go back home?” His response was a sober one: “The spatial Heimat does not have the greatest value. Even if we were in our Heimat lands today, we would not feel at home. All the dear people who are intimate to us are part of the Heimat. Today, they are scattered around the world.” In light of this reality, he encouraged his flock to sustain their “spiritual Heimat within” by helping one another and “retaining the customs and dialect of the Heimat.”Footnote 53 Nearly all expellee pastors passed through a comparable process: the lost Heimat was perceived as more foreign and undesirable by the day, while hope for return steadily faded, replaced by yearning for spiritual Heimkehr to the intransient, unfading Heimat of memory. Letters to pastors and memoirs attest to the fact that some expellees adopted this outlook early on; by the 1950s, a plethora of private and published reflections reveal that a desire for Heimkehr to the Heimat of memory had become truly commonplace.
A career expellee might have liked the first half of Maria Anders's reflections after five years of economic integration into the West. Even though “much need has diminished, much suffering has been forgotten,” she insisted that even now “the yearning for the Heimat will not be silent, it is not permitted to be silent!” As expellees looked upon their new environment, “for us, each mountain is only an image of the mountains of Heimat, each birdsong an echo of the full spring choirs of our forests and groves, and each measure of affluence only speaks to what we have lost.” When springtime came, “the blooming life doesn't come inside of us, it remains cut off, foreign, and outside, as though we were seeing it in a film. It doesn't belong to us.” Such yearning could not, however, be satisfied by “those who have taken it upon themselves to be advisors and representatives of the expellees” if their political goal of border revision brought them “to forget the immediate necessities that living hearts have for today and tomorrow: we need the feeling of Heimat to be able to work joyously and with strength.” To achieve this, expellees had to retain their “essence” as Germans from the East: “in love and pride, in yearning and faithfulness, we remain what we were in the Heimat.” Thus, in stark contrast to career expellee wishes, she urged expellees to see that there was “no sense to keep turning to look back. We need all of our attention, unclouded and clear, to rebuild our lives here.” Anders vowed to “truly live” in her new Heimat, attentive to its history and traditions, at the same time that she never renounced the Heimat she remembered and would always carry in her heart.Footnote 54
Sustaining the Heimat of the heart fed a whole genre of love poetry dedicated to the lost East. Seldom interested in physical resettlement, its overwhelming obsession was with Heimkehr as an imagined spiritual return, journeys to a land disconnected from the transformed contemporary Heimat to which they could never return, lest it corrupt their memories and alienate them from the very world they longed for. As the famed Upper Silesian Heimatdichter Hans Niekrawietz penned in a 1954 Landsmannschaft pamphlet:
everything is a return back [Wiederkehr], everything is memory. I don't complain about property, not about wall portraits and books and writings and things that might seem to salvage a world. Because, despite their loss, that world has not ceased to exist. These years of yearning and sadness have only deepened its spiritual reality. . . . And so whenever I find it possible in my everyday life, I go over the Bridge of Memory, and my mind's eye recognizes each cobblestone in the streets of my Heimatstadt again. I see every sign of wound and disgrace from its destruction, but even more strongly I see the image of what it once was, intact and glowing forth despite all the destruction. Because just as a beloved person harmed by catastrophe can still appear unchanged in the eyes of his dear ones, so the old form of the Heimat lives on everlasting in the scenes of faithful reflection and in the glint of a halo that time and suffering have cast about it. Perhaps this glint has even sharpened the contours of things for me. Because with almost painful clarity I can see them: the streets and houses, the towers and bridges, and among them the flowing river, my stream, my Oder, which in happy times I sang about like a lover and loved like a mother, and which calls me back from distant and foreign lands.Footnote 55
At this point, Niekrawietz figuratively reentered his Heimat. In his mind's eye, he ventured along the Oder River and gazed once more upon “the eternal mountains and forests, the veins of the Oder with their numerous tributaries,” all the way to Upper Silesia itself, still dear in spirit, though in reality he saw it as lost, transformed by the war and its aftermath “into a steppe and fallow land.” The Asiatic vision led him to conclude, “Memory is rebirth. Rebirth of the spirit. And this becomes something imperishable [Unvergänglichkeit].” Through Heimkehr to his Heimat of memory, by nourishing “knowledge about its lingering reality,” he found strength and hope despite his exile.Footnote 56
This figurative Heimkehr, this “calling back” to the pristine lands of memory notwithstanding the alienating changes known to impede the possibility of actual return, saturated expellee writing about the Heimat in the 1950s.Footnote 57 This was Heimkehr to a paradise outside history, miraculously whitewashed from Nazism and German crimes, but also seldom tainted by rhetoric about revenge and reconquest. It was a means of coping with loss and moving on, mobilizing an invented past to find healing in the present. The journeys could be excruciating in their detail. In his enormously popular 1948 book (reprinted in 1949, 1968, and 1982), Wolfgang von Eichborn carried his fellow expellees through an entire year of make-believe “journeys” through Silesia: to the Riesengebirge mountains at the onset of spring, throughout his house and garden in Breslau, across the plains and through castles and cloisters during the summer, along the Oder River in the fall, and finally out of the fairytale itself and into the grim ruins of reality in icy January, a replay of expulsion and the realization that the Heimat could only be grasped through memory. Such a tragic end did not engender complaint, however, but was crafted into a commission: to ensure that “the heartbeat of the Heimat lives in the hearts of its children, of all who wander through the landscapes of their yearning in the still hours of thankful memory.”Footnote 58
The ferment of melancholic nostalgia could reach such a point that it transcended the earthly realm altogether. After fourteen years apart from her beloved Lüben, which lay just a few kilometers on the Polish side of the Neisse River, Zoe Droysen expressed her certainty in a 1959 poem aptly entitled “Heimkehr” that heaven itself would resemble her Heimat of memory.
In the hour of my death, I will go home, and at the pearly gates, God will stand waiting for me. Then I will recover from my homelessness, and everything that once was will spread around me. God will wait for me with a smile, and I will walk with him through the old garden, enshrouded by his blessing. In the holy spaces of the Heimat, he will then cradle me in sleep. And I want to lie in deep dreams, tranquil on [God's] heart.Footnote 59
Asleep in the peace of death after a lifetime of remembering, Droysen could at last be reunited with the paradise she imagined within her lost garden in Lüben.
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, the trend continued with little change. In 1960, the editors of a typical Heimat book expressed hope that their publication would facilitate many “theoretical journeys” back to their old hometown Liegnitz.Footnote 60 After Khrushchev's thaw made limited travel into contemporary Poland possible, many expellees explicitly rejected the idea of a real return journey in favor of a pleasant Heimkehr into memory, truly the only place where their Heimat still existed.Footnote 61 By Christmas 1964, Bruno Otto wrote to his Heimat paper urging his old neighbors to keep on holding the Heimat in their hearts. Without mention of the contemporary spaces of western Poland or the career expellees' political tirades, he summoned an “inner light kindled by the memory of Heimat and youth in our yearning souls. Immersed in this magical light, I see my Heimatdorf in the peace of snowy Christmas.” Overlapping with mental imagery of ruins still filling his village from the war (cleared away, of course, by Polish settlers he never acknowledged), he imagined his old church and his parents' house still standing as before: a collage of the two Heimat images, the dear world he yearned for and the tragic warning that it was lost.Footnote 62 His wife Elfriede complemented his memory vignette with a poem called “homesickness” (Heimweh):
Everything is so still in me, when at twilight I [venture] through the dark and distant forests [and] find myself home once more. Everything is so holy to me when I stand at the graves, pray in the Heimat church, and walk the old paths. Everything becomes so joyful in me, hear the bells of the Heimat ring! Heimat, are you calling us to you? Does this signify our Heimkehr? Oh, everything is raw in me. It's just a dream, and dreams fade away. So long as I live, I will certainly never find my Heimat again.Footnote 63
Until her ascent into the heavenly Heimat, Heimkehr was only possible in memory; tactile reunion with the world she desired could never be possible.
Heimkehr #2: Going “Home” to West Germany
A second form of Heimkehr moved in a westward rather than an eastward direction. Between 1955 and 1970, approximately 370,000 German-speaking natives emigrated from Poland's annexed territories to West Germany.Footnote 64 They yearned to escape from their old Heimat to reach the Reich (a word easterners historically used to denote the core of the old Holy Roman Empire) and felt little sympathy for a definition of Heimkehr that ran in the opposite direction. A woman still living in Beuthen summed up the general mood in her 1952 letter to an old colleague in West Germany:
Because I have work, I've automatically been a Polish citizen since January 1, 1951. A great many spouses live here with their children, and they would gladly move to Germany to their husbands, though until now they have not been allowed to leave. Why must we suffer so? The beautiful, good old times certainly won't come again. Really, one was so ungrateful. Here we only work and work. Wages are few, everything is expensive.
She was brought to tears seeing once reputable neighbors begging at the church door. In her dreams, West Germany would be a land without beggars, a paradise where “one is permitted to speak German, hears only German in church, and at performances, films, and events, everything is in German! God, that must be glorious.”Footnote 65
This was not the first time that eastern Germans had migrated “home” to the Reich. Not long before, Hitler inaugurated the ethnic cleansing of World War II in 1939 by calling on ethnic Germans to come Heim ins Reich. Due to a bilateral treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and motivated by fear of the coming Soviet occupation, more than 60,000 Baltic Germans and 132,950 Germans from eastern Poland arrived in the Reich by the end of the year, many transplanted onto newly annexed territories in central Poland ethnically cleansed of their Polish and Jewish populations.Footnote 66 A 1941 Nazi film called Heimkehr presented Poles, played by Gestapo and SS actors, as savage oppressors forcing ethnic Germans to flee “home” to the Reich, where at last they could thrive on “German soils” (thus rewriting history to make the brutal Nazi invasion of 1939 a rescue mission to “save” German minorities). By January 1944, the number of ethnic Germans coming “home” had reached 750,000.Footnote 67 But when the war drew to its apocalyptic finish in 1945, the meaning of Heimkehr transformed. No longer implying the colonization of a greater German Reich established on conquered lands in the East, it embodied the hope of millions of eastern Germans even inside Germany's 1937 borders for escape to the truncated Reich in the West—a world that few of them had ever seen before, but that they imagined would offer the Germanness and prosperity they missed in the East.
Though after 1949 the expellee leadership had turned Heimkehr around to denote a “return” to eastern areas of settlement, the previous idea remained strong among German-speakers still scattered through the former eastern territories. Weary of foreign subjugation and increasingly convinced that their Heimat would never return to Germany, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans proved eager for “expulsion” from eastern Europe through the late 1940s, and from 1949 onward the Upper Silesians and East Prussian Masurians who constituted the bulk of the remaining native population tended to feel the same. These were often bilingual people with a fluctuating national identity, which allowed the Polish authorities to claim that they were in fact autochthonous Slavic populations who had simply forgotten their Polishness. Feeling trapped in their former homelands amid intensive polonization campaigns through the years of high Stalinism, most of the Masurians and thousands of Upper Silesians decided once and for all that they were Germans and fled to the truncated Reich.
Despite their medieval Slavic heritage, the Protestant Masurians had been steadily integrating into a German cultural milieu for hundreds of years, a trend that had culminated in an overwhelming vote for Germany in the 1920 East Prussian plebiscite. Alienation from their Heimat had already begun in earnest during the last months of the war, due to the understandably intense anti-German sentiment prevalent among Polish settlers. The East Prussian Landsmannschaft itself captured the mood by printing an eyewitness account from a “German journalist” who visited the area in 1956: “One can be certain that these ‘autochthones’—above all the Masurians—are Germans; that they think, speak, and feel like Germans; that they would never choose to become Polish; and that they yearn for the day when they can live again under a German government.”Footnote 68 These predictions came true, but not as the Landsmannschaft would have preferred. While career expellees intended such passages as a plea for the return of the territories to (West) German control, the sudden opportunity for emigration in 1956 prompted most Masurians to flee to the remaining German territories. As Andreas Kossert observed, “their German identity meant more to them than their traditional Heimat, and so they voted with their feet against acceptance of Poland.”Footnote 69 Of the 80,000 Masurians who had remained in southern East Prussia in 1950, no more than 10–15,000 remained in 1980.Footnote 70
Upper Silesians who managed to flee in the mid-1950s begged the West German government for help in getting their loved ones out of the Heimat. For months through the mid-1960s, Franz Nagel sent letters to the Federal Ministry for All-German Questions pleading for aid in securing his brother Heinrich's emigration from Groß Strehlitz.Footnote 71 For four years, Christa-Maria Skopek's brother tried to escape from Upper Silesia with his family and was ultimately forced to settle in communist East Germany, far from his elderly mother in West Germany. How embarrassing (beschämend) that “we bring herds of foreign workers into our land,” she fumed, when Germans “could have enough of our own people.”Footnote 72 Letters from the diminished native population testified to a sense of abandonment. In 1965, Otto Krimmer wrote from Upper Silesia:
Every day, one follows the radio and finds nothing mentioned about us. Has the German government forgotten us? Or does it want to forget us? We really don't want to be forgotten. We were Germans and want to remain Germans in the future. I beg the German government and also the German Red Cross to step in for the Germans who have remained behind, who have the greatest wish to be liberated.Footnote 73
Krimmer didn't want Bonn to step in and conquer Upper Silesia; he wanted Heimkehr to West Germany. Terrified that this migration in the “wrong” direction would undermine German claims to the region, career expellees often sought to oppose it. When the International Red Cross first announced its plan to assist Germans who wanted to emigrate from Poland, expellee leaders declared it “a new European scandal.”Footnote 74 But such a rigid view failed to stem the tide of “autochthonous” immigration. Weary of foreign rule, desperate to see their friends and family again, and attracted by the West German economic environment, they pinned their hopes on Heimkehr to the West.
Heimkehr #3: The Official View and its Discontents
As early as 1950, the Silesian priest Georg Siegmund attacked career expellees for misrepresenting the Recht auf die Heimat and Heimkehr. Writing in a major Catholic expellee paper, he recounted how “an influential man from the financial office of the Glatz expulsion camp collected his fellow villagers around himself and declared to them with a loud voice, ‘I tell you, in fall of this year we will be home!’” It was truly “shameful,” Siegmund continued, that:
such people's prophets [Volkspropheten] are hard at work turning cheap sentimentality to feelings of irritation and yearning for revenge. They inflame the masses with an “enthusiasm” that they celebrate with them. We certainly don't need to give away our Recht auf die Heimat, we are certainly permitted to denounce this injustice as such and demand restitution, but not in ways that threaten to bring about new injustice.Footnote 75
Through the 1950s and 1960s, a great number of West German commentators seconded this dire view of the expellee leadership. As a leader in the German-Polish Society of West Germany and regular visitor to Poland, the journalist Hans Joachim Orth sought to humanize Polish society and imply that Polish settlers and their descendants in the lost German territories had a Heimatrecht of their own. Regular harassment by expellee leaders frustrated him: “Whoever preaches of an imminent Heimkehr to the expelled eastern Germans conjures up not just new dangers but also new injustice; he also overlooks every reality and possibility.”Footnote 76 Communist East German authorities joined the diverse opposition to the expellee leadership's vision of Heimkehr. In 1949, the president of an association for friendship with Poland denounced the “criminal clique of West German ‘politicians,’” who sought to talk expellees (here referred to as Polish emigrants, Aussiedler) “into believing that a life and livelihood is only possible in Pomerania or Silesia and induce them to remain sitting on packed suitcases, waiting for the Rückkehr or even to move toward war once again.” He advised West German “resettlers” (Umsiedler) to follow the alleged example of East Germans and “take hold of their new Heimat earth, as had the millions of farmer's sons who migrated to cities before.”Footnote 77
Yet did expellee politicians, scholars, newspaper editors, and other leaders truly form such a solid front about what Heimkehr itself would mean? Much as their diverse opponents may have envisioned them as a common chorus of “people's prophets,” whose shrill song of revanchism must be silenced, great discord was evinced, especially through the early 1950s when the official calls for Heimkehr were strongest. First, they were a motley band with questionable pasts: disproportionately ex-Nazi, some of them had only lived in the East for a few years, a few of them never at all. Helmut Janssen himself had no relation to his expellee “godchildren.” The Hanover politician and Patenschaft advocate had only visited East Prussia as a retreating Wehrmacht soldier in 1945, when he had witnessed the flight of thousands of expellees firsthand; this had later inspired his ardent desire to attend every Landsmannschaft meeting and represent what he thought was a common interest in physical Heimkehr.Footnote 78 Second, however, though in public they called for the restoration of an eternally ordered German paradise in the borders of 1937, in private impassioned debates arose about what Heimkehr itself really meant. Frustration was rife that the official view of Heimkehr was too impractical ever to be achieved, and a wide range of proposals offered “realistic” alternatives. Some demanded the expulsion of all Polish settlers from the lost territories, others resettlement alongside them, still others the creation of a multicultural Polish-German borderland.
The leadership's supposed unity on the issue of Heimkehr proved especially vulnerable when the question arose of what was to be done with the Polish settlers on former German lands. Vague or muted intimations tended to predominate the rare scenarios for actual Heimkehr, sanitized without mention of further expulsions, even purporting that the Poles would be grateful. Silesian youth pastor Joachim Engelmann assured his readers that, despite the “tricky questions” of damage inflicted on Poland during the war and the expellee “right” to compensation for the eastern territories, there was “a certain community of interest” between both people. Unwittingly adapting Nazi stereotypes to include Poles among the chosen master race, he professed their common need to expel the Russian, “Mongol” scourge that had destroyed a joint historic German-Polish project to “civilize the East.”Footnote 79 To attain this, he urged for the nonviolent creation of a free and independent Poland constricted to the borders of 1937.Footnote 80 Apart from such naïve and hazy proposals, leaders preferred not to discuss the fate of the Polish settlers at all, because the only major options—resettlement alongside Poles or the expulsion of Poles—struck a fatal blow to both the notion that the idealized past could be restored and the moral rectitude of the expellee movement.
One of the most heated debates over the question of Polish settlers resulted from a statement by the Silesian expellee Paul Löbe, the Bonn parliament's heralded elder statesman, who had served as German Reichstag president throughout most of the Weimar era and suffered repeated persecution for his active resistance to Nazism. At first, Löbe upheld the official view. In a June 13, 1950, speech to the Bundestag, he opposed East Germany's ratification of the Oder-Neisse border and rejected any “politics of renunciation” on the grounds that the eastern territories “remain a part of Germany.”Footnote 81 In 1952, he wrote loving reminiscences about Liegnitz in the Heimat paper and assured his old neighbors that, though much had been ruined, fond memories “strengthen our hope and our will to make the land of our fathers back into our Heimatland as it once was.”Footnote 82 The storm of controversy arose when, during a 1953 speech at the fourth Schlesiertreffen in Cologne, he added that, of course, in the event of Heimkehr, returning Germans would have to learn to live together with the Poles.Footnote 83
Responses flowed in from local Heimat leaders. At one extreme, some Heimkehr advocates rejected coexistence entirely, citing the trauma of living among Poles in the former German East in the immediate aftermath of the war; for this minority, “justice” could only mean Heimkehr to a Heimat violently restored to what they imagined it to have been. Franz Seifert called Löbe's words a “whipping in the face”; his wife had remained in the East until June 1946 and (he asserted) knew well that there could be no neighborly relations with Poles. “If we return to the Heimat,” he promised, then “no ‘newly settled’ Pole can remain there.” After western occupiers had ensured that the Poles did not destroy everything (an allusion to the fantasy that all destruction in the old Heimat had a Slavic origin), “then our thrust back would begin.”Footnote 84 In much the same terms, Herbert Schmitt decried a more moderate leader's response for “a German-Polish partnered state” as a sure way to provoke nationalist conflict, and rejected any “sentimental romanticism” that Heimkehr could happen peacefully. The only answer was for Poles to be “cleared” from the eastern territories.Footnote 85 Long after, extremist fringe groups such as Aktion Oder-Neiße (AKON) made similar demands for renewed ethnic cleansing, even citing the doctrines of human rights in their defense. AKON went so far as to assert that an expulsion of Polish settlers would be far more humane than what had happened to the Germans before.Footnote 86
In contrast, a comparatively moderate Bunzlau career expellee agreed with Löbe that, once the land had been divvied out to Germans, “enough property without owners will remain on hand for members of foreign European nations,” because, he admitted, “the number of those able and willing to return will not be sufficient to fill the old German Lebensraum back in completely.” In his letter to the Heimat paper, he declared that the Recht auf die Heimat could only be satisfied if all property were returned to its former owners. Nonetheless, while he predicted that “we or our children will be able to return to our Heimat,” he also accepted that many would opt not to undertake Heimkehr. As a result, “the conditions and forms of life will be completely different,” because “the wheel of world history never allows itself to be turned backward.”Footnote 87
This sober interpretation had already been upheld by numerous expellee leaders over the preceding years. In 1952, Ludwig Landsberg had also expressed that “the circle of time is not to be turned back. The [former] way of life has been conclusively lost.” In advocating for a “Rückkehr without illusion,” he reproached other expellee leaders for “whipping up feelings that can never be fulfilled” just to create a cheap following:
one has to have the courage not to keep from the expellees that there can perhaps be a return to the East but never a return to the Heimat. Otherwise, one would feel the deepest disappointment never to find again what he had left: the Heimat, the old neighborhood community, his existence, his property, the surroundings of his life.
He berated expellees for dwelling “in passivity, in the memory of a better past” and getting comfortable in the West, but could not deny (and urged his fellow leaders to accept) that as a result few actually wished for actual Heimkehr:
Not all expellees will return, perhaps not even the majority. Though most of the elderly yearn for the old Heimat, many of them will remain here, because there, where the work of pioneers must succeed, there is no space for old people. Many of those who have in the meantime found an existence here, who have no reason to return, will also remain here. Why should the Upper Silesian miner leave the Ruhr region again, where he has found the same work and better living conditions than the East can offer him? Why should the agricultural worker from the East [return] who has in the meantime gone into industrial labor? Why should all of the others who had nothing, came here with nothing, and found their bread here? Only mass unemployment could expel them again.Footnote 88
Because expellees as a whole could not be counted upon to reconquer the East, Landsberg demanded that the whole German Volk “fulfill its world mission for the resettlement and contribution in the eastern European Raum.” But again he faltered; like most expellees, he did not believe in “a retribution of robbery through robbery, expulsion through expulsion, blood through blood.” So he concluded with softened expectations comparable to Löbe that Germans must be “ready to live and work together with the people who have in the meantime come to take possession of the land.” He admitted that “something in us rebels against . . . this honest account,” but it was, he felt, the only practical Heimkehr possible.Footnote 89
When considering the fate of Polish settlers, only a few leaders inserted autochthonous populations into the equation. Through the early 1950s, Theodor Kapitza's intimate if isolated O/S Aktion proposed a deeply regionalized, Upper Silesian vision of Heimkehr. While Upper Silesians had fostered a unique identity early on (a separate Upper Silesian Landsmannschaft was created in 1950), Kapitza went much further in his Piasten Kurier, a journal whose subtitle explicitly called “for the Heimkehr to Upper Silesia.” In continuity with local independence movements dating back to the Upper Silesian plebiscite of 1921, his group demanded the creation of an independent Upper Silesia, dominated by a Szlonzok dialect-speaking population that shared both German and Polish roots and cultural traits, and it attacked the Landsmannschaft vision of Heimkehr, comparing any proposal for settling Germans in Upper Silesia to Hitler's plan to degrade Slavs and transform Upper Silesia into “a raped [vergewaltigte] colony settled with [German] foreigners [Landfremden].”Footnote 90 Kapitza openly denounced mainstream leaders such as Hans Lukaschek, who had abandoned their once strong Upper Silesian loyalties in favor of German revisionism.Footnote 91 Mainstream Upper Silesian Heimat papers responded with ridicule, attacking Kapitza as an interwar idealist still out of touch: “Once more these people perch themselves as a representative between two chairs,” one commentator scoffed. “That's a place where one doesn't sit very well and then falls to the ground.”Footnote 92 As punishment for its rejection of the privileged official narrative, O/S Aktion was cut off from federal funding. Members lauded Kapitza for proving that he struggled “out of love for our Upper Silesian Volk, rather than out of love for the Federal Republic coffers at Bonn.”Footnote 93 But by 1954, the movement had all but vanished. Observing the group shortly before its dissolution, Der Spiegel regarded O/S Aktion as little more than a curiosity, exciting for its apparent ties to spy rings in both the East and West Blocs, but on the balance just an “insignificant group of Upper Silesians.”Footnote 94 Heimkehr to a multiethnic vision of the East simply failed to garner significant appeal.
Conclusion: Career Expellees at the End of an Era
In his introduction to the 1950 picture book Unforgettable Homeland: A Book of Memories on the Eastern Territories, Expellee Minister Hans Lukaschek expressed his hope that prewar imagery would help expellees to “never give up hope that each German land on the other side of the Oder-Neisse [border] might one day be the Heimat of the German people again.”Footnote 95 Yet an expellee blurb for the dusk jacket gave an alternative, significantly apolitical purpose: Heimkehr to a Heimat of memory, and commemoration as a means of healing.
Happy is he who finds a new Heimat—but can he ever forget the old one? No, one can never forget his Heimat: not he who left it of his own free will, and how much less he from whom it was taken by a cruel fate. Heimat: this is the land of childhood, the sites of security, a paradise of memories. This is where our forefathers lived and worked, their holy earth surrounds their graves. Pain for the lost Heimat is one of the wounds that can never fully be healed. But at the same time, it is a strong tie that binds the hearts of all who carry the same suffering. When they sit together—the men and women from East Prussia, from West Prussia and Danzig, from Silesia, from Pomerania, and from the Sudetenland—their reflections ramble back to the seas and forests of Masuria, to the Baltic Sea's harbors and [Vistula] spit, to Rübezahl's mountains, to the lofty gabled houses of Danzig. And they begin to narrate of what had once been their Heimat and is for them today a closed, lost land. . . . Sometimes someone in the group pulls out a photograph, and it passes from hand to hand, and once more it arises before them: the dear, old, unforgettable Heimat.Footnote 96
While the expellee leadership defined Recht auf die Heimat as the right to self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) and return (Rückkehr) to lost territories reintegrated into Germany, in reality as early as the 1950s only a decreasing minority would have chosen to return to the East if they had been offered “self-determination” to settle where they willed.Footnote 97 From the time of the expulsion onward, alternative understandings for Recht auf die Heimat and Heimkehr clashed with official expellee political objectives and crippled the movement from within. Some expellees even went so far as to attack the political leadership for monopolizing their favorite expressions for revanchist aims. By the 1960s, some of them had already joined political opponents such as the Spiegel columnist in using the term Berufsvertriebenen as a way to ridicule functionaries for turning the misfortune of their former neighbors into careers.Footnote 98
The term “Heimkehr” possessed many more meanings than could be discussed here in detail—almost always unrelated to resettlement and usually tied to the need to heal after the traumas of war and displacement. It could refer to Heimkehrer, hundreds of thousands of POWs who “returned home” to West Germany, especially from Soviet imprisonment in the 1950s. Only a roughly proportional minority of POW Heimkehrer came from the lost eastern territories; nevertheless, expellee papers regularly deployed the term “Heimkehr” when referring to them. Beside the image of a German officer, proud in his Wehrmacht uniform, the Bunzlauer Heimat-Zeitung recorded that General-Lieutenant Alfred Hemmann felt “overwhelmed” by the enthusiastic welcome he and 600 other Heimkehrer found upon their Heimkehr into West Germany in October 1955.Footnote 99 At the same time, Heimkehr often signified a spiritual return home to God. While expellee religious leaders and their flocks could seldom agree on whether God willed an actual, physical Heimkehr one day to the East, a broad consensus arose in sermons and religious periodicals that one's earthly Heimat was inherently transient. A lasting Heimat could only be found through one's final Heimkehr into heaven.
Perhaps most significant for the political question of Recht auf die Heimat, after the Khrushchev thaw of 1956 and especially after the 1970 border treaty, Heimkehr could refer to the trips undertaken by thousands of expellees back to their lost homeland. In search of signs from their pasts, these “homesick tourists” saw for themselves that any promise of real return was an illusion. Only traces remained of the physical substance they had known before. Ruins left by war and pillage, the erasure of German inscriptions and monuments, and contact with the new inhabitants of their old homes and villages left them with little doubt that the old Heimat was now home for someone else, and the world of their desires could only be found in memory.Footnote 100 Career expellees were justifiably concerned that “homesick tourism” would undermine desire for actual Heimkehr. Yet how could they discourage travel to the land they claimed was still theirs? Heimat paper editors often responded by printing travel reports regularly, but stamping them with stark political interpretations. Expellees who returned to Raudten in 1957 reported that they felt alienated by the “wilderness” they found in place of their old Heimat, where Polish and Ukrainian strangers dwelt in the ruins. To compensate for the tenor of this dystopic account, the career expellee who had printed their report stepped in at the end with an incongruous lesson: despite such a bleak picture, “we still say ‘our Heimat!’ ”Footnote 101 Such editorial glosses nevertheless produced little effect. Harrowing slides and stories shared by homesick tourists among their old neighbors in the West generated an aura of depression and detachment. Much as they still felt a “right” to their old homeland and refused to renounce its spiritual importance, they knew that there could be no Heimkehr to a Heimat that was no longer home.
Mass disillusionment with the official political stance on Heimkehr came to the fore at the political crossroads of 1970, when career expellees mustered only meager followings at rallies protesting the impending West German recognition of the Oder-Neisse line. The BdV marshaled 55,000 demonstrators to march across the Bonn marketplace on May 30, 1970; to vest them with a politically useful meaning, the Landsmannschaft organ Der Schlesier frantically assured everyone that “this was absolutely not a club of career expellees [Berufsvertriebenen]. . . . The overwhelming applause proved that the expellees have unconditional faith in the leadership of their organizations.” Yet the rest of the report testified to a very different reality: that those gathered were merely a fanatical remnant that had flocked to the capital from across the Federal Republic. While addressing the crowd, the conservative Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauß identified significant representation from career expellees, not least the gathered Landsmannschaften leaders and members of the rightwing NPD party.Footnote 102
German exiles from the East were embarrassed and annoyed that, even after the 1970 treaty, revanchist politicians still dared to claim that they represented all expellees. In January 1971, a “nonreader” of the Liegnitzer Heimatbrief wrote that she strongly opposed “the opinion of the ‘career expellees’ [Berufsvertriebenen], who make politics and do business with sentimental feelings” and wished to “explicitly distance myself in every way from this position.” In her eyes and the eyes of many other expellees, Bonn's treaties with Moscow and Warsaw would contribute “to understanding between peoples and peace.”Footnote 103 With Heimkehr open to so many interpretations, even recognition of the Oder-Neisse border itself could not impede the expellee Recht auf die Heimat.
After 1970, the leadership's view of Recht auf die Heimat and Heimkehr drifted ever further to the right-wing radical margins of political life, by now completely out of touch with the views of the vast majority of expellees. Amid the events of 1970, a number of ex-Nazis with leadership positions in expellee organizations had already founded Aktion Widerstand, which in often violent demonstrations sought to prevent the achievements of Ostpolitik; though soon dissolved, it spawned numerous militant and even neo-Nazi splinter movements in the coming decades.Footnote 104 By 1985, when Silesian Landsmannschaft chairman Herbert Hupka tried to organize the annual meeting of Silesians under the motto Schlesien bleibt unser (Silesia remains ours), traditional supporters in the CDU found the slogan so radical that they made Hupka change it.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, many career expellees thought that, at long last, the chance for Heimkehr had come. As late as 2004 and at the age of 89, Hupka (still honorary chairman) promoted the next Federal Meeting of Silesians in Nuremburg with the motto Heimat Schlesien in der Mitte Europas (Silesian Heimat in the middle of Europe)—but his softened rhetoric about expellees as bridge builders between East and West hardly meant that he had given up on Heimkehr. Hence his frustration that almost no expellees had used the preceding fifteen years to make property claims, to the point that he had come to wonder just “how many want to use” the opportunity to move back.Footnote 105 The only serious post-Cold War movement for physical Heimkehr came from a fringe group called the Preußische Treuhand (officially translated “Prussian Claims Society,” but literally the “Prussian Trust”), founded in 2000 to pursue a few claimants' attempt to recover their old property in court. Though even Erika Steinbach (the leader of the BdV) opposed these claims in public and the European Court of Human Rights declared them illegal in 2008, a few aged career expellees have continued to hold out hope.Footnote 106 Among them is the head of a local chapter of the BdV—evidence that even today career expellees hardly form a united front. When I met him just months before the court decision, the ardent Preußische Treuhand activist stubbornly believed that the facts of history were irrelevant. At the same time that he protested the arrival of too many “Russian Jews” in the Federal Republic and “excessive” compensation paid to Holocaust survivors, he proudly showed me the handle from “his” horse barn, which he had recently stolen in the night from his former family farm in West Prussia and proudly mounted on a plaque in his basement. Though he had only known the farm as a child, though his parents had only moved there in 1920, and though his own children had no interest, he vowed that this claim would never die.
Fortunately, reality has intervened: the revanchist dreams of a few career expellees do not survive their deaths. Financial contributions to their organizations have been on the wane, and obituaries to deceased leaders overwhelm the pages of each Heimat paper. Hupka himself died in 2006, having at least publically accepted before the end that Heimkehr would not be possible. Yet even as they approach extinction, the last career expellees fail to accept that their vision of Heimkehr had never sustained broad appeal for most of their constituents. When I spoke with the Silesian expellee Ruth Knaut in 2008, she expressed her sustained love for the lost Heimat and shared stories of her homesick tourism in western Poland from 1978 onward. She had learned about me from an advertisement in her Heimat paper, the Grafschafter Bote, in which I had asked expellees to mail me materials about travel experiences in their old Heimat. All at once, she sought to clarify just why she still subscribed to a paper whose “hateful” political diatribes still appeared on the front pages and whose editor remained an open member of the Preußische Treuhand. She insisted that, though she detested the paper's political intentions, she felt that the wistful tales and old pictures contained on its inner pages sustained her sacred link with the old Heimat.Footnote 107 Regardless of career expellees' ongoing attempts politically to deploy the Recht auf die Heimat, the last of their supposed constituents persist in retaining their own outlook and undertaking the same spiritual Heimkehr that has helped them scar over their wounds through the past sixty years.
