Andrew Demshuk's monograph on Silesian expellees in the Federal Republic of Germany joins a growing body of scholarship on the aftermath of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from territories east of the Oder-Neisse Line. At war's end, some twelve million Germans fled or were expelled from these territories and settled in what became the two German states, with the larger portion ultimately opting for West Germany. Some three million of these uprooted people hailed from Lower and Upper Silesia, the southeastern “arm” of the German Reich on the prewar maps. How these new arrivals would settle into their new surroundings, and how they would behave politically in the fledgling democracy, was anyone's guess. The Western Allies certainly expected them to play a destabilizing role through demands for repossession of lost territories now under Polish rule. They therefore undercut any attempts by these new arrivals to organize politically. But even when this restriction was lifted after the founding of the West German state, and despite offensive rhetoric by expellee leadership figures about their right to “return to the homeland,” the radicalization of the dispossessed and transplanted did not occur. Why?

Demshuk addresses this question by examining how Silesians in West Germany dealt with their loss of Heimat and the traumatic experience of expulsion. He argues that the irredentist and incendiary rhetoric for return and repossession emanated from “professional expellees”—those who spoke on behalf of the expellees in the public realm—but not from the mass of the expellees themselves. Indeed, some scholarship, he says, has offered a “caricature of millions of expellees” (p. 6) as reactionary and unreconstructed advocates of a German East compatible with Nazi visions. But instead of supporting their leadership in demands for a return to the land of their ancestors, expellees at the grassroots were engaging in a complex, at times apolitical process of mourning that brought many of them to the early realization that the homeland as they had known it was gone for good. Demshuk opposes this argument to the explanation from economic integration: it was not rising prosperity that stole the movement's thunder but rather thorny and painful memory work among the rank and file.

To prove his point, Demshuk introduces the illuminating distinction between the Heimat of memory and the Heimat transformed. The former represents the usually nostalgic reminiscences that expellees nurtured about their picture-book hometowns and villages where childhood was filled with laughter, apple trees flowered, and Nazis were absent. The latter refers to the real postwar tranformation of these places that were first devastated by war, then reconstructed as an integral part of (western) Poland and settled by Poles who had often themselves been evicted from somewhere else.

Naturally, the Heimat of memory was incompatible with the Heimat transformed. Demshuk chronicles the various clashes between the two concepts: reports from ethnic Germans who had remained behind spoke of devastation, deprivations, and suffering in the old Heimat and tended to coalesce in the desire to join the already departed Silesians in the west. Once travel to Silesia was possible again (and Demshuk deserves credit for discovering the little-known fact that “homesick tourism” had already gained steam in the late 1950s, not only in the 1970s after the Eastern Treaties), expellees themselves visited their transformed homeland and discovered the unfolding Polonization and reconstruction, to which they reacted with alienation, disorientation, sadness, and only gradually with respect. But since their travel reports drove home the point to other Silesians that it was futile to fight for a return to the Heimat of memory, a chimera as it were, homesick tourism was not in good standing with the expellee leadership (pp. 221–26). The tourism chapter brings out nicely that for ordinary expellees, the Heimat of memory was a device to cope with loss, not a political program.

If the divide between the politics of the expellee leaders and the regular members of expellee organizations was as stark as Demshuk makes out throughout the book, however, why would these leaders be returned to their positions year after year? Why would expellees retain spokespeople who did not express shared ideas? Key figures such as Erich Schellhaus, Herbert Hupka, and Herbert Czaja served expellee organizations for decades, and, in the cases of the latter two, retained a mandate in the Bundestag for just as long. Bundestag membership might be explained through the befuddling German voting system that provides for safe party lists (Listenplätze), but within the expellee organizations, members had a say. The switch of perspective from top to bottom that Demshuk undertakes yields important new insight but it leaves the question of political power unaddressed.

Demshuk's monograph has not ventured very far from his 2010 dissertation. This might explain some regrettable slips in the book [e.g., the reference to East Prussians who left only in the mid-1950s and are said to have migrated to “the Reich” (p. 98), Hitler's first name as “Adolph” (p. 51), and a scholar named “Kranke” instead of Frauke (p. 59), etc.]. It might also explain why he did not seize the opportunity to extend the time frame of his analysis from 1970 to 1989/90, thereby covering the life span and narrative arc of the generation he was tracking. Citing space restrictions (p. 27), he terminates the study with the reaction of expellees to the Eastern Treaties of 1970. Here, the gap between Silesians and their elected leaders did indeed become particularly obvious. For the leadership, 1970 appeared to dash the hopes for return once and for all, whereas ordinary Silesians had already arrived at that conclusion many years before by working through the tensions between the Heimat of memory and the Heimat transformed. The generals were thus left without foot soldiers, reflected in the relatively poor turnout for public demonstrations against the treaties (p. 250). At this juncture, Demshuk implies that the ensuing two decades only offered more of the same: “A clique of embittered and moribund leaders recited the same old laments” (p. 261). Many noteworthy highlights thus fall from view [e.g., the intense battles over historical interpretations and symbolic acts during the Kohl years, including the prominent 1985 convention of the Silesians under the (withdrawn) heading “Silesia remains ours”; and the expellees' reactions to and roles in the process of reunification]. Even a hardliner such as Hupka finally accepted the need for German-Polish reconciliation and disengaged from return fantasies (Czaja did not). It seems that some leadership figures and the rank and file finally found common ground, a development well worth considering.