I.

Much of the scholarship on Germany and eastern Europe has been informed by what Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius recently termed ‘the German myth of the East’. That myth produced, and was reproduced by, a ‘German’ discourse about eastern Europe, grounded in the ostensible antonyms of German cleanliness, efficiency, orderliness, productivity and indeed civilisation, versus the dirty, inefficient, disorderly, unproductive and largely uncivilised Slavic landscapes and their inhabitants.Footnote ³ According to this discourse, that east desperately needed German cultivation and civilisation, and such convictions supported political arguments in favour of German conquest and colonisation from the age of Frederick the Great through the period of National Socialism.

There is no question that various ideologues harnessed this discourse for political and military purposes. Nor is there any question that these notions were reductive and ignored the range of dukes, princes and absolute monarchs who solicited hundreds of thousands of Germans over the course of centuries to tame their landscapes and help establish well-networked towns. This discourse largely ignored those Germans’ continual presence in eastern Europe as well, preferring instead to underscore the alleged antitheses of West and East, of German and Slav.Footnote ⁴

Such myths can have great power. It is thus fitting that Annemarie H. Sammartino opens her first chapter in The Impossible Border with a discussion of perplexed German soldiers’ at the outset of the First World War ‘discovering’ Germans and German places in what they assumed were exclusively Slavic spaces (p. 18). That epiphany could be both pleasant and problematic. Either way, it led to persistent questions: What was the place of these ethnic Germans abroad in the German nation and polity? What role might they have in Germany's future? What role should they play, we might also ask, in our narratives of European and German history?

During the war itself, and particularly with German victory looming in the east, officials in Imperial Germany regarded ethnic Germans in eastern Europe as part of a greater national patrimony and expected to include them in a new post-war polity. Consequently, officials began planning for their ‘return migration’ into what was expected to be a much larger Imperial Germany. To legitimate that plan, arguments circulated through government offices attesting to the purity of the Germanness maintained by these ‘colonists’ over generations. Through rigorous institutions, especially churches and schools, these people had even retained regional dialects and customs in their adopted homes (p. 41). That integrative vision continued through the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It was thrown into question, however, when the war was lost, and the Allies redrew Europe's boundaries during the post-war settlements.

Nevertheless, a ‘return migration’ happened. As the war in the west drew to a close, and after new conflicts broke out in the Baltics, some hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from Russia and eastern Europe flowed into a now radically reduced German state, posing serious challenges to both the new Weimar Republic and older German discourses about civilised Germans and the ostensibly ‘wild east’. Consequently, these ethnic Germans were not always well received, and the rhetoric about them changed notably.

Indeed, Sammartino underscores that ‘the state and many of its supporters remained decidedly cool toward these Russian citizens of German descent, and even the pan–Germans dismissed the Russian Germans as hopelessly backward’ (p. 29). Such a reaction, she argues, ‘reflects the highly charged German ambivalence toward these migrants and the borders they crossed’ (p. 2). Or at least it reflected the ambivalence of the state and its officials. Faced with former Reichsdeutsche (German citizens) who found themselves living in the new Poland (and other lands), these officials were in a political quandary: the state ‘could not morally refuse the rights of these former German citizens to settle in German territory and receive government aid, but it also could literally not afford to pay for them’ (p. 96). Nor could it afford to welcome ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsche, from Russia or other lands. There were just too many.

Sammartino's book thus turns around the crises these immigrants caused for the Weimar Republic. That state is her subject, and in her narrative its ‘borders became the symbols of spaces of crisis as states fought over their location and sought to control the people who traversed them’ (p. 3). Indeed, she claims that this led to a crisis of sovereignty in the Weimar Republic as well as a set of surprising actions on the part of state officials. By 1931, she explains, only 330,000 of the original 1.2 million German residents of the Polish Territories remained in Poland (p. 98), while another 150,000 Reichsdeutsche immigrated from Alsace and Lorraine. In order to reduce the flow, many officials argued that maintaining a German community in Poland was a national duty; it was necessary to reduce the influx of former citizens and thus aid the beleaguered Weimar Republic (p. 115). To that end, financial incentives were crafted to encourage those Germans to remain in the new Poland. Nevertheless, ‘restricting aid to Germans who emigrated while increasing assistance for those who stayed in Poland initially did little to stem the tide of immigrants’ (p. 118). They just kept coming.

This is a compelling portrait of beleaguered state officials perplexed by the disjuncture between their vision of the greater German nation and the realities of the weak and truncated German state. Yet it is hard to agree with some of Sammartino's conclusions. She argues, for example, that as a result of Reichsdeutsche recalcitrance and the state's machinations, ‘ethnic German identity was divorced from territorial location and citizenship’ and ‘from this deterritorialization of German identity, of which the Polish Germans were both a cause and a symptom, we might conclude that borders had become irrelevant to the German state; after all, ethnic Germans, regardless of their territorial location or their citizenship, could lay claim to its resources’ (p. 119). That, however, was not new. Consulates had long been established to serve Germans abroad and citizenship laws had been changed in 1913 to tie Germans abroad to the nation state—regardless of their citizenship(s). This was an old problem in a new context.

Similarly, one can certainly agree with her argument that ‘disparate cultural and ethnic definitions of the German nation competed with one another on both the national and Länder levels’ and that the ‘virulence and insolubility of these disagreements spoke to the deep and bitter lack of consensus about the meaning and boundaries of the German nation in the first years of the fledgling Weimar Republic’ (p. 158). Both are clearly true; here too, however, it is worth bearing in mind that the ‘tensions between the cultural and the ethnic definitions of German citizenship’, which she identifies coursing through the regime, were not uniquely a product of its creation. They had been there long before.

A similar, overlooked longevity animated the debates she explores about the relationships between the state and the Volk, and the conscious choice of Weimar officials to place the needs of the state above those of ethnic Germans abroad. Sammartino argues that after 1919, ‘the Volk became both the object and subject of politics across the political spectrum, from right-wing ideologues (who used the supposed betrayal of the Volk by the state as a bludgeon to denigrate the republic) to the revolutionary councils (who called for radical democratic participation in political decisions)’ (p. 197). In the end, she contends, ‘the Foreign Office argued that the need of the German state to maintain a claim to Polish territory trumped the suffering of individual Germans’, which she asserts was both ‘the culmination and rejection of völkisch logic’ (p. 198). It was also, however, quite consistent with the actions of Bismarck's government when faced with protests in Imperial Germany about Hungarian efforts in the 1880s to nationalise the ethnic Germans who had lived in that part of eastern Europe for generations. It was largely for that reason, in fact, that the Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland, which became a million-member organisation during the Weimar Republic, was founded in the first place.Footnote ⁵ The creation of state borders that truncated the interconnected communities of Germans across central and eastern Europe was not unique to the Weimar era. It was, rather, a problem inherent in the age of nation state formation, one that reoccurred again and again as nation states were fashioned and refashioned in this region.

Moreover, if her assertion that the Volk became the new ‘object and subject of politics across the political spectrum’ during the Weimar era recapitulates the arguments of some officials and ideologues, it does not reflect conditions on the ground. As Winson Chu demonstrates in his outstanding work on German minorities in inter-war Poland, a focus on majority-minority conflict has been one of the chief limitations in the historiography on German minorities in eastern Europe. The very vocabulary, in fact, presupposes the salience of unitary categories such as ‘German’ and ‘Pole’ and ‘suggests a harmony among the Germans’ that did not exist in the German or the Polish nation states during the inter-war era.

Consequently, Chu warns that historians’ eager efforts to juxtapose ‘Germans’ and ‘Poles’ not only run the risk of ‘reifying the concept of Volksdeutsche by reaffirming the premises and wishful thinking of German nationalists’ (p. 6) they also obscure the fact that völkisch thought ‘often divided as much as it united Germans’ (p. 16). For that reason, Chu argues that it ‘is important not to overethnicize [sic] Weimar support for ethnic Germans in Poland’. Instead, we must recognise that the state's ‘revisionist politics had little to do with the currents of völkisch thought that saw [German] minorities as important for their intrinsic ethnic or racial qualities’. Rather, these policies ‘were more in tune with etatist thinking that sought to instrumentalize [German] minorities for territorial-revisionist aims’ (p. 28). The same complexities ran through civil society. Even the participants in the combination of different associations devoted to supporting Germans abroad—which became an important political lobby after 1919—were divided. Although these ‘organizations are often touted as völkisch and grouped together, a closer examination shows that they were quite heterogeneous’. Their concern for Germans abroad ‘differed in their means and ends’ and those differences consistently hindered the creation of a ‘unified agenda in approaching the Germans abroad in general and the Germans in Poland in particular’ (p. 36). On top of that, the German minority in Poland was also fractured, regionally divided, competitive, untrusting of each other and poorly represented by the spokesmen who championed their national character. That fractured character only became irrefutable, however, after Chu and others looked past the rhetoric circulating in German-language texts and turned to Polish sources.

II.

The great value of Chu's volume stems from his willingness to unsettle what we think about nationalism and national affiliation. ‘The potential of nationalism to create conflict within a national group’, he writes, ‘is still largely understudied’ (p. 12). It is, however, precisely what happened in inter-war Poland. When the Allies inscribed the borders for a new Polish state on the map of eastern Europe, that state inherited Germans from three shattered empires. The ethnic Germans in western Poland, whose homes had been in Imperial Germany, were converted from Reichsdeutsche (German citizens) to Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) as a result of the peace treaty. ‘Most of these Germans’ Chu remarks, ‘found it particularly hard to come to terms with Polish rule.’ In contrast, German speakers in central and eastern Poland had already experienced life in a state (Russia) where Germans rarely belonged to the political elite and where the German language had been suppressed. Thus many German activists in these territories actually viewed the creation of a new Polish state with some enthusiasm; they hoped that it would show greater tolerance of minorities. In the former Austrian lands of south-eastern Poland, the Germans were already accustomed to local rule by Poles, and the peasant populations in particular ‘were rarely preoccupied with issues concerning Germany or Germanness’. Those regional differences mattered, and despite ideologues’ efforts to unify these fractured minorities, they remained splintered along regional lines (p. 4).

Few of these divisions are captured in official records. The Polish census from 1921 shows over a million Germans in the state, accounting for ‘3.9% of the population’ (p. 63). The numbers, however, obscure as much as they reveal. Jews in western Poland were generally considered German rather than Polish, and Jews and non-Jews alike, as Sammartino notes, kept leaving for Germany. In part, that was due to active efforts at Polanisation on the part of the new regime, and the declining German populations in the Polish state left many German leaders there concerned about an increased indifference to nationality among those who stayed. Those statistics and concerns, however, can also easily mislead us about those who did stay, because many ethnic Germans became active in the Polish government as a kind of self-preservation, and the German political parties that took shape in inter-war Poland remained split along regional lines (p. 70). Thus if ‘a transformation in German self-understanding after 1918’ led to a ‘völkisch turn’, not all Germans turned together (p. 85).

Moreover, that ‘German self-understanding’ varied among German state officials as well. They also projected it differently upon the various German communities that remained in Poland. Thus, while we know that the Weimar Republic spent millions trying to keep Germans from leaving Poland, ‘much of this money came from disparate sources that appeared incoherent, and the confusion over the status of the Polish Germans created considerable bureaucratic infighting and inter-ministerial competition’ (p. 56). Prussian officials continued to feel responsible for the people they had lost along with their eastern territories, and many of these officials viewed the fate of those Germans as a domestic problem. Consequently, Prussian authorities often collided with both Polish officials and the Reich Foreign Ministry as they continued to support the flow of money for teacher salaries and German-language textbooks (among other things) into German communities in Poland. However, the asymmetrical distribution of these funds, which favoured the former Reichsdeutsche, clearly affected the self-perceptions of the different German minority groups in Poland, and further undermined any efforts to establish political solidarity among them.

III.

It is striking how little the animosity between the fractured German minorities in inter-war Poland changed after the Nazis came to power. Despite Nazi party leaders’ appeal to völkisch unity, they had little impact on the relationships between regional factions (p. 161). That said, the rhetoric among the political leaders of these factions did change. The Nazis’ success in Germany and their repression of all other parties left German nationalists in Poland with no alternative framework of cooperation for those ‘who wanted to maintain ties with what they considered to be their mother country’. In essence, ‘German conservative-nationalist leaders had to support the Reich government and its German minority agenda or risk appearing un–German or even anti-German’ (p. 172). They were also dependent on subsidies from the Reich, and so they had to continue their relations with this new incarnation of the German state, taking up its political rhetoric and trappings; but that did not bind them closer together. Even the Nazi practitioners of Ostforschung (largely ethnic studies of eastern Europe) acknowledged this at first. They characterised Germans in Poland as broken and factional, and identified a structure of five dominant groups in the 1930s. Only later, as ideologues criticised this portrait as politically incorrect did they change their analyses to support the state's purposes.

Chu is not alone in these observations. In his compelling examination of Silesia from the inter-war through the post-war period, Andrew Demshuk also argues that German ‘national identity remained ambiguous’ in Silesia, where people were ‘neither German nor Pole’ but rather ‘Catholic and regional, and centred on the local Schlonzok dialect’ (p. 43). This national indifference led many who identified themselves as ‘Polish speaking’ in a 1910 census, for instance, to vote to remain ‘German’ when pressed in 1921. Such moves were common in these ‘western territories’.

If anything served to pull these disparate Germans in Poland together it was the negative integration that accompanied inter-war Poland's ‘terrible record with its German, Jewish, Ukrainian, and other minorities, which made up roughly one-third of its population’ (p. 47). As Demshuk notes, the Polish state undercut the hopes of many German minorities, and violated the Geneva Convention by making Polish mandatory in this new state. In addition, ‘German businesses were nationalised, German property seized, Germans who held political or economic roles were removed and replaced with Poles, and a 1925 Polish land reform expropriated many Germans in favour of Poles’ (pp. 47–8).

Similar actions also characterised the new Czechoslovakia. As R. M. Douglas reminds us in his stunning Orderly and Humane, ‘physical attacks on Sudetendeutsche and their institutions and symbols were far from uncommon during the Republic's early years’ and ‘neither were they treated on anything like terms of equality’ (p. 9). The new state manipulated population records, pressured people and recast ethnicities in order to keep German representation at a minimum in local as well as national government. ‘Not a single ethnic German was to be found in Beneš's own Foreign Ministry’ (p. 12), he notes, and anti-German legislation grew significantly during the 1930s. Thus when Douglas turns to a discussion of Nazi propaganda about the Polish and Czech mistreatment of German minorities, he reminds us, as do Chu and Demshuk, that, while most of these stories ‘were exaggerated out of all recognition’, not all them were ‘manufactured out of whole cloth’ (p. 42). That gave them a poignant resonance.

IV.

The Nazi focus on inter-war states’ anti-German propaganda set the stage for their efforts to recast the populations of eastern Europe. That included their redistribution of the German minorities already there. As Douglas makes clear, transfers of large German populations began immediately with the German-Soviet division of Poland in 1939. German minorities in the territories acquired by the USSR were sent west to the Nazi state. Those moves were arduous and often disheartening for transferees. Much like the Russian–German returnees of an earlier decade, these were mixed and motley groups who were uprooted, divested of property, and seldom made to feel welcome by the Reich and its residents. It also quickly became clear to all involved that resettling people was much more difficult that moving them. That did not, however, stem the population transfers.

It also became clear that identifying who was and was not German was fraught with challenges. A large number of the initial ‘returnees’, for example, had fraudulent documents testifying to their Germanness, acquired in an effort ‘to escape Stalin's clutches’, while many ethnic Germans in mixed marriages had managed to dodge the transports and chosen to remain behind. As the war progressed, so too did the debates about who was and was not German. Even at high administrative levels priorities and methods remained unclear. For example: based in part on Nazi ideology, but also on expediency and a bureaucratic interest in repopulating their territories, Arthur Greiser, the head of the Warthegau, and Albert Forster, in charge of Danzig-West Prussia, had radically different ideas about how to identify and classify Germans. While Greiser favoured painstaking, yet inconsistent, racial screenings for all individuals, Forster endorsed rounding up suspected Germans on such a massive scale that the ‘inability to speak German was no obstacle’ to inclusion (p. 50).

The result was a ‘toxic brew of bureaucratic infighting, institutional confusion, last-minute changes of plan, and clashing objectives that stultified almost every major initiative undertaken by the Nazi state’ to redistribute German populations (p. 50). Moreover, these initial problems were only further complicated in June 1940 as the Soviets and the Nazis forced the Romanian government to round up another 137,000 Volksdeutsche and send them to Germany. Soon, over a quarter of a million ethnic Germans were transferred north from south-eastern Europe. That was more than had arrived from the Baltic States and eastern Poland combined (p. 52).

According to Douglas, ‘the biggest single impediment to the success’ of this ‘colonization program’ was ‘the sheer diversity among the Volksdeutsche’ (p. 55). In order to help them decide who should go where, the Nazis adopted the so-called Volksliste, a four-level scale developed by the French government after the First World War to assist its own sorting out (and expulsion) of ethnic Germans from Alsace and Lorraine. The Volksliste, however, added only a superficial clarity to Nazi procedures. It failed to prevent, for example, urban Germans from Estonia being placed on Polish farms while rural Romanians found themselves becoming industrial workers in the Reich. It also offered few deterrents against the many ‘booty Germans’ who, much to the bemusement of their neighbours, ‘suddenly heard the call of their German blood’ after the Nazis arrived. The Volksliste, in fact, accommodated such people. The fourth level included those with ostensible German racial heritage who had either abandoned it or had had it taken from them. Indeed, even people with no knowledge of (or belief in) their own Germanness could be placed on the list, something that occurred with increased frequency toward the end of the war, during military recruitment drives or labour shortages (p. 56).

This ‘policy of forced Germanization’ had sobering consequences for many. It also has critical implications for our narratives of the post-war era. As Douglas remarks, the forced transfers, arbitrary classifications and failed efforts at homogenisation, make clear that there is no obvious answer to the question of ‘whether the Volksdeutsche are to be regarded as ‘perpetrators’, ‘victims’ or ‘bystanders’ in relation to Nazism and its crimes’ (p. 59). The problem, too often overlooked until recently, is that Volksdeutsche was no more a viable unitary category at the end of the war than it had been at its outset. Unfortunately, however, that did not discourage the Allies from uncritically adopting the category for their own population transfers any more than it had deterred the Nazis from harnessing it for theirs.

V.

While the chaos that accompanied the end of the war makes all statistics unreliable, ‘the scale’, as Demshuk underscores, ‘is certain’. In Lower Silesia, he writes, ‘virtually the entire indigenous population was gone by 1949’. Some 3,181,200 Silesians were expelled into the four occupation zones of post-war Germany in what he terms ‘the biggest change to the German demographic balance since the Thirty Years’ War’ (p. 58). Indeed, Douglas calls the broader action ‘the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of people—in human history’ (p. 1). It included some twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans, mostly women, children and elderly people, and it was chaotic and brutal. As a result of these massive actions, ‘tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease’. Many died in camps, some in the very camps liberated from Nazis, as the Allies inverted the Volksliste, targeted the people on it, and engaged in the ethnic cleansing of eastern Europe at a rapid pace.

Despite both the staggering numbers and the fact that Poland and Czechoslovakia were transformed from the most heterogeneous and multicultural countries in Europe into ethnic monoliths within a decade, the general histories of Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland, have paid little attention to the significance of these events. Hardly anyone denies the expulsions took place, but until recently few wanted to engage their implications. For contemporary Germans, Douglas explains, such discussion ‘invites debate over the dubious wartime record of the ethnic German minorities living outside the Reich—the so-called Volksdeutsche—and the degree to which they can be considered to have drawn their eventual fate upon themselves’. For Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and citizens of other expelling countries, ‘it complicates and undermines a series of national narratives, supported by overwhelming consensus’; it questions ‘Germans exclusively as perpetrators and their own peoples exclusively as victims’; and it raises ‘concerns about the durability of the legal arrangements through which ex–German properties came into the possession of their current owners’. For the Western Allies, especially Americans,

In short: ‘the history of the expulsions is one from which few if any of those directly involved emerge in a creditable light’, (p. 3), and thus they have remained understudied.

By scrutinising those expulsions and reflecting on the silences, Douglas seeks to demonstrate that the ‘population transfers were not simply an undoing of Nazi deportations, but a demographic experiment on a scale unprecedented in human history’ (p. 38). It began under Nazi auspices, during the reversal of the war. That led to ‘the greatest seaborne evacuation in history in which more than two million refugees were transported from the collapsing north-eastern provinces by the German Navy’ (p. 62). It continued as millions more fled before the advancing Red Army. It gained its greatest momentum, however, in the wake of the war, as the Allies decided to repeat ‘a policy that Adolf Hitler had already shown to be a disastrous failure’ (p. 64).

There was, however, no precedent, even under Hitler and Stalin, for moving so many people in so short a time. Yet according to Douglas, ‘the Allies were under no illusions as to how much chaos the expulsions would . . . involve’ (p. 66). While they announced publically that the population transfers would be ‘orderly and humane’, they knew that would not be the case, and they ‘encouraged their allies to carry out, and promised their cooperation in accomplishing, deeds for which they would later prosecute their enemies as war crimes’ (p. 92).

The details Douglas has assembled about this ‘state-sanctioned carnival of violence’ (p. 129) are deeply disturbing: wild expulsions, forced marches, starving children in camps set up by Nazis and restaffed with Czechs, Poles, Slovaks and others, many of whom were criminals. Brutal tortures, horrific sexual violence and unheated, un-provisioned freight cars overfilled with sick and starving, women, children and elderly people. Few people identified as German were spared due to their circumstances; 10% of those targeted did not even speak German (p. 301). With the exception of those children who were abducted to be re-educated as Czechs or Poles, neither young children nor those from mixed marriages were sparred. Germans who had simply kept their heads down during the war were included along with ideologues; so too were concentration camp survivors, members of resistance movements and some German-speaking Jews (p. 101). They all suffered together, and they died by the tens of thousands (p. 129).

While Douglas repeatedly acknowledges ‘there is no valid parallel between even the worst of the post-war camps and their wartime predecessors’, he also reminds us that ‘the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime’ (p. 156). With the exception of the war years, Europe had never witnessed ‘so vast a complex of arbitrary detention’. ‘That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see’ (p. 157). It is hard to disagree.

VI.

As a result of the expulsions, western Poland suffered under an acute population shortage that was difficult for the new Polish state to overcome. The removal of some nine million people was part of a broader effort to create a homogenous Polish state. Not only were Germans expelled to the West but Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian peasants were moved eastwards. At the same time, Poles from the eastern districts, which became part of the Soviet Union when the Allies ‘shifted’ the state's borders approximately 125 miles to the west, were relocated to those depopulated western districts. There, bandits and Soviet soldiers plagued the remaining populace, and most of these transferred Poles arrived short of food, with little support, and received parcels of land too small for their subsistence (pp. 270–1). Because of the dearth of people, the Polish government tried hard to instrumentalise and retain the autochthons in the region—those people of mixed German and Slavic characteristics. They did for a time, until opportunities allowed most to flee to the West.

The western cities were emptied out as well, and here too, as Gregor Thum remarks in his stunning history of Breslau's transformation into Wrocław, ‘there were serious consequences to these “ethnic unmixings”’. ‘The decade of expulsions not only changed the appearance of Central and Eastern Europe beyond recognition, but it also profoundly traumatized the people and societies involved’ (p. 54). While Breslau had belonged to Polish, Bohemian, Austrian and Prussian states in the past, during the decades before 1945 the citizens largely considered themselves to be German. Poles made up only 5% of the population before the First World War, and that declined to about 1% during the inter-war period. As Breslau became Wrocław, however, it was refashioned as a Polish city, with a Polish past and a homogenised Polish culture.

That process took some time. The Poles who arrived in Wrocław immediately after the war ‘entered an environment that was still largely shaped by Germans’. In many places, in fact, ‘Germans and Poles coexisted for months or even years, sometimes under one roof. In rural areas it was by no means unusual for German farmers to operate their farms together with the new Polish owners for a time’ (p. 66). Suffering from a lack of contact with their homelands in the east, but prevented by political taboos from openly lamenting their loss, many eastern Poles chafed as well from the knowledge that the Soviet military, at least in the short term, preferred to work with the Germans.

‘By the end of 1947’, however, ‘the German population had been virtually eliminated’ (p. 87). Yet traces remained. As Thum explains in a brilliant set of chapters about the remaking of the city, there was a long transitional era, in which the city was no longer in Germany, but not yet part of Poland. It was a period in which most Poles lived with German things—apartments, clothing, cutlery, dishes, furniture, carpets, tools, pictures and magazines. ‘Germanness’, one wrote, ‘emanates from every corner’ (p. 174).

In response, a unitary Polish identity was fashioned upon the rubble of Breslau. In Wrocław, eastern Poles arrived to find German-speaking Poles from the west, whom they held in suspicion, while the local Poles regarded the new arrivals as Lithuanians, Russians, Ruthenians or Ukrainians—certainly not quite Polish (p. 179). Ultimately, however, ‘Wrocław was one of the major melting pots in which the ethnic heterogeneity of prewar Poland met its end’. Through that process, Poland, which had been so diverse at the end of the First World War, became ‘a country virtually without dialects and regional customs’ (p. 181).

In order to facilitate (and legitimate) this transformation, scholars connected to the school of ‘Western Thought’ pursued policies and actions quite similar to the German practitioners of Ostforschung. The West Institute, founded in Poznań in 1945, became the flagship of western research. ‘The main fields of research were the history and culture of the western territories, Western Slavic studies, and Polish–Czech relations, as well as the history of the German occupation of Poland and German–Polish relations in general’ (p. 196). Their central goal, Thum explains, was to refashion the western territories as ‘recovered territories’, which had been reunited with the rest of Poland after centuries of division. That required their pushing their histories back to the year 1000, to find the antecedents of contemporary Polish rule, and reducing a millennium of complex historical relations in central Europe to simple formulas.

Museums played a central role in popularising these notions. Local history groups aided the efforts of the scholars charged with these nationalist duties. So too did an array of popular publications, in which leading scholars from Polish universities penned narratives of unitary Polish history. Those differed markedly from both the histories of the past and, in some cases, their own more scholarly essays (p. 221). Thum details a remarkable refashioning of the past within these ostensibly scholarly publications, one that ‘required that numerous facts be omitted and that others be presented in distorted form’ (p. 219). While these scholars eschewed the racial rhetoric of the Nazi visions of the area's history, ‘the consequences of Polish propaganda’, Thum argues, were ‘by no means harmless. In the eyes of many, it seemed to justify acts of violence against the German population in the western territories and vandalism of the material legacy of Prussian and German culture’ (p. 207).

That vandalism took place in a clearly organised fashion across the city's buildings, street signs, cemeteries and monuments. Here too, such ‘nationalist’ acts, and the arguments that supported them, bore a stunning resemblance to those pursued by the Nazis. ‘In both cases,’ Thum notes, ‘the [Nazi and Polish] governments advocated the complete elimination of foreign language designations, to which end they were supported by organizations such as the League for the German East, on the one hand, and the Polish Western Union, on the other.’ In both situations ‘university professors offered their services in order to veil the political campaign in ostensibly academic arguments’, and in both cases ‘the employment of linguistically ‘pure’ name forms was allegedly intended to reestablish an original state’. The reality, however, was purely political: ‘to expunge the traces of multi-ethnic settlement history in the Slavic–German borderlands that were embedded in the area's place names’ (p. 248).

VII.

For Germans expelled from eastern Europe, the memories of lost German places persisted. Yet as Demshuk makes clear, that did not lead to a radical politics of memory with aggressive aims. This was true despite the fact that many expellees suffered under difficult conditions in West Germany, where most found themselves and their children disadvantaged economically. Their bellicose spokesmen gained considerable attention. Much as in the case of the people studied by Chu, however, there was a disconnect between those spokesmen and the expellees from Silesia: most expellees engaged in their own relations with the former Heimat (home), coming to terms with their loses in amenable ways.

Ultimately, Demshuk's book is an analysis of the fate of expellees and the ways in which they thought about and remembered lost Heimats: one lost to the past and another lost in the present, transformed and undone. His argumentation boils down to a combination of the different ways in which this took place, as the expellees slowly detached themselves from the lost territories and came to terms with their losses and their new lives. He spends surprising little time discussing the material advantages of landing in West Germany, but his point is well taken. He argues that ‘all across West Germany, Silesian exiles steadily came to the same realisation: two images of Heimat were developing simultaneously, drawing ever further apart’. Consequently, ‘they transfigured Heimat into an idealised realm that they could possess whenever they closed their eyes to console themselves amid growing awareness that the physical Heimat east of the Oder and Neisse rivers was diverging away, becoming a foreign space that they could never possess again’ (p. 3).

Rather than clinging to the idea of a return from the 1950s through the 1970s, until Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik created closure by recognising the border, this conglomerate group (no more unified than the Polish-Germans studied by Chu) knew that the Heimat ‘had grown far more distant in time and in space’ (p. 13). They knew that ‘the home they had known could never be restored in the physical spaces of the lost East’ (p. 19). Consequently they created memorials and monuments in their new homeland, ‘Heimat spaces’, such as the Brieg tower in Goslar, which later become part of local, West German lore (p. 183). They travelled as well as tourists to Silesia, much more than is commonly assumed, and their reports of transformation brought a kind of closure, at least for that generation. For the vast majority of West Germans, including the descendants of these Silesians, however, this became the ‘forgotten East’. Indeed, Demshuk ends his book somewhat perplexed, even disappointed at Germans’ ignorance about Poland and the ‘transfigured Heimat’ that so interested him (pp. 266–7).

VIII.

Douglas notes that one of the paradoxes of the expulsions of Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the war was that ‘the post-war population of this truncated and divided country . . . was larger than in 1939’(p. 301). The implications of that demographic concentration has not yet seen enough scholarly attention, but neither has the general homogenisation of eastern European states. For within the longer framework of German history, one of the most striking transformations to follow the Second World War was surely the disinterest Demshuk identifies among so many Germans. After a millennium of travel and mixing, eastern Europe was no longer a natural place for Germans to go—to study, to work or to live. Nor are Germans any longer a people to whom the rulers of eastern European states might logically turn when engaging in agricultural, economic, intellectual or scholarly enterprises. This is no longer a function of borders or oppositional regimes. It simply is. During the twentieth century, stunning geopolitical shifts radically altered the cultural, economic, political and social structures that had underpinned the fluidity of identity and multiplicity of interaction that had characterised this region for hundreds of years. While the Nazis and the Soviets participated in that transformation, one of the points these books make quite clear is that they did not do it alone.

Moreover, what emerges in all these accounts is the terribly vulnerable individual caught up in clashes of categories, the geopolitical machinations of great and small powers, and the politics of multiple regimes and organisations. It is hard not to agree with Douglas when he argues: ‘the focus of any historical or commemorative treatment of the expulsions, as with the other and greater tragedies of the era, must remain squarely on the human person, which both in 1939–1945 and 1945–1947 was reduced to an abstract category rather than recognized as an all too vulnerable individual’ (p. 362). From the various subjective experiences and viewpoints of these vulnerable individuals no single history can emerge. There are, rather, many histories and stories that capture the continual (if diminishing) fluidity of identity and the multiplicity of interactions among people in these regions as they acted within shifting structures that sorted and redirected them, and channelled their movements across vast landscapes. It was not only states that were truncated, but also possibilities of empathy and interaction. It is hard to escape a sense that those actions impoverished both the people and the regions, as the zeal to fashion nation states with homogenous polities obliterated distinctions. It is also hard to underestimate the value of these books. Taken together, they push us to engage in a task of evaluation that is less dependent on the precepts of defensive and polemical national histories and national-ethnic categories and engage, instead, in a reassessment of the lives and fates of intertwined individuals, minorities and majorities, German and non-German alike.