i

Dissertation, Summer 2012

Candidate number: 70639

MA Migration Studies, University of Sussex

Word Count: 10156

Narrating ‘home’: What can we learn from the

experiences of German expellees and

refugees after the Second World War?

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Summary

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the concept of home by looking at the

experiences of expellees and refugees in Germany after the Second World War, situating

these in the literature on migration, displacement and home, and in particular

transnational anthropological literature. After conducting auto-biographical interviews

with expellees, their narratives, influenced by their historical, social and economic

context, reveal that their understanding of home has undergone profound changes

throughout their life-course, and can loosely be categorised into three phases: the loss

of home, itinerancy, and settlement. Throughout these phases the meaning of home

was constantly being contested and negotiated by expellees. This has led to an

imagined, idealised and romanticised notion of their Heimat (homeland) that now only

exists in their (common) memory and is now combined with their current home where

they describe themselves as Zuhause (at home).

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Table of Contents

Summary ............................................................................................................................................................... ii

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................................................ iii

List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................... iv

List of Illustrations, Figures, Maps and Tables ................................................................................................. v

Preface .................................................................................................................................................................. vi

1. Introduction................................................................................................................................................. 1

2. What is the meaning of ‘home’? ................................................................................................................ 5

3. Historical context: expellees and refugees in Germany after the Second World War .......................... 9

4. Narrative, life-course and relatives ......................................................................................................... 14

5. The loss of ‘home’ ..................................................................................................................................... 18

6. Surviving in the ‘homes’ of others ........................................................................................................... 25

7. Making a new ‘home’ ............................................................................................................................... 32

8. Remembering and narrating home and Heimat .................................................................................... 37

9. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 41

10. Appendix ............................................................................................................................................... 44 10.1 Aufforderung zur Einbürgerung, 9 Dezember 1944: .......................................................................... 44 10.2 Certificate as Deutscher Umsiedler, Berta Marialke, 6 Dezember 1944: ........................................... 45 10.3 Certificate of delousing and medical examination: Flüchtlings – Durchgangslager Uelzen-

Bohldamm, 20 Mai 1946: ........................................................................................................................... 45 10.4 Flüchtlingsmassentransport List 8. Juli 1946 ..................................................................................... 46 10.5 List of refugees and expellees arriving in a local parish given to the mayor ...................................... 47 10.6 Erfassung, Herrn Mühlenherdt, Oerdinghausen, 1 November 1948: .................................................. 48 10.7 Grundstückszeichnung, Albert Müller, Oerdinghausen 23: ................................................................ 49 10.8 Zuweisung von Wohnraum, Herrn Franz Wolf, 10 Januar 1949: ....................................................... 50 10.9 Flüchtlings-ausweis, Nummer C.G.A.B. 041909: .............................................................................. 51 10.10 Antrag auf Ausstellung eines Ausweises für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge, Franz Siegert, 26

Januar 1957 (first page only) ...................................................................................................................... 52 10.11 Flüchtlingsfragebogen Nr. 105, Wilhelm Wilke: .............................................................................. 53 10.12 Ausweis für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge A, Nummer: 3131/11182: ................................................ 54

11. Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 55 PRIMARY SOURCES 55

a) Archival sources ................................................................................................................................ 55 b) Newspapers and periodicals .............................................................................................................. 56

SECONDARY SOURCES 57 OTHER 60

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List of Abbreviations

BdV Bund der Vetriebenen (Alliance of Expellees)

FRG Federal Republic of Germany/West Germany (previous the American,

British and French Zones)

GDR German Democratic Republic/East Germany (previously the Soviet Zone)

IRO International Refugee Organization

UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

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List of Figures, Maps and Tables

3:1 Refugee Population in Germany in 1950 (Connor, 2006:174) ........................................... 11

3:2 Population of Cornau, 1950…………………………………………………………..…..…11

3:3 Population Movements 1944-48................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

5:1 Refugee treks arriving in Lilienthal, Bremen, (Reiter, 2006) ............................................ 21

6:1 The destroyed western part of Bremen (Reiter, 2006) ....................................................... 25

7:1 Pictures of Maria's estate: the plan, building and the end product (Reiter, 2006) .......... 35

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Preface

I am grateful for the help of my mother in finding research participants for me, her

enthusiasm for the topic and the many conversations we had about it. I would also like

to thank my partner for very valuable proof-reading of this dissertation and his patience

throughout. Importantly I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Katy Gardner for her

interest in my topic and helpful direction particularly on conceptual issues and how to

use and organise the wealth of material I had gathered. Most of all I would like to thank

all the expellees who shared their often intimate experiences with me, usually a

complete stranger, and let me into their home. They were patient and generous in their

conversations with me, and without them this paper would not exist.

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1. Introduction

Throughout my childhood the story of my grandparents’ expulsion from Silesia to a

village in Lower Saxony, Germany, in 1946 has been a background accompaniment to

our family’s history and gatherings. Many conversations were sprinkled with words such

as Vetriebene (expellees) and Hiesige (locals), stories of events and trips with the

Flüchtlingsverein (refugee association) and references to where neighbours used to live

in the Heimat (homeland). However, it was not until more recently and in the context of

pursuing migration studies, that I realised the significance of such an event in someone’s

life. Although I learnt about the Second World War at school in Germany and studied

migration at postgraduate level, the fact that there were about 12 million German

refugees and expellees in Germany as a result of the re-drawing of the boundaries after

the end the Second World War (Connor, 2007; Lehmann, 1991; Ther, 1996) was never

covered in the syllabus. Yet, it is one of the biggest movements of people over a short

period of time in Europe’s recent history.

Research about expellees and refugees saw its pinnacle in the 1950s, mostly finding

‘that the integration of the refugees and expellees [had] made good progress’ (Bommes,

2010:132). As this research was so bound up with ‘policy and practical applicability’

(Bommes, 2010:128), often motivated by worries about political radicalization of the

expellees, once ‘good integration’ had been demonstrated the interest in researching it

faded. It was not until the 1970s, 80s and 90s that the topic was re-visited, particularly

by historians.

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In this paper my aim is to explore how the expulsion and the subsequent repatriation of

expellees and refugees in Germany was experienced by individuals, and how this

experience interacts with their understanding and construction of ‘home’. By looking at

their experiences and following Malkki I will aim to ‘question the notion of identity as a

historical essence rooted in particular places, or as a fixed and identifiable position in a

universalizing taxonomic order’ (1995a:2). Broadly speaking, their experience is one of

being expelled from their family and childhood home and subsequently placed in a new

area, a ‘home by chance’ (Lehmann, 1991, my translation). These disruptions of ‘home’

over time and space, forced them to constantly re-evaluate what home meant to them

materially and symbolically.

Experiences of expellees and refugees after the end of the Second World War are hugely

diverse, depending on the time and conditions of the flight or expulsion, experiences of

the war itself, the age and gender of the expellees and refugees and the dispersal of

their families, amongst other things. Throughout these experiences the space of the

‘home’ has played a crucial role. It is thus important to remember that the stories in this

paper are not generalisable to all expellees and refugees of the period, and that the

understandings of ‘home’ presented here reflect particular experiences. Nonetheless, by

following their journey over space and through time, these particular experiences can

help us think about what ‘home’ means more generally.

Among the narratives in this research three main, chronological, phases of ‘home’

emerged, demarcating specific influences on and negotiations of ‘home’, reminiscent of

Gurney’s episodic ethnographies (1997). The first phase, ‘loss’, is the traumatic and

often sudden loss of the family and childhood ‘home’, including all of its material and

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symbolic content, and the subsequent journey West. The second phase, ‘itinerancy’, is

marked by conditions of material and economic deprivation and living in other people’s

homes and frequent moves. Throughout this time, relations between expellees and

receiving communities were often tense and difficult (Lehmann, 1991; Ther, 1996).

Although this period was generally intended as a temporary situation, it could last up to

ten years. The final phase, ‘settlement’, is that of making a new ‘home’. This is a

physical, emotional and social process of settling.

These various experiences of ‘home’ have contributed to a distinct construction of what

‘home’ means to expellees. Previous studies on this topic have found that expellees

make a clear distinction between Zuhause (at home) and Heimat (homeland) (e.g.

Svašek, 2002). Strong ties to the ‘homeland’ are often maintained and nurtured, and the

new house is only reluctantly accepted as ‘home’ (Lehmann, 1991; Schulze, 2002;

Svašek, 2002, 2005). Such discourses are not only prevalent in personal narratives of

expellees and refugees but also in those of the various expellee organisations (Cordell,

2006; Wolff, 2001). These studies also show how ‘home’ can be a multidimensional

concept which includes personal and social aspects as well as having physical and

emotional, material and symbolic meanings. The concept can also be contradictory,

being both negative and positive, fixed and without boundaries. Similarly feelings about

the homeland and host countries can be contradictory (George and Fitzgerald, 2012).

By analyzing the three phases of ‘home’ in the narratives of expellees and refugees my

aim is to understand what ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ means to them and how these

phases, which have both material and symbolic/metaphorical meaning, have

contributed to the way that expellees and refugees have constructed ‘home’ and to

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what extent recent theories can explain these constructions. In the first section of this

paper I will discuss the concept of home and the historical context that the experiences

of expellees and refugees are situated in. I will then explore in-depth the three phases of

‘home’ as narrated by the expellees and finally evaluate what we can learn from these

with regards to our understanding of ‘home’; in short how displacement,

deterritorialization and exile shape the construction of ‘home’.

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2. What is the meaning of ‘home’?

When starting this project my intention was to explore questions of national identity in

Germany after the Second World War through the experiences of expellees after their

displacement from areas such as Silesia and Pomerania to the Federal Republic of

Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Instead ‘home’ emerged as

the dominant theme from the interviews and narratives, for example through lengthy

stories of the ‘lost home’, the elaborations on different ‘homes’ inhabited subsequently

or in the descriptions of the search for and the making of a new ‘home’. Thinking about

‘home’ also became part of my own involvement in this project, for which I returned to

my childhood home and found out about my family’s history.

The concept of home is complex and one that has undergone profound changes.

Traditionally home has been viewed as a fixed and bounded dwelling, closely linked to

the assumption of a natural and essential association between a people, their culture

and their territory (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). Such a view of home meant feelings of

security and familiarity and represented the private (i.e. female), rather than the public

(i.e. male) sphere. More recently, interdisciplinary, feminist and transnational

approaches have challenged this notion of home by deconstructing the assumed

relationships in the traditional view. This has included decoupling the private sphere

from naturally being gendered and female, disassociating home from its physical locality,

deconstructing its identity-place unity, and thus exposing its social and cultural

construction (e.g. Ahmadi Lewin, 2001; Svašek, 2002). For example, in her study of

elderly Bengalis in London, Gardner found that their understanding of home is ‘fluid: a

set of practices, memories and myths’ (2002:211). The meaning of home to an individual

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can thus change according to their gender and stage in the life-course, and depends on

cultural, historical, economic, and political contextual factors (Mallett, 2004).

Furthermore, the position of the researchers themselves will be significant, as home is a

concept that is culturally and ideologically influenced, and full of personal meanings and

emotions – not just for the researched (Mallett, 2004). Given that in the case of

migration or displacement, contextual factors and the material dwelling are subject to

change, this becomes a particularly interesting site in which to study the meaning of

‘home’ and its construction.

Some significant contributions to the study of home and migration have been made by

anthropologists in the context of transnationalism (e.g. Gardner, 2002; Fog-Olwig, 2002,

2007; Salih, 2003), a key work being the edited volume Migrants of Identity by Rapport

and Dawson. In it they call ‘for the anthropological appreciation of “home” as a useful

analytical construct’ to ‘explore physical and cognitive movement within and between

homes, and the relations between the two’ (1998:4), incorporating perspectives of both

the individual and the collective.

According to Rapport and Dawson, the traditional, fixed meaning of home discussed

earlier, is no longer useful in a world defined by individuals’ movements through space

and time. Home has thus become mobile and ‘plurilocal’, intricately bound up with

movement, and can be defined as ‘where one best knows oneself’ (Rapport and

Dawson, 1998: 9). They also argue that home has the strongest effect in its absence or

negation as is the case after migration or displacement.

In more recent transnational ethnographic work, scholars have explored the idea of

having more than one home, paying special attention to the age and gender of the

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researched (e.g. Ahmed, 1999; Fog Olwig, 2002, 2007; Gardner, 2002; George and

Fitzgerald, 2012; Mand, 2010; Salih, 2003). Fog Olwig explains: ‘in the first sense, home

is a concrete locus of specific relations of social and economic rights and obligations…in

the second sense, home is a more abstract entity of belonging expressed through

various types of narratives and other forms of symbolic interchange’. These two

understandings and practices of home ‘mutually reinforce and implicate one another’

(2002:216). Following Brah, Mand (2010) similarly argues that home is a lived experience

and a place of origin. This idea of two homes is one that I want to explore in this paper.

Instead of two physical homes and actual movement between the two, in this context

there is one remembered, imagined and lost Heimat-home, and one material and

current house-home. Exploring the meanings of these two homes to expellees, their co-

existence and concurrent influence will form the central theme of this paper.

As most of the research on expellees and refugees was carried out in the first 20 years

after the war (exception Lehmann, 1991), most scholarly interest was in a historical

account of their integration. The picture that emerges is of a homogenous group of

refugees, a homogenous group of locals and a homogenous experience of integration in

West Germany. Such an ‘integration-ideology’ (Lehmann, 1991:68) is not just the

dominant historical narrative in Germany but is also often replicated in the stories of the

expellees themselves – at least at first. By using more recent theorizations of ‘home’ and

applying these to the experiences and narratives of expellees I will aim to deconstruct

and add complexity to this dominant narrative.

It is also important to note that words for home are different in various languages, so

that some languages do not distinguish between ‘home’ and ‘house’ (Ahmadi Lewin,

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2001), and in German, there is a distinction between the word ‘home/Heim’ and

‘homeland’ (Heimat) (Svašek, 2002), where the Heim refers to the individual home, and

the Heimat to its collective meaning (Rapport and Dawson, 1998:8).

The meaning of ‘home’ is also often historically and ideologically loaded. In this context

we need to be aware of various Nazi policies which explicitly connected Nazi ideology

with the German Heimat. More profoundly by making ‘a connection between Heimat

and Vaterland (fatherland)… Heimat became a central concept in Nazi ideology’ (Svašek,

2002:496). One of these policies was the resettlement of Baltic Germans from Estonia

and Latvia in Germany with a policy they called ‘“Heim ins Reich” (Back to the

Homeland)’ (Cordell, 2006:22) and another labelled Anschluss (accession), which

appropriated areas where ethnic Germans lived (such as the Sudetenland) into the Third

Reich (Svašek, 2002).

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3. Historical context: expellees and refugees in Germany after

the Second World War

The mass displacement of people that followed the end of the Second World War was

the birth of the refugee as we understand the term today (Malkki, 1995b). As many

scholars have pointed out, discussion about ‘refugees’ and ‘displacement’ today has

numerous underlying assumptions. Two major premises at play here are ‘that refugees

are a transitory phenomenon of crisis and disorder, and thus only temporarily

relevant…[and that] human nature is best served in a sedentary setting’ (Harrell-Bond

and Voutira, 1992:7). The term displacement also assumes a natural association

between people and places, where people are rooted and therefore become uprooted

(Stepputat, 1994). In this politics of space the ‘essential refugee’ must have crossed a

national border.

Refugees have also been described as upsetting the ‘national order of things’, but as the

‘other’ defining its imagined boundaries (Malkki, 1995a, 1995b; Turner, 2004) and

revealing the social construction of the territorial nation state. It is the assumed match

between a people, a territory and a national culture that is exposed, or in other words

the illusion of a nation as a continuity from the past and into the future (Balibar, 1991).

The ‘home’ of the refugee, which has been disrupted by forced displacement and so

needs to be continually recreated, is in opposition to the idea of a bounded national

‘home’.

The end of the Second World War saw one of the biggest forced movements of people

in recent history. As a consequence of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements ‘some 15.4

million people had to leave their former home’ (Fassmann & Munz, 1994:521) and move

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from Eastern to Western Europe. The largest of these movements was that of ethnic

Germans who now found themselves as refugees and expellees being resettled in the

four Occupation Zones in Germany, later the Federal Republic of Germany and the

German Democratic Republic (Connor, 2007:173; Ther, 1996), with 7.7 million in the FRG

mostly concentrated in the British and American Zones (Connor, 2006). The expellees

and refugees mainly came from the rural and agricultural regions of Silesia, Pomerania,

Sudetenland and East Prussia in Eastern and Central Europe. Formally these expellees

and refugees were further distinguished into Reichsdeutsche (National Germans or

German Citizens; 4.6 million) and Volksdeutsche (Ethnic Germans; 3.1 million), where

the National Germans were ‘the former inhabitants of those areas east of the Oder-

Neiβe line which had belonged to Germany on 31 December 1937’ (Connor, 2006: 173).

All of my interviewees were Reichsdeutsche: one from Pomerania and six from Silesia.

The extent of the quantity of people that arrived in West Germany and the impact it had

on the West German population becomes clearer when considered in relation to the

total population and the native population. The table below summarises the distribution

of refugees across the West German States:

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3:1 Refugee Population in Germany in 1950 (Connor, 2006:174)

In the destination village of two of the interviewed expellees the population almost

doubled from 552 in 1933 to 904 in 1946 (Chronik, 1979), significantly altering the make-

up of the community. The parish that the village was situated in counted its population

and their respective origins as follows in 1950 (as published in the telephone directory;

my translation and selection):

3:2 Population of Cornau, 1950

from the parish 48 817

from the Soviet Zone 2 029

from Silesia 11 779

from East Prussia 4 796

from Pomerania 2 178

from Gdansk and Poland 2 934

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In addition to the refugees and expellees there were large numbers of other displaced

persons (see for example Seipp, 2009), ex-prisoners of war and German ex-soldiers, who

had all been moved as part of the war and were now ‘homeless’.

Movements of people also occurred across other new boundaries in Central and Eastern

Europe, including the movement of some 1.5 million ethnic Poles and Polish Jews from

Lithuania, Belorussia and the Ukraine to Prussia and Silesia, the very areas that the

ethnic Germans had been expelled from (Fassmann & Munz, 1994:523). As we will see in

some of the narratives, these movements often overlapped resulting in homes being

shared by several families from different areas.

A map of Germany at the time will help to illustrate the mass migrations that took place

during and after the Second World War:

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3:3 Population Movements 1944-481

1 http://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Germany342/PopulationMovements1944-1948.jpg

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4. Narrative, life-course and relatives

As the participants in my research were elderly people looking back over their life and

on experiences from over 50 years ago, the narrative and auto-biographical approach

was the obvious choice for my project. Furthermore, it is a method usually used to write

about ‘history from below’ to highlight experiences that have thus far featured little in

mainstream narratives (Thomson, 2006). Given the lack of visibility of this topic

described in the introduction, this method seemed even more appropriate. Finally, as

Ahmadi Lewin argues, ‘personal experiences are quite crucial for how people perceive

the meaning of home’ (2001:362) and the methodology used needs to be able to

capture these experiences.

It has been argued that the strengths of the narrative approach lie in its ability to

capture complexity, subjectivity and to contextualize the individual’s story. Importantly,

this approach attempts to reveal the complexities about the individual’s experiences and

their embeddedness in the broader context, thus avoiding generalisations about

‘peoples’ or ‘cultures’. As Abu-Lughod has argued ‘attending to the particulars of

individuals’ lives need not imply disregard for forces and dynamics that are not locally

based, the effects of extra local or long-term processes are always manifested locally

and specifically’ (1993:8). It is also important to remember that these narratives are

‘conscious and structured accounts of events across the past’ (Gardner, 2002:31) and

only reflect what the expellees and refugees chose to tell me.

While focusing on the micro-level of individual’s experiences in this paper, it is important

to remember that people do not act in a vacuum but are situated in their political-

economic context, structural features and policies (Brettell, 2003). What I will then try

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and do is to ‘understand one person’s life and its meaning to that person in the context

of broader history and culture’ and to see what historical events of migration actually

‘look like on the ground’ (Brettell, 2003:25, 32), always trying to remain ‘mindful both to

the general and the particular’ (Brettell, 2003:44).

For my fieldwork I spent ten days in and around Bremen, Germany, at the beginning of

July 2012. Having grown up there myself, I was familiar with the area and the language.

All of the interviews were arranged before I arrived in Bremen. Participants were mostly

found through personal networks, including three of my own relatives, as well as

through the Bund der Vetriebenen Bremen (Alliance of Expellees Bremen).

In addition to the interviews I visited two archives, one district archive in Diepholz,

Lower Saxony, and another run by volunteers of the Bürgerverein Borgfeld (Citizens

Association Borgfeld) in Bremen.

In total I spoke to seven individuals. All but one of the interviews were carried out in the

participants’ own homes, and lasted between one and a half and four hours. Two

interviews were carried out with two participants present. The majority of participants

welcomed me and my interest in the topic and were forthcoming in sharing their life-

stories. However, some were reticent to revisit their past which was a painful memory,

and preferred instead to forget about it.

I will close this section with a few reflections on my own postitionality. All the

participants were elderly and in the majority of cases approached via one of their

children. During this process some of the children expressed concern that the interviews

may upset their elderly parents. I therefore conceded to have the children initially

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present at the interview. They eventually withdrew as they were happy with my conduct

of the interview. However, this has had two consequences: one is that the audience of

the narrative shifted, and secondly the children prompted and interfered with their

parents’ narration in some cases. Although I am aware that this is methodologically

problematic I do not think that this influenced the narratives a great deal.

Another consequence of the interviews being set up through the expellees’ children was

that in several cases I travelled to the participants’ homes with their children. During this

period, many did not refrain from telling me their version of their parent’s experiences.

Although interesting, this put me in a situation of entering the interview with prior

(biased) knowledge and created some problems in relation to where data collection

starts and finishes. This once again illustrates the difficulty in simply being an objective

observer when conducting fieldwork that involves human interaction.

Finally, a brief reflection on conducting interviews with relatives, namely my

grandfather, his sister and their uncle. A major issue was my prior knowledge about my

grandparents’ experiences, especially as we had been on a trip to visit my grandparents’

parental homes in Silesia in the summer of 2003. This meant that during the interview I

was conscious of the limited story I was being told, which led to some disappointment

on my side but also illustrates how the formal interview situation can influence the

narrative. The boundaries of what can and cannot be included as data were also

constantly being tested. For example, my grandmother’s passing away only three

months prior to the interviews must have had a significant impact on my grandfather’s

story, who made no mention of her throughout, despite her being central, according to

my knowledge, to at least some of his experiences. I also stayed on before and after the

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interview, and it was in fact after I had switched off the audio-recorder that he started

talking more freely and elaborately about his life. After some ethical pondering and in

discussion with my supervisor I have decided to include all the material. I do however

use pseudonyms in an effort to protect my participants identity. I would then agree with

Mullings’ (1999) observation that the researcher’s position as an insider and outsider

shifts constantly, as does the position of the participant.

Finally, it is important to remember that while the analysis in this paper is based on the

auto-biographical interviews conducted with expellees, it is also my own construction of

their narratives.

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5. The first phase: loss of ‘home’

The loss of the childhood and family ‘home’ was a traumatic experience for expellees

and with it ‘the sense of belonging to a place and community [was] brutally disrupted’

(Wolff, 2001: 53). Their narratives kept returning to this event, despite it being over 50

years ago. What effect did the loss have on their understanding of ‘home’? How does

this past ‘home’ influence the construction of ‘home’ today and their sense of belonging

in any future home?

The following quote from Renate illustrates the strong feelings the memory of the

expulsion still provokes today:

When I think of it today…this anger, this extreme disappointment, it sits so deep in me, and I will take this into the grave with me…. You see, we did not just lose our house and yard but we lost our Heimat. And everything can be replaced, but not the Heimat. And I have to tell you honestly…this expulsion, everything that the people had built, everything…it…well…words really fail me…

Let us first consider the varying circumstances of the loss of home and the journey west.

Differences in the way the home was lost and the subsequent journey include its timing,

which varied between 1944 until late 1947; how they left or were removed from the

homes, for example the extent of violence experienced; whether they could leave with

their family; their age and stage in the life-course; what they saw along the way, such as

rape or death; and their gender. Some of these differences led to a loose distinction

between who was deemed to be a refugee and an expellee – refugees being those who

fled before end of war and expellees returning home and remaining there after the end

of the war until they were expelled by Polish authorities.

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The first movement West occurred during the war, where most fled from the advancing

Soviet army (Connor, 2007; Fassman & Munz, 1994). These were often people who had

relatives in the West – both Julia and Renate made their way West in this way. For

others, fleeing from the Soviet troops was only the first stage of their flight, as they

returned to their homes after the front had passed them. This was the situation for

Erhard, Herbert, Helga and Maria. Returning home after this short flight was coloured in

contradictory feelings, relief that their house was still there co-existed with the sadness

at its damage.

Soon the situation changed again. Herbert und Helga were 11 and 9 when they saw a

lorry pull up onto their farmyard bringing two Polish families to live with them in their

home, already housing a family of five. This chaotic event remains a vivid memory for

them:

Herbert: ‘We got the first [Poles] in the village.’

Helga: ‘Yeah, the lorry stopped in our yard, and everyone got out. “Mine, mine, mine” was all that happened. And our parents were on the field, I was alone at home….my friend was still there and we got one of our pans, knives and forks back from them, when they went back to the lorry we fetched something else again.’

This period lasted for roughly one year, in which relations between the families were

difficult. The home owners were now relegated to two rooms on the second floor of

‘their’ family home, while one Polish family lived downstairs and another upstairs.

Already at this stage the expellees’ understanding of ‘home’ had undergone significant

changes. Firstly, there was the experience of the sudden loss of their physical home,

their material possessions and their labour on the fields. This was followed by the re-

appropriation of the home. However, after the return ‘home’ no longer meant the same,

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as the sense of security previously bound up with it was hard to regain. The home,

although in the exact same place, was now marked by the scars of the war. The damage

to the house and the field, constantly acted as a reminder of the new fragility of the

home. The familiar village environment and everyday life had also been disrupted. Not

all neighbours returned after the first flight and the annual farming routine could not be

carried out as usual.

These already changed circumstances were followed by the forced sharing of the space

of the family home. The home, although being the same physical building in the same

location, was no longer a place of security and familiarity. The home as a private space

had to be not just shared but almost entirely given over to complete strangers with

whom they did not even share a language. The context of the war meant that in the

space of the home a microcosm representing the post-war positions of ‘the Germans’ –

the losers - and ‘the Polish’ – the winners – was being recreated. What resulted was a

delicate balance between ensuring survival for all members of the household, all who as

a consequence of the war were losers of their own homes, and tense relations of

national superiority and inferiority were being reconstructed in the home. In the

narratives of the expellees, although only children at the time, this is very clear. Their

story is littered with feelings of resentment against ‘the Poles’ who lived in their house,

who had to be fed from their harvest and who went around the house claiming anything

that the family was not able to secure. At the same time their narratives do not feature a

single story of open confrontation between the families, showing that there must have

been an awareness of their status as ‘Germans’ who had lost the war and so had to bear

the consequences.

21

This period was abruptly ended for most families with the final expulsion from their

home between 1945 and 1947. They were told to pack their bags – only as much as they

could carry - and leave. The destination was unknown to them throughout the journey:

‘When we were leaving the village a little boy asked “where are we going?” and his grandfather answered “if only I knew”’ (Erhard)

Many also did not realise that they were never going to return to their homeland,

illustrated by the fact that they buried their valuables in the grounds of their home with

the intention of recovering them later. After a short stop in a camp for medical

screenings and delousing2, they were taken to their destination. However, the journey to

their final home was still several years away.

5:1 Refugee treks arriving in Lilienthal, Bremen (Reiter, 2006)

2 See example of such a certificate in the Appendix: 10.3.

22

A consequence of the expulsion or flight was the dispersal of families, relatives and

village communities, representing the loss of another aspect of ‘home’. In the homeland

families and neighbours depended on each other in many activities of their everyday

life. Hermine tells of how they used to take their bread and cake to the bakery to be

baked, as family homes did not have an oven. And Maria writes in her memoirs ‘we

hadn’t thought of the fact that we wouldn’t be among the people we loved once we had

crossed the Neiβe river. Where was grandmother, Aunt Marta, the neighbours from

home?’ ‘They were deprived of the support networks they had relied on in their

homeland’ (Connor, 2007: 165) and which constituted a significant part of what ‘home’

meant to expellees and refugees and ‘the life back home’. It is then a loss of home in all

its multidimensional aspects – the house, the family, the social relationships, security,

familiarity and a sense of belonging.

In the process of moving people from East to West ‘the refugee camp became emplaced

as a standardized, generalizable technology of power in the management of mass

displacement’ (Malkki, 1995b:498). It was not only the organization of people in the

camps – which was usually the responsibility of the Allied troops, later UNRRA3 and the

IRO4 – but also the German bureaucracy and specially passed laws5 that created the new

(legal) category of the ‘refugee’ and later ‘expellee’. As Malkki puts it ‘”the refugee” as a

specific social category and legal problem of global dimensions did not exist in its full

modern form before this period’ (1995b:497-98). From this followed the generalization

of the ‘refugee experience’ (Malkki, 1995b: 511). Lehmann similarly observes that at the

3 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

4 International Refugee Organization

5 For example the 1952 Lastenausgleichsgesetz (War Burden Redistribution Act) and the 1953

Bundesvetribenengesetz (Federal Expellee and Refugee Law) (Wolff, 2001:55).

23

time the fate of the refugee was seen as a homogenous and uniform one, when in

reality the differences were not fewer than the similarities (1991: 20). Such a

generalization and homogenization of the expellees’ and refugees’ experience

demonstrates the use of a language of power which contributes to their essentialisation

and their representation as having a fixed ‘culture’ – that of the refugee or expellee

(Abu-Lughod, 1993).

The term refugee did not remain as the only categorization. Once it became clear that

the ‘refugee problem’ was not temporary and that they had to be fully integrated in the

FRG, the term expellee’ emerged illustrating the transition of their status to permanent

members of the FRG (see appendices 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 and 10.11). Ther even argued

that the term Vetriebene (expellee) is a West German creation defined for the first time

in the Bundesvertriebenengesetz 1953 (1996:781).

From these legal categorizations developed a collective identity out of an otherwise

diverse group of people bound together by their status as refugee/expellee and their

common experiences of loss and suffering (Cordell 2006; Wolff, 2001). It is this

collective, non-voluntary suffering, Svašek (2005) and Wolff (2001) argue, that is an

important source of identification and belonging, not just individually but also

collectively. Furthermore, ‘the community…comes to life through the collective act of

remembering in the absence of a common terrain’ (Ahmed, 1999:344), something that

was facilitated and perpetuated by the many expellee organisations.

The terminology employed by the bureaucracy, the rhetoric used by expellee

organization and expellees themselves, all acted to entrench the experiences of loss and

24

suffering in their collective and individual identities, and thus became key to their

understanding of home.

The meaning of home has then undergone profound changes as a result of the

disruption of the established home during this phase of loss. The conception of home as

a locally bounded place of security and familiarity has been fundamentally undermined.

25

6. The second phase: itinerancy and surviving in the ‘homes’

of others

Due to the damage to many of Germany’s towns and cities during the war and the

consequent housing shortage, refugees and expellees were mostly located to the

countryside (Connor, 2006), where many ‘had to endure deplorable housing conditions’

(Connor, 2007:29). The destinations of expellees and refugees were usually set

arbitrarily (Lehmann, 1991). Overall, ‘the task of integrating almost 8 million

dispossessed refugees into an economy still recovering from the impact of the war was

enormous’ (2007:25).

6:1 The destroyed western part of Bremen (Reiter, 2006)

The majority of arrangements for the accommodation of refugees and expellees were

made locally. After the journey in the Flüchtlingsmassentransporte (refugee mass

transports, see Appendix 10.4) they would commonly be put up in a temporary shelter,

26

until they were re-housed by mayors who were simply asked to ‘house the…listed

refugees in your parish’ (see appendix 10.5).

Under the instruction of the Occupying Powers expellees were ‘to be billeted with

private householders’ (Connor 2007:30-31), on the legal basis of the Housing Law

(March 1946). The first step was the Erfassung (survey; see appendix 10.6) of the houses

in the locality, in order to establish who would be expected to take in refugees. The

refugees were given a Zuweisung von Wohnraum (allocation of housing space; see

appendix 10.8), which usually consisted of one room for all members of a family, with

varying levels of furniture and access to the kitchen and bathroom. The refugees

themselves usually had no choice in where they were placed nor the amount of space

they were allocated. The housing conditions and length of time spent in these

‘temporary’ arrangements varied and resulted in serious overcrowding (Connor, 2007).

Throughout this period the ‘refugees’ living conditions were significantly worse than

those of the indigenous inhabitants’ (Connor, 2007: 32). Herbert and Helga describe the

first accommodation they stayed in together with their parents:

Herbert: The farmers preferred us to other expellees, but for us this wasn’t an advantage. It was just a small booth…

Helga: One room with just one bed in it, an oven, a round iron stove.

Among my interviewees the length of time spent in such housing arrangements varied

from a few years up to a decade. This housing shortage continued for a long time, the

severity of which was revealed in ‘the census of September 1950… [which stated] that

the newly established West German state had a shortage of 4.4 million homes’ (Connor,

2007:139-140).

27

Huge numbers of people were transported and accommodated in this way, although

some also made their own way west, either directly from their homeland or later from

the Soviet Zone. Among those interviewed two made their own way to relatives in the

West, three were part of the organized movement and two were in the Soviet Zone first

and later made it across the border schwarz (illegally). There were also thousands of

people who remained in camps for many years after the end of the war (Connor,

2007:38; see also Seipp, 2009).

The experiences of the expellees I spoke to were typical of this period, while at the same

time illustrating their diversity, and deeply affecting what home meant to them. The lack

of privacy while being subtenants created a crucial shift in their understanding of home.

Helga tells how their living space was constantly being invaded by their hosts: ‘when

they opened the door to the entrance hall, the farmers, we got completely smoked out!’

Herbert did not even share the room with his parents and sister, instead he slept ‘in the

entrance hall, they put up an old bed for me to kip in, together with the farm hand’.

Hermine recalls similarly difficult experiences when they were subtenants and already

had one small child of their own: ‘as a baby she was all black in the face…when…[the

landlords] were building the chimney and then the wind came up and all the soot blew…

those are times one doesn’t like to be reminded of.’

Combined with multiple and frequent changes of ‘home’, these housing arrangements

meant that ‘home’ became to be seen as little more than a physical, practical

arrangement. This ‘home’ comes nearly without privacy, familiarity and security – in

other words these ‘homes’ have none of the characteristics that the home in the Heimat

28

had. Home then was starting to be constructed always with reference to the absent

home of the Heimat which became idealized:

Helga: Yes, we all lived healthily, then. First of all we were always outside in the fresh air, we had enough exercise and we ate lots of vegetables.

Such an idealization of the homeland is not uncommon in migration and displacement

(e.g. Gardner, 2002; George and Fitzgerald, 2010). In her study of Sudetengermans,

Svašek found that ‘Heimat began to be used to express Romantic notions of unspoiled

life in the countryside’ (2002:196) and explains that ‘selective memory is inherent in the

notion of Heimat itself’ (2002:499), erasing any problems and anomalies. Cordell also

observed that ‘surviving expellees and their descendants sometimes articulate a view of

the past that is overly romantic, and as a consequence have difficulty in coming to term

with the present’ (2006:25). Here, as Lovell argues, ‘memory recovers time and space in

a synchronic gesture, streamlining and unifying some of its diversity and contradictions

in order to create viable and cohesive collective images in the present’ (1998:12).

Another pattern typical of the early post-war period was the separation of families

through housing and work arrangements. This was in addition to any dispersal already

created by the war and expulsion. Herbert and Helga’s family’s experience illustrates

this. Their eldest brother, 16 year old Michael, was immediately placed as a farm hand.

Once Herbert left school he also moved out of his parents sublet room to wherever he

worked. On turning 14 Helga was ‘shipped to work in a hospital in Dortmund’, also

working for room and fare. Here, the dwelling of home is further disassociated from

feelings of familiarity and security as the expellees’ closest social relationships are

removed from the space of the home. Home then shifts even more from being an actual,

29

bounded space to being de-localised relationships spread out over significant physical

distances.

Relations with locals further affected the way expellees understood home. These were

often tense, the main causes being of an economic nature, such as housing: ‘there is

general agreement that housing was the most divisive economic issue between the

newcomers and the original population’ (Connor, 2007:69). Food was another cause, as

is vividly recalled by Helga: ‘I will never forget how we were scolded by a local farm lady

when we were stealing potatoes’. Others included employment, religion and the fear of

‘foreign’ influence (Connor, 2007). On the other hand the compatibility of the

characteristics of locals and expellees played crucial roles in successful relationships

(Connor, 2007:60). It was particularly in rural areas that relations were more difficult

‘partly [as] the result of the huge economic and social gulf between the native and

refugee populations. Many of the villages to which the refugees were sent in 1945-46

had emerged virtually unscathed from the war…On the other hand, the refugees had to

rebuild their lives from scratch. They had lost their homelands and most of their

possessions which they, their parents and grandparents had collected over generations.’

(Connor, 2007:64; see also Bösche, 1991). This economic gulf is illustrated by a story

from Herbert:

I can still remember well how, when I was staying with the farmer, we both got a suit, the farmer got the same suit as I did, a tailor in a nearby village had sewn them for us. Both the same suit, just with the difference that the farmer wore his for work and I only on Sunday afternoons. But I also had a suit.

This time was consistently narrated as a life of hardships and suffering, leading to

feelings of inferiority and victimization among many expellees (Lehmann, 1991),

30

strengthening the key pillar of the collective identity developed through the loss of the

home. The suffering of the expellees now extended beyond the experiences of the

expulsion to their early post-war situation.

Finally, the view that the ‘refugee problem’ was temporary caused tension. For some it

only became certain that they would never be able to return to live in their homeland

when Chancellor Kohl recognized the Oder-Neisse line as the German-Polish border in

October 1991 (Schulze, 2002:44).

These, now semi-permanent, arrangements reaffirmed the loss of home and second

class status among expellees. The space that was their ‘home’ was often a space in the

middle of another’s home, constantly pervaded by the host family. Whether relations

were good or bad between the local family and the expellees, the negation of what

home used to mean during this period, entrenched the home in the Heimat as the ideal.

As Maria concludes ‘the mentalities are different…the Silesian mentality is totally out of

place here in North Germany…it is a big, big difference. Bremen is difficult for the

Silesians’.

Even Renate, who managed to secure a private living space in a barrack together with

her mother and sister, expressed feelings of estrangement and inferiority when thinking

back to this time: ‘Well, I myself have many inferiority complexes. I felt foreign – which

they also let me feel – it makes sense…because they had remained in their Heimat…but

we, we were foreign, felt as if we were intruders’. She adds ‘it took a very long time until

I was able to discard these feeling of inferiority’. We can see here that it is not just the

physical space that prevents the feeling of being at home, but also the context of

31

material hardships, the lack of social networks and the myth of the eventual return to

the homeland.

This phase of itinerancy was then characterized by the dispersal of families, several

moves between different housing arrangements, usually living in other people’s homes

rather than their own, ‘serious economic deprivation’ (Connor, 2007: 47) and a lack of

privacy. These factors led expellees to feeling torn between the old Heimat and the new

home, with both still having the potential of being their permanent future home.

‘Home’ was constructed in terms of what ‘home’ meant in the homeland and in

opposition to what it represented in the early-post war period. In addition to the

experience of a forced loss of the home, which in itself acted as a strong identifier for

expellees, the continuous and ongoing hardship of life in general and especially housing

conditions in West Germany entrenched this view.

Finally, underlying this construction of ‘home’ was a sense of ambivalence. Despite all

the hardships many were able to see that in the context of the war and the horrors of

the holocaust they were also lucky. As Gardner has argued the ‘presence of emotions

depends to a huge degree on the personal histories and characters of the individuals

concerned’ (2002:18) which can result in ambivalent feelings.

32

7. The third phase: settlement and making a new ‘home’

The housing situation of expellees and refugees improved considerably in the 1950s,

despite an initial worsening of the situation following the currency reform in 1948. A

combination of factors made this possible: the housing building programmes of the FRG

(with laws passed in 1950 and 1956); the 1952 Lastenausgleichgesetz (Equalisation of

Burdens Law); foreign aid; and the ‘economic miracle’. Furthermore, as Connor argues,

the large proportion of expellees renting, buying or building their own home reflected

their ‘disinclination to be subtenants, resulting from the problems many had

experienced when billeted with native householders in the early post-war years. Instead

they preferred their own space and privacy…’ (2007:140). In the early 1950s most of the

newly built housing was intended as cheap rented accommodation; in the later 1950s

the emphasis shifted to building for ownership (Connor, 2007). However, despite these

improved housing conditions for expellees the census of 1960 still recorded a gap

between these and those of the native population, which was not closed until 1968

(Connor, 2007).

This phase of ‘settling’ was characterized by the following features: the passage of time

meant that many of the expellees had become accustomed to their new surroundings;

the age and stage of their life-course meant that by the mid-1950s many of them were

starting families. Finally, the political context of the Cold War made a return to the

homeland less likely and the ‘economic miracle’ of the FRG made staying more

appealing. Eventually, many expellees thus recognized that they would have to accept

their new location and started the process of making their house into their home.

33

With the passage of time many expellees became embedded in their new locality and

initial problems moved into the background. Helga affirms this when saying ‘it was only

in the early period that they sort of rejected the refugees a bit, but then it was ok.’ The

embedding included more economic security as many found permanent employment or

were able to follow a career. Joining local clubs and associations was another important

waypoint for establishing expellees’ sense of belonging in their new home (Connor,

2007; Schulze, 2002). These were some of the few spaces frequented by both locals and

expellees.

Most important though was the re-establishment of social relationships. Here the many

local expellee and refugee organizations played a significant role. As their political aims

of reclaiming the homeland lost relevance due to the Cold War, they became centres of

sociality instead. Such social events brought together expellees and refugees from the

different areas and with different stories, creating from the shared imagined identity

defined by loss and suffering a real community providing a network of support in the

new environment. Everyday life also brought locals and expellees closer together, by

working together, living as neighbours or their children attending the same schools.

Renate, for example, became close friends with a colleague of her husband and his wife,

to the extent that they would go on holiday together. Erhard became close friends with

his neighbours through their children. The next generation found it significantly easier

and were often quite determined to integrate. Mixed marriages between locals and

expellees, but also expellees from different areas of origin became common. ‘Since the

end of the 1960s and the early 1970s a break in the historical consciousness among the

younger generation is observable’ (Lehmann, 1991:83).

34

The passage of time inadvertently brought with it the creation of a new family, as those

who were children or young adults during the expulsion grew into adults and a new

stage in their life-course. It was especially the birth of children that created a sense of

belonging to the new locality for expellees and a departure from a life defined by

hardship. As Maria explains: ‘Soon our first daughter was born, she brought cheerfulness

into our life, it was a gift from God’.

With starting a new family, came the desire to secure a physical, bounded and private

space for themselves. This finally became a realistic possibility for the aforementioned

reasons. Although this process was often long and full of setbacks, in the majority of

cases it led to expellees being able to own their own home, and once again own their

physical space in privacy. Among the interviewees all but one was able to own their

home. For Maria and her husband it was an especially long journey: ‘It took 12 years

until we got our own house.’ In order to build housing, land had to be found by parishes,

as well as the raw materials which remained scarce for a long time. The result was often

estates rather than individual houses integrated into towns and villages, although these

also existed. Maria lives in such an estate to the north of Bremen. This kind of an

arrangement resulted in clear territorial and spatial separation – or even segregation –

between locals and expellees. However, for Maria this is a very positive experience:

‘After we’d built [our house] we were only among refugees, that was splendid!’ To some

extent it is here that the Heimat and the new home are combined, by creating a

community of only expellees and refugees and recreating many aspects of the ‘life back

home’ such as subsistence farming. What binds this community together remains their

common experience of loss and suffering, rather than their exact location of origin,

35

which in fact often varied. In Maria’s estate for example expellees came from

Bessarabia, Silesia and Pomerania, as well as smaller numbers from other areas.

7:1 Pictures of Maria's estate: the plan, building and the end product (Reiter, 2006)

In her study of the Sudetengermans in Bavaria, Svašek (2002) also found narratives of

ownership and property compensating for their earlier losses. The house in its

materiality, Mand argues, acts ‘as a site for claims and counterclaims of belonging’

(2010:276). Home and house are thus becoming re-integrated.

Visits back to the homeland organised by expellee organisations became common

amongst the expellees and brought with them another important realization about their

previous homes. Namely that their memory of the Heimat no longer corresponded with

the current reality. Their home in the Heimat no longer existed and could not be

connected to the current geographic location. Although it was often painful for expellees

to see new generations being born in ‘their’ home, they also realized that this was not

36

their home anymore. Instead, theirs was the home of their memory and in the past.

George and Fitzgerald (2012) in their study of elderly migrants in New Zealand and

Svašek (2002) in her study of Sudetengermans found the similar effects of such visits:

‘the homeland was no longer home’ (George and Fitzgerald, 2012:251).

In this period many aspects of the expellees’ initial economic deprivation and markers of

their difference disappeared. Combined with the dwindling prospects of an eventual

return to their homelands, many expellees accepted that they would remain in their

new ‘home by chance’ permanently. This acceptance also altered the way expellees

understood the physical space of home, once again the aim was to combine the house

with the home, to establish in it feelings of security, familiarity and privacy. This period

represented a conscious effort on behalf of the expellees to fix their home into place.

However, the memory of their Heimat and expulsion meant that they were not able to

be completely and solely emotionally connected to their new home.

37

8. Remembering and narrating home and Heimat

I always say I am at home here, but my Heimat is Pomerania. It’s been like this until now; it will always be like this and it will never change. The manner in which we left our Heimat was too painful for it to be any other way. It would be different if I had left voluntarily…but if you are forced… (Renate)

Well, here I am Zuhause (at home), because I have my children here, but I always say if I visit Silesia and I die there then burn me in the Lichter forest, don’t bring me back…Of course, my roots are there, that’s how it is. (Maria)

These two quotes illustrate how expellees have constructed home as a consequence of

their experiences and historic context. In this they maintain connections to both their

home prior to the expulsion – the Heimat – as well as their new home, the locality and

house they now inhabit. Similarly to how many transnational migrants have two homes

(e.g. Gardner, 2002; Mand, 2010), expellees integrate two homes into their meaning of

home. The main difference here is that one home is an imagined home of the past and

preserved in memory. This is integrated into the second home, which is physical and

current. This creates a fluid relationship between the two homes, each remaining

internally bounded and fixed in terms of their meaning and their locality. Svašek

similarly found that for the Sudetengermans the ‘Sudetenland has become an imaginary

space’ (2002:498) and so expellees’ identities are in fact territorialized in the assumed

natural link to the homeland. Cordell similarly found an association with the two homes

and concluded that ‘a certain schizophrenia exists’ (2006:41) in relation to feelings

towards home.

As Gardner has shown in her work on elderly Bengalis in London, home can be both ‘an

idea and a set of social relationships and practices’ (2002:4). For expellees the idea is the

home that was experienced in the Heimat, whereas the social relationships and

38

practices are those that take place in the new home. They are the new family, their

children, their new work and so on.

Gardner also found that the elderly Bengali’s ‘imagining of desh-bidesh [here and away]

is not stable; it is a product of personal and collective histories and change over time’

(Gardner, 2002:23). Although this is also the case for expellees, their idea of the

imagined Heimat eventually becomes one that is relatively fixed. This is due to the fact

that the Heimat is and remains in the past, and it is only the past home that is associated

with Heimat, not the same geographical location today. Expellees then cannot return to

their Heimat as it no longer physically exists. It is because of their displacement, loss and

feelings of homelessness over a long period of time, that the image of the Heimat

becomes idealised, romanticised and fixed. The fact that it is also their childhood home

contributes to this idealization. As Ahmed argues, it is the impossibility of return that

combines places and memories and actually binds them together (1999:343).

Together with the notion of having ‘two homes’, feelings of contradiction and

ambivalence develop – again, Gardner found this among the elderly Bengalis in her

research (2002). She concludes that ‘migrancy and exile involve constant quarrel with

where one comes from’ and change over the life-course. Ahmadi Lewin further makes

the point that ‘for elderly immigrants, the meaning of home takes on a special character

involving not only the fact that they have lost their homeland and former residence but

also their history and home’ (2001:366). This point about the loss of their history was

made by Renate: ‘It is so important in life to have something on which you can

build…and that was exactly what we had lost. Something on which I can build…’. It was

also of importance to Maria who elaborated at length about the research she had

39

carried out into her family’s history and their home back in Silesia establishing that: ‘my

family lived on this mill since the 18th century’.

Heimat remains important for the various reasons discussed in the previous sections.

Also key however is the economic hardship experienced in the early post-war period and

that even fifty years after their flight or expulsion many expellees never felt fully

accepted by the native population (Schulze, 2002). In her study of Moroccan women’s

transnational lives Salih found that ‘the reason why [they] keep emotionally and

economically investing in their country of origin, [is due to] the social and economic

marginalization they experience in the host country’ (2003:53).

However, places are not just ‘constructs’ existing in the imagination. They are also

materially constituted locations’ (Gardner, 2002:218). This is represented in the

expellees’ narratives of their new home, which has become important to them after

their experiences as subtenants. As Fog Olwig (1998) argued home is not just an abstract

space but a place of rooting, a set of practices, repetitions of social interactions and the

house itself. Gaining ownership of the material location of a house or a flat then

produced a process of rooting and belonging, in which the house became a home. Space

then, rather than being irrelevant, becomes ‘reterritorialized’ (Gupta and Ferguson,

1992:9) and the new territory becomes reinscribed with Heimat in its current position,

shaped by the experiences of the expulsion, the loss and the itinerancy of the early post-

war period. The boundaries between the here (new home) and the there (Heimat) thus

become blurred. The ‘there’ that is the Heimat is longer a real place in geography, but an

imagined place fixed in a past time and location. This Heimat to some extent can only

exist in the past and in the particular geographical location. However, because Heimat

40

can no longer be a real place as it was, due to the displacement of the Heimat’s

inhabitants, Heimat now becomes part of the ‘here’ in the imagination of the expellees,

as well as in their everyday practices (engaging in subsistence farming, attending Heimat

events, reminiscing about the past) and in the social networks they choose (a large

majority of which are also expellees or refugees, though not necessarily from the exact

same place in the homeland). The new home here is then always inscribed with the

Heimat there.

41

9. Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to explore the meanings and constructions of ‘home’ in

relation to the experiences of German expellees and refugees following the Second

World War. This mass displacement of people across Europe as the result of the war and

its peace agreements produced huge upheaval in the lives of millions of people and

disruption in countless communities across Germany. Despite the expellees, refugees

and locals all being ethnic Germans, the experiences of loss and suffering, the housing

arrangements of the early post-war period and Germany’s economic deprivation created

strong feelings towards the Heimat among expellees.

Through narrative interviews with expellees this paper identified three phases of change

for the home: the loss of home, a period of itinerancy and settlement. Central to the first

phase was the abrupt loss of the material home, its symbolic and traditional meaning of

a bounded space firmly located in a particular place, and feelings of security and

familiarity. During the early post war-period, which lasted for about a decade, the lives

of expellees were dominated by economic hardship, separation from their family

members and previous community, frequent moves of housing arrangements and a lack

of privacy resulting from them. The final phase of settlement came with the realisation

that a permanent return to the homeland would not be possible. In the context of the

‘economic miracle’ and many housing programmes, expellees were able to secure their

own, private housing space in which they could finally re-create the home they knew in

a new locality and with different people, thus combining their material and symbolic

homes.

42

These phases have meant a profound change in the way that expellees now view home.

Despite the great separation between them and their Heimat through both time and

space, their feelings and memories about the Heimat have remained strong. They were

entrenched both by the brutal initial loss, as well as the difficulties expellees

experienced in their new destinations. Heimat has thus become the idealised and

romanticised notion of the past home, unchanged through time and space. However,

eventually most expellees accepted the fact that their homeland would not belong to

Germany again – although for some it took until 1991. The longer they stayed in their

new destination, started families and careers there, the more they belonged to their

new communities.

The combination of the expellees’ strong feelings for their Heimat and the eventual

settlement in their new home made the meaning of home a concept full of

contradictions and ambivalence. Home was not just a multidimensional concept, but to

expellees had two quite distinct fixed meanings, which stood in a constant influencing

and fluid relationship to each other. Throughout all the narratives there was a very

matter of fact approach towards this complexity and with it an acceptance that ‘this is

just how it is’.

The numbers of expellees are declining as they are reaching the end of their lives and

their experiences will be lost if these are not captured in time. The difficulties they went

through are just as much part of the German historical narrative, as is the narrative of

the ‘successful’ – economic – integration of expellees and refugees and the war itself.

However, they are yet to be fully incorporated into German collective memory (Schulze,

2002). The ability of expellees to look back on their experiences towards the end of their

43

lives from a secure and comfortable position can give us valuable insights into what

forced displacement and reterritorialising a home can mean. Further exploration of this

in the context of a globalising world, increasing numbers of refugees and Germany being

a receiving country of refugees, could help us develop an understanding of the

challenges facing refugees in their host countries. Future research on this topic could

look at the experiences of the children of expellees in Germany and their

conceptualisation of home and feelings towards the Heimat.

44

10. Appendix

10.1 Aufforderung zur Einbürgerung, 9 Dezember 1944:

45

10.2 Certificate as Deutscher Umsiedler, Berta Marialke, 6 Dezember 1944:

10.3 Certificate of delousing and medical examination: Flüchtlings – Durchgangslager

Uelzen-Bohldamm, 20 Mai 1946:

46

10.4 Flüchtlingsmassentransport List, 8. Juli 1946

47

10.5 List of refugees and expellees arriving in a local parish given to the mayor

48

10.6 Erfassung, Herrn Mühlenherdt, Oerdinghausen, 1 November 1948:

49

10.7 Grundstückszeichnung, Albert Müller, Oerdinghausen 23:

50

10.8 Zuweisung von Wohnraum, Herrn Franz Wolf, 10 Januar 1949:

51

10.9 Flüchtlings-ausweis, Nummer C.G.A.B. 041909:

52

10.10 Antrag auf Ausstellung eines Ausweises für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge, Franz

Siegert, 26 Januar 1957 (first page only)

53

10.11 Flüchtlingsfragebogen Nr. 105, Wilhelm Wilke:

54

10.12 Ausweis für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge A, Nummer: 3131/11182:

55

11. Bibliography

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Certificate of delousing and medical examination: Flüchtlings – Durchgangslager

Uelzen, Bohldamm, 20 Mai 1946.

Flüchtlingsmassentransportlisten:

- 8 Juli 1946, Zug. Nr. 8, Ankunftszeit Bahnhof Syke, 15.24 Uhr

- 11 Juni 1946, Bahnhof Syke, 18.31 Uhr

Weitertransportlisten (no date):

- Kleinbahn I. TRansport

- L.K.W. Transporte

- Reichsbahn Transport

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- Selbstabholer

Fluchtlingslisten zur Unterbringung in Ortschaften:

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- Barrien, 11 Juni 1946

Erfassung, Herrn Mühlenherdt, Oerdinghausen, 1 November 1948.

Grundstückszeichnung, Albert Müller, Oerdinghausen 23.

Zuweisung von Wohnraum, Herrn Franz Wolf, 10 Januar 1949.

Flüchtlings-ausweis, Nummer C-G-A-B 031909

Anträg auf Ausstellung eines Ausweises für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge

- Anna Riedel, 26 Mai 1955

- Ulrich Krüger, 18 Juni 1955

56

- Franz Siegert, 26 Januar 1957

Flüchtlingsfragebogen Nr. 105, Wilhelm Wilke.

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