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?
4
ii
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).
iii
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
iv
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
v
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
vi
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.
1
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.
2
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
3
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
4
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’.
5
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
6
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
7
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,
8
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).
9
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
10
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:
11
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
12
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:
13
3:3 Population Movements 1944-481
1 http://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Germany342/PopulationMovements1944-1948.jpg
14
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
15
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
16
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
17
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.
18
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.
19
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,
20
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.
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:
52
10.10 Antrag auf Ausstellung eines Ausweises für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge, Franz
Siegert, 26 Januar 1957 (first page only)
55
11. Bibliography
PRIMARY SOURCES
Materials gathered from the Kreisarchiv Diepholz, Huelsmeyerstr. 44, 49406 Eydelstedt,
Germany. Visited on 4 July 2012:
a) Archival sources
Aufforderung zur Einbürgerung, 9 Dezember 1944 and Certificate as Deutscher
Umsiedler, Berta Marialke, 6 Dezember 1944.
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
- Kleinbahn II. Transport
- Selbstabholer
Fluchtlingslisten zur Unterbringung in Ortschaften:
- Bassum, 18 Juni 1946
- 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.
Ausweis für Vetriebene und Flüchtlinge A, Nummer: 3131/11182
b) Newspapers and periodicals
Bösche, B., 1991. Magisterarbeit. Unpublished.
Chronik der Gemeinde Drebber, 1979. Gemeinde Drebber: Schrödersche
Bachdruckerei: GmbH, Diepholz.
Der Kreis Grafschaft Diepholz. Zustand und Entwicklung. In: Heimat-Addressbuch
des Landkreises Grafschaft Diepholz. 1958: I/15-I/17.
Friedhoff, T., 2004. Endstation Wagenfeld, Erinnerungen an Flucht und Vertreibung.
Heimatblätter des Landkreises Diepholz. Beiträge zur Geschichte. Heft 20, Ausgabe
2004.
Gerke, W., 1988/1989. Die Lage vor der Währungsreform. Flüchtlingsprobleme im
Kreis Grafschaft Hoya. Heimatblätter des Landkreises Diepholz. Beiträge zur
Geschichte. Heft 8, Ausgabe 1988/1989.
Gerke, W., 2004. Zeit der „CARE“-Pakete. Sie halfen: Die Welt der Spender 1945-
1951. Heimatblätter des Landkreises Diepholz. Beiträge zur Geschichte. Heft 20,
Ausgabe 2004.
Gröger, G., 2007. Ein Nachkriegsschicksal. In Graue gelebt, in Westfalen aufgeblüht.
Heimatblätter des Landkreises Diepholz. Beiträge zur Geschichte. Heft 21, Ausgabe
2007.
Hasselhorn, F. (ed.), 1994. „Uns wollte hier ja keiner“. Flüchtlinge im Landkreis
Diepholz. Gymnasium Sulingen: 2 Auflage.
Hinz. R., 2010/2011. Die Neue Heimat. Wehlauer Heimatbrief. Folge 84, Winter
2010/2011.
57
Materials gathered from the Heimatarchiv Bürgerverein Borgfeld, Littweg, 28357
Bremen. Visited on 3 July 2012:
Reiter, M., 2006. 50 Jahre Siedlung für Vetriebene Landwirte in Borgfeld by
Bürgerverein Borgfeld. CD accompanying the exhibition.
Reiter, M., undated. Land der Sehnsucht. Unpublished. (memoirs of her expulsion sent to
me as an email attachment)
Reiter, M., undated. Kawelke, E. Unpublished.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Abu-Lughod, L., 1993. Writing women’s worlds: Bedouin stories, Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press (ACLS Humanities E-Book).
Ahmadi Lewin, F., 2001. The Meaning of Home among Elderly Immigrants: Directions
for Future Research and Theoretical Development. Housing Studies, 16:3, 353-370.
Ahmed, S., 1999. Home and away: Narratives of migration and estrangement.
International Journal of Cultural Studies. 2:3, 326-347.
Balibar, E. 1991. The Nation Form: History and Ideology. In: E. Balibar, and. I.
Wallerstein eds., 1991. Race, Nation, Class, Ambiguous Identities. London &New York:
Verso.
Bommes, M., 2010. Migration Research in Germany: The Emergence of a Generalised
Research Field in a Reluctant Immigration Country. In: Thrähnhardt, D. and M. Bommes,
2010. National Paradigms of Migration Research. V&R unipress, Universitätsverlag
Osnabrück: Osnabrück: 127-185.
Brettell, C.B., 2003. Anthropology and Migration. Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity,
and Identity. Walnut Creek, Lanham, New York, Oxford: Altamira Press.
Brettell, C.B., 2008. Theorizing Migration in Anthropology. In: C.B. Brettell and J.F.
Hollifield eds. 2008. Migration Theory. Talking across Disciplines. New York,
Abingdon: Routledge, pp.113-159.
58
Connor, I., 2007. Refugees and expellees in post-war Germany. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Connor, I., 2006. German Refugees and the SPD in Schlewig-Holstein, 1945-50.
European History Quarterly, 36:2, 173-199.
Cordell, K., 2006. The past, the present, and virtual reality: A comparative assessment of
the German Landsmannschaften, Journal of Baltic Studies, 37:1, 22-47.
Fassmann, H. & R. Munz, 1994. European East-West Migration, 1945-1992.
International Migration Review, 28:3, 520-538.
Fog Olwig, K., 2007. Caribbean journeys: an ethnography of migration and home in
three family networks. Durham N.C., London: Duke University Press.
Fog Olwig, K., 2002. A wedding in the family: home making in a global kin network.
Global Networks. 2:1.
Fog Olwig, K. Epilogue: Contested Homes: Home-making and the Making of
Anthropology. In: N. Rapport & A. Dawson, 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of
Home in a World of Movement. Berg: Oxford, New York: 225-236.
Gardner, K., 2002. Age, Narrative and Migration: The Life Course and Life Histories of
Bengali Elders in London. Berg: Oxford, New York.
George, M. and R.P. Fitzgerald, 2012. Forty years in Aotearoa New Zealand: white
identity, home and later life in an adopted country. Ageing & Society, 32, 239-260.
Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, 1992. Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7:1, 6-23.
Gurney, C. M., 1997. “…Half of me was satisfied”: Making sense of home through
episodic ethnographies. Women’s Studies International Forum, 20:3, 373-386.
Harrell-Bond, B. and E. Voutira, 1992. Anthropology and the study of refugees.
Anthropology Today, 8:4, 6-10.
Heineman, E., 1996. The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s „Crisis Years”
and West German National Identity. The American Historical Review, 101:2, 354-395.
59
Lehmann, A., 1991. Im Fremden ungewollt zuhaus. Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in
Wesdeutschland 1945-1990. München: C.H. Beck.
Lovell, N.. Introduction. In: Lovell, N. (ed.), 1998. Locality and Belonging. Routledge:
London, New Tork: 1-24.
Malkki, L.H., 1995a. Purity and exile: violence, memory and national cosmology among
Hutu refugees in Tanzania Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
Malkki, L.H., 1995b. Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order
of Things. Annual Review of Anthropology. 24:495-523.
Mallett, S., 2004. Understanding home: a critical review of the literature. The
Sociological Review. 52:1, 62-89.
Mand, K., 2010. I’ve got two houses, one in Bangladesh, one in London, everyone has:
Home, Locality and Belongings. Childhood. 17:2.
Mullings, B., 1999. Insider or outsider, both or neither: some dilemmas of interviewing in
a cross-cultural setting. Geoforum, 30, 337-350.
Rapport, N. & A. Dawson. Home and Movement: A Polemic. In: N. Rapport & A.
Dawson, 1998. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Berg:
Oxford, New York: 19-38.
Rapport, N. & A. Dawson. The topic and the Book. In: N. Rapport & A. Dawson, 1998.
Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Berg: Oxford, New
York: 3-17.
Salih, R., 2003. Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and Belonging among
Moroccan Migrant Women. Routledge: London.
Schulze, R., The Struggle of Past and Present in Individual Identities: The Case of
German Refugees and Expellees from the East. In: Rock, D. & S. Wolff, 2002. Coming
home to Germany?: the integration of ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe
in the Federal Republic. Berghahn: New York, Oxford: 38-55.
Seipp, A. R., 2009. Refugee Town: Germans, Americans, and the Uprooted in Rural West
Germany, 1945-52. Journal of Contemporary History, 44:4, 675-695.
60
Stepputat, F., 1994. Repatriation and the Politics of Space: the Case of the Mayan
Diaspora and Return Movement. Journal of Refugee Studies, 7:2/3, 175-185.
Svašek, M., The Politics of Chosen Trauma: Expellee Memories, Emotions and Identities.
In: Milton, K. & M. Svašek (eds), 2005. Mixed emotions: anthropological studies of
feeling. Berg: Oxford: 195-214.
Svašek, M., 2002. Narratives of “Home” and “Homeland”: The Symbolic Construction
and Appropriation of the Sudeten German Heimat. Identities: Global Studies in Culture
and Power, 9:4, 495-518.
Ther, P., 1996. The Integration of Expellees in Germany and Poland after World War
Two: A Historical Reassessment. Slavic Review, 55:4, 779-805.
Thomson, A., 1999. Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies. Oral History,
27:1, 24-37.
Turner, S. 2004. Under the gaze of the ‘big nations’: refugees, rumours and the
international community in Tanzania. African Affairs, 103:227-247.
Turner, S., 1998. Representing the Past in Exile: The Politics of National History among
Burundian Refugees. Refuge, 17:6, 22-29.
Wolff, S., 2001. German Expellee Organizations between “Homeland” and “At Home”:
A Case Study of the Politics of Belonging. Refuge, 20:1, 52-64.
OTHER
Anonymous, 1953. Das Los einer schwergeprüften Flüchtlingsfrau. Magdeburg:
unpublished.
Top Related