Who, in 1945 and 1946, could have foreseen that the economic and social integration of the millions of Germans from the East expelled into West Germany after Wodd War II would largely be accomplished in a few years? And, who could have foreseen that many years after this accomplishment the political repercussions of the expulsions would go on? Yet, surprisingly enough, this is what has happened. In 1969, as usual, the major issues of the federal election campaign in West Germany hardly reflect any specific economic and social concerns of the expellees, not even those bruited about by the NPD (N ationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands). At the same time, how ever, all the political parties vying in the campaign, with the exception of the newly founded, less influentialDKP (the new German Commu nist Party), pay considerable deference to the political interests of the expellees in the German question. Whether these interests represent the opinion of most of the expellees and whether the expellee associ ations in fact speak for many voters is another matter. Why are these questions rarely posed? Why, despite the economic and social integration of the expellees, do the East German Home land Provincial Societies - the Landsmannschaften - retain much influence? The explanation of this phenomenon becomes increasingly clear if one reads the intelligent and superbly documented analysis by Hans Schoenberg.

A fifth of West Germany's post-1945 population consisted of ethnic German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe, a quarter of whom came from Silesia. As the richest territory lost inside Germany's interwar borders, Silesia was a leading objective for territorial revisionists, many of whom were themselves expellees. The Lost German East examines how and why millions of Silesian expellees came to terms with the loss of their homeland. Applying theories of memory and nostalgia, as well as recent studies on ethnic cleansing, Andrew Demshuk shows how, over time, most expellees came to recognize that the idealized world they mourned no longer existed. Revising the traditional view that most of those expelled sought a restoration of prewar borders so they could return to the east, Demshuk offers a new answer to the question of why, after decades of violent upheaval, peace and stability took root in West Germany during the tense early years of the Cold War.

Examining the consequences of the removal of some 15 million Germans from Central and Eastern Europe after World War II, this text explores the impact of this human influx on the political development of West Germany, where more than half of those expelled settled, and analyses the consequences for Germany's foreign policy throughout the Cold War.

An acknowledged authority on German history and memory, Alon Confino presents in this volume an original critique of the relations between nationhood, memory, and history, applied to the specific case of Germany. In ten essays (three never before published and one published only in German), Confino offers a distinct view of German nationhood in particular and of nationhood in general as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between the many memories that exist in the nation. The first group of essays centers on the period from 1871 to 1990 and explores how Germans used conceptions of the local, or Heimat, to identify what it meant to be German in a century of ideological upheavals. The second group of essays comprehensively critiques and analyzes the ways laypersons and scholars use the notion of memory as a tool to understand the past. Arguing that the case of Germany contains particular characteristics with broader implications for the way historians practice their trade, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance examines the limits and possibilities of writing history.

The re-emergence of the issue of wartime suffering to the fore of German public discourse represents the greatest shift in German memory culture since the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. The (international) attention and debates triggered by, for example, W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand testify to a change in focus away from the victims of National Socialism to the traumatic experience of the ‘perpetrator collective’ and its legacies. The volume brings together German, English and Israeli literary and film scholars and historians addressing issues surrounding the representation of German wartime suffering from the immediate post-war period to the present in literature, film and public commemorative discourse. Split into four sections, the volume discusses the representation of Germans as victims in post-war literature and film, the current memory politics of the Bund der Vertriebenen, the public commemoration of the air raids on Hamburg and Dresden and their representation in film, photography, historiography and literature, the impact and reception of W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, the representation of flight and expulsion in contemporary writing, the problem of empathy in representations of Germans as victims and the representation of suffering and National Socialism in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang.

Difficult Pasts provides a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary Germany's rich memorial landscape. It discusses the many memorials to German losses during the Second World War, to the victims of National Socialism and to those of GDR socialism. With up-to-date coverage of many less well-known memorials as well as the most publicised ones.