Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, historians of Germany have rediscovered ‘empire’ as a category of analysis that permits a deeper exploration of the multiple meanings of ‘Germany’ and its territorial fluctuations over time. They have looked especially closely at the maritime empire of the Second German Empire from 1884 to 1918, its impact on German identity, its earlier roots, and its relevance to subsequent periods in German history. Although research and debate on the imperialism of the Kaiserreich continues to thrive, German aspirations to a continental European empire inspired in part by the German migrations eastward from the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages have received increased attention. As David Blackbourn argued recently, Mitteleuropa, or alternatively Osteuropa, was as important to Germans as India was to Great Britain and Algeria to France. Compared to the desire to colonize the ‘East’, Imperial Germany’s short-lived ‘blue water’ empire paled in significance.1 Not surprisingly, the need to assess the Nazi regime’s murderous Drang nach Osten, its continuities and ruptures with earlier imperial imaginings, contribute to this trend. Yet if the defeat of Nazism ended German expansionism, the ‘East’ left its traces in the forced migrations of ethnic Germans to what remained of the Reich. The destruction of the Nazi empire and the rediscovery of past precedents to cope with defeat shaped the most critical issue that the postwar Germanys had to confront as postcolonial societies: who indeed was ‘German’?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
David Blackbourn, ‘Das Kaiserreich transnational. Eine Skizze’, in Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds, Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004), 322–3.
Wolfgang Mommsen, Der Erste Weltkrieg: Anfang vom Ende des bürgerliche Zeitalters (Frankfurt, 2005), 96–7;
MacGregor Knox, Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships, vol. 1: To the Threshhold of Power, 1922/33 (Cambridge, 2007), 54–7.
See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford, 2009) for a recent synthesis,
and especially Ulrike Jureit, Das Ordnen von Räumen: Territorium und Lebensraum in 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2012), 287–385. For empire as defined by cultural difference,
see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), 8–11. On French colonial policy after the war, see Todd Shepard’s chapter in this volume.
Again see Todd Shepard’s chapter in this volume. See also Jennifer L. Foray, Visions of Empire in the Nazi-Occupied Netherlands (Cambridge, 2012).
See Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, 2006).
Of the estimated fourteen million ethnic Germans who fled, two million died before they reached the occupation zones. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 5 vols., vol. 5: Bundesrepublik und DDR, 1949–1990 (Munich, 2008), 35.
For the periodization of mass violence, see Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus Weinhauer, ‘Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence’, in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2011), 11–39.
See Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ‘Der Weg nach Potsdam — Die Allierten und die Vertreibung’, in Wolfgang Benz, ed., Die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten: Ursachen, Ereignisse, Folgen (Frankfurt, 1985), 49–69.
The substantial literature on the expulsions begins with the collection edited by Theodor Schieder, first published in 1954, Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, 5 vols. (Munich, 1984). In contrast to the Schieder collection, subsequent studies treat the expulsions as the consequence of the Nazi Lebensraum project.
See Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York, 2009), 211–45;
Detlef Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung, 1938–1945: Pläne und Entscheidungen zum ‘Transfer’ der Deutschen aus den Tschechoslovakei und aus Polen (Munich, 2nd edn, 2005);
Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, 2012), 33–62;
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, 2012);
Eva Hahn and Hans-Henning Hahn, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern (Paderborn, 2010);
Pascal Maeder, Forging a New Heimat: Expellees in Post-War West Germany and Canada (Göttingen, 2011);
Ulrich Merten, Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II (New Brunswick, 2012);
Hugo Service, Germans into Poles: Communism, Nationalism and Ethnic Cleansing after the Second World War (Cambridge, 2012);
and Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau became Wrocław during the Century of Expulsions, trans. Tom Lampert and Allison Brown (Princeton, 2011), chapters 1–4.
On the complexities of citizenship in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic, see Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatsangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen, 2001), 177–327;
and Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca, 2010), 19–24.
See also Annemarie Sammartino, ‘After Brubaker: Citizenship in Modern Germany, 1848 to Today’, German History, 27(4) (2009): 581–99.
See Hahn and Hahn, Vertreibung , 489–583; and Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2001), 21–87.
See Andreas Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich, 2008), 27–86;
and Rainer Schulze, ‘Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War’, in Robert G. Moeller, ed., West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era (Ann Arbor, 1997), 53–72.
Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 136. For the upward mobility (in general) of expellees and their transnational movements, see Maeder, Forging a New Heimat, 210–14, 239; and Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995), 49.
Christoph Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatssgründung: Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1955 (Göttingen, 1982), 240–3;
Rüdiger Wenzel, Die große Verschiebung? Das Ringen um den Lastenausgleich in Nachkriegsdeutschland von den ersten Vorarbeiten bis zur Verabschiedung des Gesetzes 1952 (Stuttgart, 2008).
See Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe 1945–1990 (Oxford, 2003), 54–114; and the table on the distribution of expellees in Hahn and Hahn, Vertreibung , 26.
See Douglas, Orderly and Humane, 321–5; and Philipp Ther, Deutsche und Polnische Vertriebene: Gesellschaft und Vertriebenenpolitik in der SBZ/DDR und in Polen 1945–1956 (Göttingen, 1998), especially 171–203. For a comparison between the expellee policies of the GDR and FRG, see Michael Schwartz’s chapter in this volume.
Mary Fulbrook, Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (Oxford, 2011), 267–8.
See Jan Palmowski, ‘Citizenship, Identity, and Community in the German Democratic Republic’, in Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski, eds, Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford, 2008): 73–91, and especially Palmowski’s book, Inventing the Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–90 (Cambridge, 2009).
Liulevicius, The German Myth, 217–18. On the arts, see Bill Niven, Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works (Rochester, 2014). For an effective challenge to the application of ‘totalitarianism’ to the GDR,
see Andrew I. Port, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, 2007).
On the competition between the FRG and GDR, see William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969 (Chapel Hill, 2003), 10–13.
o On the Berlin crisis and the development of Ostpolitik, see Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York, 1993), 58–83.
Axel Schildt, ‘Mending Fences: The Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe’, in Eduard Mühle, ed., Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003), 153–79, here 167.
Demshuk, The Lost German East, 185–262, and ‘What was the “Right to the Heimat”? West German Expellees and the Many Meanings of Heimkehr’, Central European History, 45(3) (2012): 523–56, here 543–6. Some 370,000 German-speakers from Poland emigrated to West Germany between 1955 and 1970. In addition to Demshuk’s discussion of memory and nostalgia in his book The Lost German East, 1–32, see Gregor Thum, ‘Mythische Landschaften: Das Bild vom “deutschen Osten” und die Zäsuren des 20. Jahrhundert’, in Gregor Thum, ed., Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006), 181–212;
and Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600–1947 (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 681–8.
Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, 2007), 237–68.
Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte, ‘Between Torah and Sickle: Jews in East Germany, 1845–1990’, in Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte, eds, State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (New York, 2011), 28–44;
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 106–61.
Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 48–68; Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 69–140.
Heide Fehrenbach, Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, 2005), 46–106, 132–88.
Denis Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds, Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005 (Berkeley, 2007), 9;
Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge, 2007), 33–52.
Ulrich Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880–1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers/Guest Workers, trans. William Templer (Ann Arbor, 1990), 9–85.
Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen, 292–3. On Polish migration from a global perspective, see Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 2006), 124–67.
Herbert, History of Foreign Labor, 209–54; Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford, 2006), 243–4.
Eva Kolinsky, ‘Meanings of Migration in East Germany and the West German Model’, in Mike Dennis and Eva Kolinsky, eds, United and Divided: Germany since 1990 (New York, 2004), 152–3.
Michael Geyer and Konrad Jarausch, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton and Oxford, 2003), 188.
Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Germany and European Integration’, in Helmut Walser Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), 775–94, here 787. On Kohl’s position, see Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name, 227–31.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Shelley Baranowski
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baranowski, S. (2016). Legacies of Lebensraum: German Identity and Multi-Ethnicity. In: Borutta, M., Jansen, J.C. (eds) Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508416_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137508416_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-70150-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-50841-6
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)