© 2010 Andrew Thomas Demshuk THE LOST EAST: SILESIAN EXPELLEES IN WEST GERMANY AND THE FANTASY OF RETURN, 1945-1970 BY ANDREW THOMAS DEMSHUK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Peter Fritzsche, Chair Professor Matti Bunzl Professor Akira Iriye, Harvard University Professor Maria Todorova ABSTRACT One-fifth of the postwar West German population consisted of German refugees expelled from the former eastern territories and regions beyond. My dissertation examines how and why millions of expellees from the province of Silesia came to terms with the loss of their homeland. Revising the traditional expectation that this population was largely interested in restoring prewar borders as a means to return to the East, I offer a new answer to the question of why peace and stability took root in West Germany after decades of violent upheaval. Before Bonn recognized Poland’s postwar border in 1970, self-appointed political and scholarly spokespeople for the expellees lost no occasion to preach the “right to the homeland” (Heimat) and advocate for a revolutionary migration, in which all expellees would return to the lands that had once been inside Germany’s 1937 borders. Confronting the generally accepted theory that expellees either thought like their leaders or lost interest in the East because of material prosperity in the West, I examine a wide range of neglected archival holdings, periodicals, circular letters, memory books, travel reports, and unpublished manuscripts to show how, through fantasizing about the old Heimat, expellees steadily came to terms with the permanence of their exile. Discarding what might imperil their own victim status, they generated idealized imagery of a Heimat of memory: a timeless, pristine, and intimate space without Slavs, Jews, or Nazis. The Heimat of memory was threatened by what they imagined as its dark inverse, a Heimat transformed: disordered, decaying, foreign, and dangerous, allegedly due to the influence of Russian armies and Polish settlers. Applying theories of memory and nostalgia, my dissertation demonstrates how, though expellees never surrendered their “right” to the Heimat of memory, they also came to realize that the lost world they mourned no longer existed to be recovered in the transformed spaces of physical reality. -ii- We open with an historical overview of German history in Silesia before the expulsion. Further background is then offered through exploring the official narrative of border revision devised by self-proclaimed expellee spokespeople who, after the founding of the Bonn Republic in May 1949, received funding and support from the state. However, at the same time that official narratives dominated publications about the German East and exerted considerable political influence, expellees continued to deal with their loss and realize the impossibility of return. This process had already begun in 1945, when hundreds of thousands of eastern Germans managed to briefly return, witness the drastic changes in the former Heimat, and then return to tell others that there was no going back. Through reflection on what the homeland had been, through establishing continuity via a new sense of Heimat whenever they gathered, and through traveling back to see the changed spaces of western Poland for themselves, expellees steadily came to realize through the 1950s and 1960s that their professed “Right to the Heimat” was in fact a right to the Heimat that they imagined in memory, rather than to a space that they could never return to inhabit. In light of these findings, it becomes self-evident why most expellees showed quiet resignation when Bonn recognized the Polish western border in 1970. Though expellee spokespeople continued to demand territorial restitution, most expellees had come to realize long before that the East was truly lost. Peace and even understanding thus became possible along a border that had known such hatred and bloodshed. -iii- TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………. …v INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………........1 CHAPTER 1: FROM COLONIZATION TO EXPULSION: A HISTORY OF THE GERMANS IN SILESIA………………………………...…………………41 CHAPTER 2: THE QUEST FOR THE BORDERS OF 1937: EXPELLEE LEADERS AND THE “RIGHT TO THE HOMELAND”………………………76 CHAPTER 3: HOMESICK IN THE HEIMAT: GERMANS IN POSTWAR SILESIA AND THE YEARNING FOR EXPULSION……..………………… 118 CHAPTER 4: RESIDING IN MEMORY: PRIVATE CONFRONTATION WITH LOSS…………………………………………………………………… 155 CHAPTER 5: HEIMAT GATHERINGS: RECREATING THE LOST EAST IN WEST GERMANY…………………………………………………...….. 202 CHAPTER 6: TRAVEL TO THE LAND OF MEMORY: HOMESICK TOURISTS IN POLISH SILESIA…………………………………………..… 242 CHAPTER 7: 1970 AND THE EXPELLEE CONTRIBUTION TO OSTPOLITIK…………………………………………………………………... 315 EPILOGUE: SILESIA FORGOTTEN………………………………………… 354 APPENDIX…………………………………………………………………...... 371 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………….... 389 -iv- PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Inspiration for this project began in the undergraduate classroom, when my professor unveiled a map of early-modern Prussia and narrated that millions of Germans had once inhabited vast eastern lands. Then, at the end of World War II, they were forced out. And the lecture moved on. This left me wondering: who were these people, what became of them, and why were they absent from my knowledge of history? I had never heard of Pomerania or East Prussia before, but from that day onward intellectual curiosity compelled me forward through a decade of research. Seeking answers in scholarly literature, I discovered no explanation that satisfied my questions, perhaps in part because the issue remains so politicized in Germany and Poland, perhaps because of the reigning unawareness of the history of the “German East” outside of these countries. So I continued to read, my questions evolved and multiplied, and my conviction grew: it is impossible to understand postwar Europe without examining the fate of these borderlands and their inhabitants. It is my hope that the results of my work will shed some light on how, after the horrors of Nazi genocide and postwar ethnic cleansing, and during the worst of the Cold War, peace became possible on Europe’s most violent border. As my dissertation research proceeded, it quickly became clear to me that I was in fact working on two distinct projects. Based upon the findings in this first project, a second book is already in the works, a history of travel in the ethnically cleansed borderlands of western Poland over the sixty years after the traumas of the Second World War. Through a comparative analysis of travel accounts written from a wide range of ethnic, religious, and social, and political backgrounds, this new work will move beyond familiar, top-down narratives of bipolar rhetoric and posturing to showcase this understudied region as a space of transnational interchange, reflectivity, and healing. Countless librarians, archivists, scholars, and friends assisted me in the -v- course of both projects. Though some contributions will only appear my future work, I wish to recognize them here for the inspiration and support that they offered. Every mistake and misinterpretation is of course my own, and I welcome any and all comments and corrections as I continue my scholarly exploration. Above all, this project is indebted to my devoted mentors at the University of Illinois, especially my dissertation advisor Peter Fritzsche and committee members Matti Bunzl, Akira Iriye, and Maria Todorova. My work would not have been possible without support from my intellectual companion and wife Rebecca Mitchell, as well as from friends and family, notably Ray Bruck, Jim Chelich, and John Takis. I felt thoroughly at home whenever I was in Germany thanks to the care and friendship of Hannes Kleinhenz and Inge Lind, Annette and Andreas Wallrabe, Franz and Claudia Bardenhauer, and Christa, Reinhardt, and Andreas Kläs. Many insights that enhanced the project were gleaned through conversations with Juliana Braun- Giesecke, Dan Diner, Kristen Ehrenberger, Jutta Faehndrich, Margarete Feinstein, Christopher Gorlich, Chad Gunnoe, Mateusz Hartwich, Peter Haslinger, Andreas Hoffmann, Heidi Hein- Kircher, Winifried Irgang, Wolfgang Kessler, Sho Konishi, Craig Koslofsky, Markus Krzoska, Martin Kügler, Harry Liebersohn, Christian Lotz, Mark Micale, Timothy McMahon, Will Morris, Michael Parak, Peter Polak-Springer, Dietmar Popp, Maren Röger, Wiebke Rohrer, Kai Struve, Gregor Thum, Jakub Tyszkiewicz, Tobias Weger, Peter Wörster, and additional colleagues at the Herder Institut, the Dubnow Institut, the University of Illinois Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative, Jewish Studies program, and German colloquia, annual meetings of the German Studies Association, the Silesian Conference in Görlitz in November 2009, the 2009 international Slavic conference in Chicago, and the 2009 transatlantic seminar in Kraków. This work was also made possible through much helpful support from -vi- librarians and archivists throughout Germany and the United States, including Ulrich Albers, Antje Brekle, Silke Findeisen, Angelika Lehrich, and Jens Nicolai. Many thanks also to Goldammer Verlag and the Grafschafter Bote for publishing advertisements in thirteen Silesian Heimatzeitungen in the December 2007 issue, as well as to the Briegische Briefe for the advertisement they published