Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

254 Daniel Levy and Julian Dierkes
of national identity in the Federal Republic. As we demonstrate in this
essay, changing perceptions of ethnic Germans had differential impacts
on how the nation was publicly narrated: in the first post-war decade,
perceptions of ethnic Germans’ suffering played a significant role in
the reproduction of an ethno-cultural self-understanding; in subsequent
years, negative public perceptions of ethnic Germans contributed to the
gradual discrediting of this ethno-cultural idiom. This shift shows that we
cannot assume that automatic citizenship rights for ethnic Germans necessarily
correspond to an ethno-cultural understanding of nationhood.
Instead, we show how changing memories and perceptions of ethnic
Germans, rather than some primordial commitment to the ethnic nation,
have contributed to both ethnic and civic conceptions of national
self-understanding in post-war Germany.
The post-war years
The reconstruction of German national identity in the immediate aftermath
of the Second World War and the first decade of the Federal
Republic constitute a formative period. This decade comprises an important
backdrop to an understanding of how Germany’s national idiom
was reformed and how it has subsequently operated as a frame of reference
for the articulation of domestic and foreign policy agendas. The
ways in which this early period is being remembered in the FRG supplies
a vocabulary with which the post-Cold War integration of Aussiedler has
been assessed.
Below we briefly illustrate how the public representation of the expulsion
of ethnic Germans and their ensuing hardship were inscribed into
the public memory during the first post-war decade in order to recreate
a legitimate sense of collectivity. 27 The national experience of these years
was marked by two central and often related aspects. One was the tense
encounter with the Allied occupation forces; the other was the public and
political debate about how to compensate expellees and other groups for
their war losses. Perceptions of German suffering and the context of occupation
were decisive for the moral and political justification of German
nationhood and the emergence of policy measures on behalf of ethnic
Germans. The institutionalisation of victimhood, on both the domestic
and the international front, in conjunction with gradual economic
reconstruction, played a prominent role in reassessing the meaning of
nationhood.
27 For a lengthier analysis of ethnic German immigration see Daniel Levy, ‘Coming Home?
Ethnic Germans and the Transformation of National Identity in the Federal Republic
of Germany’ in Geddes and Favell (eds.), Politics of Belonging, 93–108.