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

Nationhood in German legislation 257
politicians from opposition parties celebrated the integration of ethnic
Germans and their contributions to the burgeoning economy, and gradually
the ethno-national idiom in Germany was reconfigured into an economic
identity. National identity was no longer articulated with regard to
conventional symbols of nationhood (e.g. flag, anthem) but through references
to the economic prowess of the new Germany. 29 The contributions
of expellees to this process were particularly significant as they encountered
more exacting conditions and faced more obstacles and hardship
than the natives. Consequently, their accomplishments were valorised
during public commemorations on their behalf and they came to epitomise
this new source of collective identification. Once this economic
pride became the foundation for collective identification it made little
sense to subscribe to primordial attachments.
The political leadership of ethnic Germans quickly realised the implications
of socio-economic integration and subsequently shifted their
attention away from issues of relative deprivation and focused instead on
matters pertaining to the ‘lost territories’ in the east. Ultimately, this shift
further aggravated the decline of ethno-national perceptions in public discourse.
In the early years of the Cold War, expellees’ hardline approach
towards the communist bloc, the uncompromising attitude with respect
to the Oder-Neisse border and their demands for the return of and to
their old homes was in tune with the rhetoric of Adenauer’s governments.
However, during the 1960s the government took a more conciliatory approach
towards the East, and the government now perceived the expellee
organisations’ foreign policy stance as disruptive and retrograde. During
the 1950s and until Kiesinger became chancellor in 1966 it had been
standard political practice for politicians to pay public tribute to the concerns
of expellee organisations. On becoming chancellor in 1969 Willy
Brandt ended this courtship with his decision to dismantle the Ministry
for Expellees.
Several scandals involving leading expellee politicians and the discovery
of their Nazi past also added to a growing public association of ethnonational
values with Nazi ideology. To be sure, discoveries about the
Nazi past of public figures were not new, but in contrast to the 1950s
they now resonated with public sensibilities that were marked by the
political maturation of Germany’s first post-war generation. The generational
conflicts of the 1960s found their expression in the confrontation
of the post-war generation with their parents’ role during the Nazi period.
29 Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming
Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Harold James, A German
Identity 1770–1990 (New York: Routledge, 1989). It is striking that for both Germanys
economic achievement became the primary source of national pride.