The Lost German East

Andrew Demshuk is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

• 1. From colonization to expulsion: a history of the Germans in Silesia; 2. The quest for the borders of 1937: expellee leaders and the 'right to the homeland'; 3. Homesick in the Heimat: Germans in postwar Silesia and the desire for expulsion; 4. Residing in memory: private confrontation with loss; 5. Heimat gatherings: recreating the lost East in West Germany; 6. Travel to the land of memory: homesick tourists in Polish Silesia; 7. 1970 and the expellee contribution to Ostpolitik; Epilogue: 8. The forgotten East.

'The millions of Silesians who fled their homes in the closing months of the Second World War or who were expelled in its aftermath have most often been remembered - if they have been remembered at all in the English-speaking world - as caricatures: symbols of either German victimization or German revanchism. Andrew Demshuk's book is among the first scholarly works to move beyond the statements of official expellee spokesmen and to explore, sympathetically but critically, the complicated processes through which flesh-and-blood individuals gradually came to terms with the loss of the former homeland. His nuanced analysis of this history is an important contribution not only to understanding West German politics and German-Polish relations in the Cold War era, but also to the comparative study of forced migration and its aftermath.' Jim Bjork, King's College London