I've been posting for a while about the immigration issue in Europe, where rightwing populists have been making political hay with it. Opponents of xenophobia tend to say these days that the EU is not facing any kind of "crisis" on immigration. And that's true in the sense that the EU isn't facing a level of immigration (refugees and others) that they can't reasonably absorb. On the contrary, as long as economic growth in the conventional sense is a goal EU countries share - and it is - the EU needs immigration to do so. Births in the EU have been below replacement rates for a while. And for jobs providing personal support to the elderly, German and Austria are already heavily dependent on immigrant labor, a demand that will only grow with the much-discussed aging of the European population.
I prefer to describe the European immigration situation is a longterm crisis, a permanent crisis for all practical purposes, that has acute and less acute moments. In 2015, an acute moment occurred, connected particularly to the (internationalized) Syrian civil war. Immigration numbers are way down since then.
But that's partly an out-of-sight-out-of-mind illusion, too. The solution to the 2015 crisis was primarily two things: Germany unilaterally took something like a million refugees, for which the government was not adequately prepared in the short run, and Angela Merkel made a deal with Turkey to house refugees transiting to the EU in Turkey itself. It was a classic Merkel extend-and-pretend solution. It let politicians like Austria's then Foreign Minister Sebastian "Babyface" Kurz claim to have "closed the Balkan route." That claim helped him advance to his current position as Chancellor in the 2017 elections. But, like way too much of the alleged actions on the immigration crisis, it was largely fake political theater. A Kasperlespiel (Punch and Judy show), as they say here.
You don't have to go back to the Magyar invasions of the 9th and 10th century to find examples of mass immigration to German-speaking areas. One of the largest rapid relocations of people in history was that of the millions of ethnic Germans were driven out of eastern Europe in the years immediately after the Second World War.
The politics of this became incredibly complicated. The new immigrants formed their own organizations and pressure groups and generally counted among the most conservative elements of West German politics. The Florida Cubans who fled from the Castro regime could provide a useful analogy in the US context. And the massive wave of immigration was a mixture of some more-or-less voluntary migration (though not easily comparable to East German migration to West Germany in the 1950s), official expulsion (including the notorious Benes decree in Czechoslovakia), and forced-if-not-exactly-official pressure.
The postwar order also involved major changes to the borders of Germany. Significant territory that was German before the war went to Poland (Schlesien) and Russia (East Prussia). And the postwar Soviet occupation zone became East Germany. So there was complex and highly emotional questions of international borders in the mix, as well. The political power of the expellee groups were a major barrier to neogiating lasting peace arrangements and final borders.
One might think that these ethnic German refugees would be received and integrated into German society much more easily than today's refugees, mostly non-Germans from much poorer countries. After all, large numbers of the postwar expellees were actually German citizens. And in reality, millions were integrated into German society and contributed mightily to the German "economic miracle" in the 1950s.
But It turns out that ethnic German refugees were greeted with a great deal of hostility, too. Andreas Kossert is the author of Kalte Heimat: Die geschichte der deutsche Vertribenenen nach 1945-1949 (2008) about the German "expellees." An interview with him on that topic appears in 1945-1949: Die Nachkriegszeit (Spiegel Geschichte 1:2018). He says that "[Bedenken und Ängste] gehören zur universalen Geschichte von Flucht und Vertreibung, sie tauchen in untershiedlichsten Mustern immer wieder auf." ("[Preconceptions and fears} are part of the universal history of flight and expulsion, they always turn up again and again in the most diverse patterns.")
Putting numbers to the Vertreibung of the late '40s is tricky. My respect constantly grows for the historians who do the original research of picking through the evidence to make reasonable estimates of such numbers. Among the challenges here is that the Vertreibung is not a clearly defined event with a beginning and an end. And there is a significant amount of judgment involved in how to parse the various reasons for the outmigration, although it was overwhelmingly forced. Kossert's Spiegel Geschichte interviewer cites a number of "up to 14 million," which seems significantly too high based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the history. The graffic immediately following the interview shows 11.9 million dated 1944-48 for refugees and expellees. And that figure seems to be estimating those who settled in Germany, which was most of them. It's also not clear if the 11.8 million are supposed to be ethnic Germans. During the last year of the war, it's worth noting, German propaganda painted the nature of Soviet occupation in the most lurid terms in order to strike maximum fear in the population and therefore encouraged and facilitated evacuation of Germans during that period. (The Soviet forces did provide some actual atrocities that lent credence to the propaganda.) How to view those evacuees in the context of the larger population movement of that time is one of the challenges.
Major contributing factors to German reluctance and hostility toward the new immigrants included the massive destruction of urban housing during the war, the devastating economic conditions facing millions of Germans including the loss of primary breadwinners in the war, and the food shortage that faced much of Europe immediately after the war, the latter exacerbated by unusally brutal winter weather in 1945. Those circumstances are a challenge in making comparisons between the reception of refugees in 1945-50 to today's immigration issues.
And there was a heavily ideological aspect of the reception, as well:
Die Menschen waren in der NS-Zeit immer wieder mit dem Negativbild vom „slawischen Untermenschen", vom Osten Europas als minderwertig konfrontiert warden. Diese Vorstellungen sind nach Kriegsende nicht einfach verschwunden.The Nazi notion of the "Aryan race" turned out not to be so inclusive even of ethnic Germans!
Wir mussen fur diese unmittelbare Nachkriegszeit durchaus von einem handfesten Rassismus sprechen. Es ist nicht so, dass die Aufnahme der Fluchtlinge problemlos gelang, weil Deutsche zu Deutschen kamen. So fühlte es sich für die Menschen damals nicht an. Die Flüchtlinge und Vertriebenen kamen oft aus Lagern, viele hatten Gewalt erlebt, waren in einem erbärmlichen Zustand, als sie ankamen, verlaust, zerlumpt - und damit entsprachen sie in vielem den Klischees, die die einheimische Bevölkerung von Menschen „aus dem Osten" hatte. Es gab ihnen gegenuber ganz eindeutig Fremdenfeindlichkeit.
[People in the Nazi era were always confronted with the negative image of "Slavic subhumans," of eastern Europe as inferior. These conceptions didn't just disappear after the war.
For this immediate postwar period, we have to call it outright racism. It's not the case that the acceptance of the immigrants was achieved without problems, while Germans were coming to Germans. The people at the time didn't take it that way. The refugees and expellees often came from camps, many had experienced violence, were in a pitiful condition when they arrived, louse-ridden, ragged - and thereby fit in many ways the clichees that the native population had about people "from the east." There was clear xenopobia against them.]
Although many of these new immigrants spoke German, they often spoke different dialects from that of the regions where they settled. Many of them were Catholics moving into heavily Protestant areas, others Protestants moving into Catholic areas. Many were settled in rural areas, and local farmers often exploited them as cheap labor.
Over the years, understanding of the postwar refugee/expellee situation was clouded by the difficulty many Germans had in recognizing what happened during the Third Reich. So, many advocates for the Vertriebenen preferred not to discuss the plight of the postwar immigrants as a direct result of Germany's massive war of aggression in the east. In ethical, legal, and political terms, the expulsions were also unjust reactions to the consequences of the war. Advocates for the Vertriebenen preferred to emphasize the latter and largely ignore the former.
Kossert is cautious about drawing lessons for 2018 from the postwar experience with the German refugees and expellees, saying the "integration is a very long, sometimes generations-long process."
This is an interview with Kossert (in German) from the YouTube channel Ostpreußischer Rundfunk, which is managed in cooperation with the Landsmannschaft Ostpreußen of the German state Nordrhein-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia). As their website and newspaper indicate, they are very much on the right wing of the German political spectrum. "Kalte Heimat" von Andreas Kossert - Die Integration der Vertriebenen in West- und Mitteldeutschland YouTube date :10/04/2012:
One reviewer of Kossert's book suggests, though, that his account is problematic in continuing the narrative of vicitimization characteristic of the rightwing Vertriebenen organizations. Andrew Demshuk (The German Expellee as Victim: The End of a Taboo? H-Net Reviews Oct 2010) criticizes:
... the book’s attempt to uphold (rather than critically investigate) expellee victim status. Certainly, it is not hard to portray expellee suffering, nor to find that they saw themselves as victims; the evidence in the core chapters does this well enough. Unfortunately, in part because of Kossert’s heavy reliance on statements by contemporary expellee political leaders in the League of Expellees (BdV), he claims that all expellees still demand redress from their German neighbors for failing to recognize that they had discriminated against them and contributed to their real status as victims.It worth noting that the claim of German victimization by the supposedly threatening and grasping immigrants is a key feature of the rightwing populist xenophobic appeal. And the preferred self-portrayal of the Vertriebenen groups during the Cold War years is a very important part of the historical background of that pitch.
This claim is premised on a misreading of history, in which the causes of the expulsion are blurred. In a style reminiscent of the old German nationalist accounts, the two contextual chapters idealize a peaceful, prosperous German East, in which the violent aspects of medieval colonization by the Teutonic Knights and general ethnic conflict before 1918 have no place. Discussion of the interwar period emphasizes the suffering of the German minority in Poland, thereby establishing them as victims even before the expulsion. Only hinting at Nazi crimes with his statement that “the Poles also suffered terribly under the Nazi politics of occupation and Germanization” (p. 27), as well as with an earlier nod to Jewish suffering, Kossert fails to explain what could have motivated the expulsion, to which he grants extensive detail. While he is right that children who suffered as Holocaust victims or expellees bore “similar long-term psychological burdens”, the search to heal such burdens requires additional analysis of the distinct contexts that brought this suffering about (p. 349). And it is problematic to imply that Nazi guilt was equal to, or even less than, the guilt of the Allied powers who expelled Germans. Illustrating German crimes in the East would not have undermined Kossert’s argument that many expellees had played no part in these crimes, nor that most suffered consequences out of proportion with their own behavior during the war. Indeed, had he demonstrated that Nazis also persecuted German communists in East Prussia and Upper Silesia during the war, he might have further added to his claims about the utter lack of rationality in the expulsion of Germans from the East. [my emphasis]
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