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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 November 2010
The author of the above quotation, Rudolf Jokiel, was one of over twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from their homes in Germany's eastern provinces (East Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Silesia), the Sudetenland, and other pockets of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II and resettled within the country's truncated postwar borders. The expellees bitterly lamented their enforced exile, and many Christians within this population shared Jokiel's sentiments concerning the connection between faith and homeland. Those who settled in the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) developed an elaborate network of overlapping subcultures dedicated to preserving their memories of lost homelands and advocating for their right to return there. In the process, these lands came to acquire a distinctly religious aura, holy places that were integral to their spiritual well-being.
1 Jokiel, Rudolf, Um Glaube und Heimat: Anregungen zur Pflege des Volks- und Brauchtums der Heimatvertriebenen (Munich: Eichendorff-Gilde, 1949), 11Google Scholar.
2 Andrea Bastian offers a valuable survey of the various permutations of meaning encapsulated in the term Heimat. See Der Heimat-Begriff: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Untersuchung in verschiedenen Funktionsbereichen der deutschen Sprache (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).
3 The spatial elasticity of the term has served an important purpose as Germans have navigated between regional, national, and supranational identities. The concept of Heimat, Celia Applegate notes, “offered Germans a way to reconcile a heritage of localized political traditions with the ideal of a single, transcendent nationality. Heimat was both the beloved local places and the beloved nation; it was a comfortably flexible and inclusive homeland, embracing all localities alike.” See A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The quotation above is found on page 11.
4 See Blickle, Peter, Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002)Google Scholar.
5 See Kossert, Andreas, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der Deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2008)Google Scholar.
6 Published in 1950 in Christ Unterwegs, a newsletter produced by and for Catholic expellees, this letter was not submitted by an actual reader, but rather was written by the editorial staff to reflect a common point of view shared by many indigenous West Germans. It was used to illustrate the lack of understanding that existed between indigenous residents and expellees in West Germany. Qtd. in Hirschfeld, Michael, Katholisches Milieu und Vertriebene: Eine Fallstudie am Beispiel des Oldenburger Landes 1945–1965 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2002), 104–5Google Scholar.
7 Piekorz, Edmund, “Heimat ist gottgewollt,” in Heimat und Glaube: Jahrbuch der katholischen Heimatvertriebenen, ed. Smaczny, Johannes (Lippstadt: St. Hedwigs Schriftendienst, 1953), 7Google Scholar.
8 Qtd. in Bade, Klaus J., Meier, Hans-Bernd, and Parisius, Bernhard, eds., Zeitzeugen im Interview: Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene im Raum Osnabrück nach 1945 (Osnabrück: Rasch Druckerei u. Verlag, 1997), 77Google Scholar.
9 See Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Ther, Philipp and Siljak, Ana, eds., Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)Google Scholar.
10 Ahonen, Pertti, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Hirschfeld, Michael, “Die Schlesischen Katholiken nach 1945 in Westdeutschland,” in Erbe und Auftrag der schlesische Kirche: 1000 Jahre Bistum Breslau/Dziedzictwo i posłannictwo śląskiego Kościoła: 1000 lat diecezji wrocławskiej, ed. Hirschfeld, Michael and Trautmann, Markus (Dülmen: Laumann-Verlag, 2001), 262Google Scholar.
12 According to census data from 1950, expellees constituted 33 percent of the population of Schleswig-Holstein, 27.2 percent of the population of Lower Saxony, and 21 percent of the population of Bavaria. Neuhoff, Hans, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen (Bonn: Osmipress, 1977), 19Google Scholar.
13 Indigenous West Germans routinely applied derisive names to expellee settlement camps, such as New Poland, New Korea, Gypsy Housing, the Chinese Colony, and so forth. Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 135.
14 Schulz, Rainer, “Growing Discontent: Relations between Native and Refugee Populations in a Rural District in Western Germany after the Second World War,” in West Germany under Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Moeller, Robert G. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 67Google Scholar.
15 According to one survey, 82 percent of expellees wanted to return to their original homelands in 1949. That figure fell to 50 percent by 1960. Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 88.
16 The most common Slavic dialect in the region was a version of Polish known derisively in German as Wasserpolnisch. Silesians typically spoke German with a distinctive lilt that reinforced the sense of difference between them and the indigenous population of West Germany, which sometimes complicated the process of integration. The German historian Lutz Niethammer recalls a telling incident from his time in Gymnasium, when he and his fellow students made common cause against their new German teacher, an expellee who spoke with an Upper Silesian accent, making it known that they “did not want the Polak any more, and certainly not in German class.” To the students' surprise, their teacher, Herbert Czaja, soon left his post after being elected to serve in the Bundestag. He eventually emerged as one of the most prominent expellee leaders in West Germany. Niethammer, , “Flucht ins Konventionelle?: Einige Randglossen zu Forschungsproblemen der deutschen Nachkriegsmigration,” in Flüchtlinge und Vertriebene in der westdeutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte: Bilanzierung der Forschung und Perspektiven für zukünftige Forschungsarbeit, ed. Schulze, Rainer, von der Brelie-Lewien, Doris, and Grebing, Helga (Hildesheim: A. Lax, 1987), 316–23Google Scholar.
17 In an effort to reinforce the commitment to the archdiocese among Silesian Catholics in exile, Fr. Johannes Kaps compiled an exhaustive survey of the personnel, administrative divisions, and religious houses of the archdiocese prior to the end of the war. See Handbuch für das katholische Schlesien (Munich: “Christ Unterwegs,” 1951).
18 A thorough and highly critical analysis of Hlond's actions can be found in Scholz, Franz, Zwischen Staatsräson und Evangelium: Kardinal Hlond und die Tragödie der ostdeutschen Diözesen: Tatsachen, Hintergrunde, Anfragen, 3rd rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Verlag Josef Knecht, 1989)Google Scholar.
19 “Neue Etappe im polnischen Kirchenkampf,” Christ Unterwegs 5, no. 2 (February 1951): 17.
20 Qtd. in Ploch, Gregor, Heimatwerk schlesischer Katholiken: Anfänge—Verlauf— Aussichten (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2006), 62Google Scholar.
21 See “Johannes Kaps (1906–1959),” in Schlesische Priesterbilder, vol. 5, ed. Joseph Gottschalk (Aalen/Württemburg: K. Theiss, 1967), 221–25.
22 See “Gerhard Moschner (1907–1966),” in Schlesische Priesterbilder, 5:230–35.
23 See Marschall, Werner, “50 Jahre Schlesisches Priesterwerk,” Schlesien in Kirche und Welt 4, no. 4 (August 2003): 64–66Google Scholar.
24 See “50 Jahre Königstein,” Königsteiner Rufe (special edition, May 1997), 4–15.
25 Schlesien als Erbe und Aufgabe: Was ist und will die Eichendorff Gilde?: Grundsätze und Werkmaterial (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Eichendorffgilden, n.d.), 3–4.
26 Qtd. in 25 Jahre St.-Hedwigs-Werk der Diözese Osnabrück: Eine Dokumentation (Osnabrück: St.-Hedwigs-Werk der Diözese Osnabrück, 1972), 12.
27 Ibid., 30.
28 See Mai, Paul, “Die Entwicklung der Hedwigswallfahrten in Deutschland nach 1945,” in Das Bild der Heiligen Hedwig in Mittelalter und Neuzeit, ed. Grunewald, Eckhard and Gussone, Nikolaus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), 247–48Google Scholar.
29 Hirschfeld, “Schlesischen Katholiken nach 1945 in Westdeutschland,” in Erbe und Auftrag, 268.
30 Indicative of the appeal of pilgrimage for Catholic expellees in West Germany is the following excerpt from an announcement concerning a 1951 pilgrimage to a Marian shrine in Hessen: “Pilgrimage! Our hearts are filled with joy when we hear this word. We have left behind our own holy Marian sites and miss them dearly. . . . For we wandered through the wilderness seeking the peaceful chapels of holy places with the image of our heavenly Mother, and all we have found are the chilly spaces of Protestant churches without her image.” Qtd. in “Wallfahrt zur Schmerzensmutter der Heimatvertriebenen in Grünberg/Hessen,” Königsteiner Rufe 3, no. 2 (February 1951): 61.
31 Schroubek, Georg, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust: Ein Beitrag zur religiösen Volkskunde der Gegenwart (Marburg: N. G. Elwert Verlag, 1968), 327–31Google Scholar.
32 Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 252–55.
33 See Ahonen, After the Expulsion.
34 See Hughes, Michael L., Shouldering the Burdens of Defeat: West Germany and the Reconstruction of Social Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
35 Kossert notes that only 19 percent of expellees belonged to one of the twenty homeland societies (Landsmannschaften) founded at this time. See Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 89.
36 In the western zones of occupied Germany, the resettlement process was designed to disperse the expellee population as broadly as possible in order to promote integration into western Germany and hinder the emergence of expellee subcultures based around lost homelands. Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 54–61.
37 Schelsky, , Wandlungen der deutschen Familie in der Gegenwart: Darstellung und Deutung einer empirisch-soziologischen Tatbestandsaufnahme (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1954), 268–70Google Scholar.
38 Hirschfeld, Katholisches Milieu und Vertriebene, 526.
39 Qtd. in Schlesien als Erbe und Aufgabe, 8.
40 Ibid., 9.
41 Kluge, Gerhard, “Wahlstatt bei Liegnitz,” in Heilige Heimat: Von Schlesiens Gnadenstätten, ed. Kaps, Johannes (Stuttgart: Brentanoverlag, 1949), 60–66Google Scholar.
42 Piekorz, “Heimat ist gottgewollt,” 7.
43 Jokiel, Um Glaube und Heimat, 5.
44 Ibid., 11.
45 Ibid., 16.
46 Johannes Kaps, “Heilige Heimat,” in Heilige Heimat, 10, 12.
47 Piekorz, “Heimat ist gottgewollt,” 8.
48 “Zum Tag der Heimat,” Königsteiner Rufe 4, no. 8 (August 1952): 228.
49 Georg Siegmund, “Christliche Heimattreue,” in Heimat und Glaube, 22.
50 Lange, Rudolf, Theologie der Heimat: Ein Beitrag zur Theologie der irdischen Wirklichkeiten (Freilassing, Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1965), 77Google Scholar.
51 See Mai, Uwe, “Rasse und Raum”: Agrarpolitik, Sozial- und Raumplannung im NS-Staat (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2002)Google Scholar.
52 Qtd. in Johannes Smaczny, “Das St.-Hedwigs-Werk: Ein Bildungswerk der katholischen Heimatvertreibenen,” in Heimat und Glaube, 51.
53 Kaps, “Heilige Heimat,” 9–10.
54 Johannes Kaps, “Von Dom zu Breslau,” in Heilige Heimat, 20.
55 Heinen, Wilhelm, “Heimatliebe und Heimweh,” Christ Unterwegs 5, no. 2 (February 1951): 4Google Scholar.
56 Golombek, Oskar, Heimatliches Brauchtum auf fremden Boden—Begegnungen und Spannungen (Neuß: Gesellschaft für Buchdruckerei, 1965), 12Google Scholar.
57 “Zum Tag der Heimat,” Königsteiner Rufe 4, no. 8 (August 1952): 28.
58 Kaps, “Heilige Heimat,” 11.
59 See Voßkamp, Sabine, Katholische Kirche und Vertriebene in Westdeutschland: Integration, Identität und ostpolitischer Diskurs 1945 bis 1972 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2007)Google Scholar.
60 Carl Ulitzka, “Die Muttergotteskirche,” in Heilige Heimat, 109.
61 Qtd. in Hitze, Guido, Carl Ulitzka (1873–1953) oder Oberschlesien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002), 1257Google Scholar.
62 See Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Coser, Lewis A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
63 Assmann, Jan, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 7–9Google Scholar.
64 One notable Silesian example of resistance to Hitler's regime was the Kreisau Circle. See Ullrich, Volker, Der Kreisauer Kreis (Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008)Google Scholar. An estimated 17,257 Jews lived in German-controlled Silesia in 1939. See Jonca, Karol, “Die Vernichtung der schlesischen Juden 1933–1945,” in “Wach auf, Mein Herz, und Denke”: Zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Schlesien und Berlin-Brandenburg/ “Przebudź się, serce moje, i pomyśl”: Przyczynek do historii stosunków między Śląskiem a Berlinem-Brandenburgią (Berlin: Gesellschaft für interregionalen Kulturaustausch, Stowarzyszenie Instytut Śląski, 1995), 318Google Scholar. Roughly 100,000 Jews lived in Polish-controlled East Upper Silesia in 1939. See Yahil, Leni, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 206Google Scholar.
65 Krystyna Mach-Biasion, the daughter of a prominent Polish activist based in the Silesian city of Katowice, recalls how after the German army occupied the city, once-friendly German neighbors turned into enemies seemingly overnight. See “Mein September 1939,” in “Wach auf, Mein Herz,” 303–5.
66 Christian Gündel, “Bedrohung der christlichen Heimat,” in Heimat und Glaube, 34–37.
67 See Fehrenbach, Heide, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 148–68Google Scholar.
68 See de Zayas, Alfred M., Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans: Background, Execution, Consequences (London: Routledge, 1977)Google Scholar.
69 Jokiel, Um Glaube und Heimat, 10.
70 Schlesien als Erbe und Aufgabe, 7.
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74 Jokiel, Um Glaube und Heimat, 16.
75 Arnold, Franz Xavier, “Das Schicksal der Heimatvertriebenen und seine Bedeutung für die katholische Seelsorge,” Christ Unterwegs 2, no. 6 (June 1948): 1Google Scholar.
76 Blickle, Heimat, 137.
77 Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Swain, Joseph Ward (New York: Free Press, 1965), 13Google Scholar.
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79 Johannes Kaps, “Andechs,” in Heilige Heimat, 59.
80 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Lee, Simon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 125Google Scholar.
81 Ibid., 126.
82 Ibid., 127.
83 Ibid., 139.
84 Ibid., 150.
85 Hupka, Herbert, “Vorwort,” in Leben in Schlesien: Erinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten, ed. Hupka, Heinrich (Munich: Gräfe und Unzer, 1962), 7–8Google Scholar.
86 Jokiel, Um Glaube und Heimat, 17.
87 Tweed, Thomas A., Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 93Google Scholar.
88 Smith, Jonathan Z., Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 101Google ScholarPubMed.
89 Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile, 94.
90 Qtd. in Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 313–14.
91 Golombek, Oskar, Zeugnis für Glaube und Heimat: Die Heimatvertriebenen auf dem 77. Deutschen Katholikentag in Köln (Cologne: Katholische Arbeitsstelle [Nord] für Heimatvertriebene, 1956), 19Google Scholar.
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95 Knott, The Location of Religion, 44.
96 Ibid., 54.
97 Jokiel, Um Glaube und Heimat, 6.
98 “Die Flüchtlinge sollen sich eingliedern!” Christ Unterwegs 4, no. 8 (August 1950): 1.
99 Ahonen, After the Expulsion, 93.
100 Ibid., 272.
101 Moeller, Robert G., War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 5–7Google Scholar.
102 See Hallier, Hans-J., “Der Heilige Stuhl und die deutsche Frage: Ein Kapitel vatikanischer Ostpolitik 1945–1990,” Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 90 (1995): 235–55Google Scholar.
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