Coming Home to Germany?

The end of World War II led to one of the most significant forced population transfers in history: the expulsion of over 12 million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1950 and the subsequent emigration of another four million in the second half of the twentieth century. Although unprecedented in its magnitude, conventional wisdom has it that the integration of refugees, expellees, and Aussiedler was a largely successful process in postwar Germany. While the achievements of the integration process are acknowledged, the volume also examines the difficulties encountered by ethnic Germans in the Federal Republic and analyses the shortcomings of dealing with this particular phenomenon of mass migration and its consequences.

David Rock teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Keele. He also edited Voices in Times of Change (Berghahn, 2000).

Stefan Wolff is Chair of Political Science at the University of Nottingham. He is co-editor of Peace at Last? with Jörg Neuheiser (Berghahn, 2003) and is editor of German Minorities in Europe (Berghahn 2001). He is also author of Disputed Territories (Berghahn, 2003).