‘Expellee’ as a political label was highly adaptable and did not track actual origin

Evidence

It is therefore very difficult to determine who should be labeled an expellee. Many prominent Social Democratic politicians, including the SPD first postwar leader Kurt Schumacher, grew up in East Prussia but had been involved in Berlin politics even before their expulsion. Other expellee politicians, by contrast, such as BHE and CDU politician Theodor Oberländer, grew up in western or central Germany and came to the eastern territories only because of their Nazi careers. Being an expellee thus meant being very adaptable and increasingly indistinct. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 752

Categorization

• XREF: Crucial for the reader’s thesis distinguishing manufactured/enemy-constructed identity from primordial origin — label adapts to political usefulness, not to biography. — connects to: Expellees integrated into the SPD lost their group-based identity politics — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 751; Clinging to lost-homeland identity actively blocked expellee assimilation — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 381
• FICTION: A character who wears a refugee/grievance identity he never actually possessed would dramatize how group solidarity gets claimed instrumentally.

Broader Connections

• Expellees integrated into the SPD lost their group-based identity politics #complicates (0.75) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 751
• Clinging to lost-homeland identity actively blocked expellee assimilation #complicates (0.70) — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 381