Direct contact with Polish life dissolved an expellee leader’s resentment and political claims
Evidence
By 1964, repeated evidence in travel reports of reconstruction and thriving Polish life in L ü ben changed her image of the city: Neither a ruin Germans should somehow repossess nor a German ghost town to be visited and mourned, Polish Lubin had become a living Polish city, in which intimate spaces from the past had become “animated and developed, the streets and plazas are formed by a different population.” She narrated how, like German expellees, Polish settlers had come against their will with few possessions to a devastated, foreign land. Hatred toward Germans was understandable, she continued, “because Poles had lost their lives in a war of extermination.” So convinced was Hoffmann-Rehmie of the importance of contact between German travelers and Polish settlers that she emphasized the “truth” as related by a friend who had recently come back from a trip to L ü ben: “You must become more active, otherwise you will be reduced to museum caregivers!” 111 Such was the last phase in Hoffmann-Rehmie’s process of dealing with loss. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 981
Categorization
- XREF: Speaks directly to whether rational/moral correction backfires or works against threat-hardened belief—here firsthand evidence produced genuine reframing. — connects to: Silesian expellees came to terms with their homeland loss over time. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 0; Personal contact with Poles, not abstract pre-judgment, dissolved expellee hostility. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 1283; Post-1956 travel accounts displaced hostile reports in depicting Silesia — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 182 (+2 more)
- QUESTION: Does contact work where abstract moral appeals failed, or was Hoffmann-Rehmie simply less invested than Weber in political return from the start?
Broader Connections
- Personal contact with Poles, not abstract pre-judgment, dissolved expellee hostility.
#corroborates(0.95) — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 1283