Personal contact with Poles, not abstract pre-judgment, dissolved expellee hostility.

Evidence

When assessing how expellees dealt with the memory of expulsion, Dietmar Sauermann expresses skepticism that travelers in the old Heimat had much contact with Poles, theorizing instead that most travelers were more interested in engaging with landscapes that reminded them of what the Heimat once was. … For all these presentiments, it is nevertheless the case that more than i fteen years before the Warsaw Treaty, German travelers regularly came to know and at times even befriend Silesia’s Polish inhabitants. The racism and mistrust that i lled expellees’ accounts tended to shift at the moment when they made personal contact with Poles, often on their old property. Usually undesired at i rst, this impromptu interchange introduced a healing, human element on soils that had recently known such interracial violence. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 1283

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the scholarship of Sauermann and Krzoska asserting pre-1970 expellees kept distance from Poles — an empirical dispute about whether contact or its absence drives attitude change, relevant to the reader’s conviction-vs-behavior divergence theme. — connects to: Personal contact with an openly gay person reduces prejudice against the group; Structured group interests, not personalities, drive intergroup hostility — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 651; Friendly contact and generalized attitude change are in tension with each other — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1812 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Personal contact with an openly gay person reduces prejudice against the group #corroborates (0.85)
• Structured group interests, not personalities, drive intergroup hostility #contradicts (0.80) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 651
• Decategorized personal contact may fail to change outgroup-wide attitudes #qualifies (0.80)
• Friendly contact and generalized attitude change are in tension with each other #expands (0.75) — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1812