Recognition that home was gone, not political pressure, eroded revanchist desire

Evidence

Having painted a backdrop of Silesia’s history and postwar mainstream narratives about its loss, the stage will be set for this book’s analytic core, the third through sixth chapters, which illustrate how and why West German Silesian expellees proceeded through the process of coping with loss. The third chapter reveals that this process started in 1945, when hundreds of thousands of Silesians remained for some months in Silesia immediately after the war, witnessed the dramatic transformation underway, and then upon migration to the West spread word of how they had suffered in the Heimat transformed . These accounts compelled many expellees in the West to take the fundamental i rst step toward accepting that there was no going back to a place that had already changed beyond recognition. … Each of these venues brought expellees to higher thresholds in their awareness that the Heimat they remembered no longer existed in reality, making their professed “Right to the Heimat ” ever more a right to the Heimat they held in their hearts. As they privately fashioned images of the lost homeland in their imaginations, expellees had to confront the fact that they preferred residing there instead of returning to live in the changed world of Silesia. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 229

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s research: threat/claim (right to homeland) decays through a non-political reckoning with changed reality, not through any correction. — connects to: Mass membership coexisted with fading desire to actually return home — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 503; Between 1914 and 1939 soldiers’ relation to home and return changed fundamentally — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 210
• QUESTION: The mechanism posited is cognitive — encountering an irreversibly changed world converts a political claim into a purely memorial one. Testable against other cases of lost-territory irredentism.

Broader Connections

• Mass membership coexisted with fading desire to actually return home #corroborates (0.90) — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 503
• Between 1914 and 1939 soldiers’ relation to home and return changed fundamentally #expands (0.75) — Julien Gracq, Balcony in the Forest, 210