West German expellee policy was effectively modernizing despite restorative rhetoric

Evidence

Thus, it was not completely fair that critics of the 1960s, such as Ralf Dahrendorf, attacked the expellee policy of the Federal Republic as a ‘syndrome of immaturity’ adverse to social modernization. Expellee policy had to concentrate on socio-economic change and economic growth and thus to affirm social mobility – independent from whatever may have been declared in Sunday speeches. Therefore, despite all the talk of ‘Status Restoration’, expellee policy could never be just ‘restorative’ in the Federal Republic; thus, both German integration policies basically had to affirm social progress and were in this regard ‘revolutionary’. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in divergence between professed conviction/rhetoric and actual measured behavior — here Sunday speeches said ‘Status Restoration’ while policy actually drove mobility. — connects to: West German governments codified expellee homeland rights as preconditions. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 96; East Germany’s nominally revolutionary resettler policy proved more restorative than West’s — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 395; Expellee organizations sustained West German revanchism by reinforcing refusal to accept the postwar border — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 190 (+2 more)