Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen — Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives

74 published claims from this book.

• A single 1993 asylum law both conceded to xenophobia and seeded a pro-immigration reaction
• A state-assigned label can misfire and become a political rallying slogan
• Brandt’s Ostpolitik accepted the lost eastern territories despite expellee opposition
• Citizenship and economic boom eased postwar expellee integration in West Germany
• Claims of national uniqueness are constitutive features of migrant-group status
• Cold War propaganda inflated the success of West German expellee integration.
• Colonial war trauma, not current conditions, drives Pieds-Noirs’ right-wing voting
• Comparative cases are needed to test the assumption of German and French national singularity
• Comparing expellees and Pieds-Noirs shifts analysis from migration origins to aftermath
• Compensation plus courtship persuaded expellees to integrate despite lingering inequality
• Continental Eastern empire mattered more than overseas colonies to German identity
• Electoral politics in 1926 made Republicans afraid to oppose park programs
• Empire loss reoriented Germany and France toward supranational European integration
• Employer cost incentives quietly converted temporary guest workers into permanent residents
• Expellee conservatism emerged only after SPD recognition of the Oder-Neisse line
• Expellee organizations sustained West German revanchism by reinforcing refusal to accept the postwar border
• Expellees actively self-organized rather than passively receiving state-directed integration.
• Expellees and repatriates occupy a distinct liminal category between internal and international migration
• Expellees and repatriates were denied the migrant label by official discourse and scholarship
• French settlers never exceeded thirteen percent of Algeria’s population
• Full political rights gave expellee migrants immediate electoral and party influence
• German expellees outnumbered French Algerian repatriates twelvefold per capita
• German expulsions were Allied-sanctioned while Algerian exodus came from decolonization war
• German imperial thinking long rejected multi-ethnicity and pursued ethnic homogeneity
• Germany adopted birthright citizenship for immigrant children only in 2000
• Germany defined expellee status broadly while France narrowly restricted repatriate status
• Germany lost forty percent of its 1937 territory through postwar border changes
• Germany’s receiving society had to be rebuilt from ruins, unlike France’s intact one
• Group solidarity and identity fade or persist through intergenerational transmission practices.
• Imperial ethnic citizenship survived in West Germany long after empire’s end
• Integration myths both obscured and drove postwar absorption of expellees
• Intergenerational solidarity is a political choice, not an automatic bond
• Irredentist homeland claims paradoxically sped expellee integration
• Mainstream parties countered the BHE threat by co-opting expellee demands
• Material scarcity and strangeness breed nativist resentment toward newcomers
• Memory lobbying borrows Holocaust victimhood templates with mixed diplomatic results
• Nazi empire differed from colonial empires by destroying difference rather than managing it
• Nazi ethnic cleansing radicalized earlier nationalist population policies into genocide
• Nostalgia and visits to the lost homelands weakened expellees’ own demand for return
• Political parties blocked integration by declaring cultural differences unbridgeable
• Popular opposition forced German citizenship reform into a weaker compromise
• Population un-mixing follows decades of demographic expansion that exceeds a single lifetime
• Post-unification immigration of two million late resettlers reignited the German identity debate
• Postwar European states shrank to metropolitan cores and turned toward supranational integration.
• Postwar German guest-worker programs were designed for impermanence, not citizenship
• Postwar states granted privileged welfare only to ethnically defined ‘national migrants’
• Postwar Western Europe shifted from emigration to mass destination of immigration.
• Radical nationalists treated 1871 unification as a launching pad for Eastern empire
• Receiving states face binding obligation to integrate involuntary settlers who cannot be expelled
• Ruin reports cast in anti-Slavic stereotypes persuaded expellees return was impossible
• Scholars had never systematically compared German Vertriebene and French Pieds-Noirs integration
• Seemingly apolitical religious practices can sustain overtly political counter-narratives.
• Seven million expellees came from Prussian eastern territories long German-settled
• Shared memory of loss, not just material interests, binds refugee groups together.
• State refusal to acknowledge expellee grievances drove thousands to emigrate West
• States choose between making displaced groups invisible or officially visible.
• States choose official labels for mass migrants that encode their intended outcome
• Successful economic integration did not dissolve expellee political communities organized around lost-homeland grievance
• The Berlin Wall’s uneventful construction forced West German policy change on eastern revisionism
• The breakdown of the wartime alliance made the 1937-borders goal permanently unachievable
• The colonial past frames present-day French debates but rarely German ones
• The expellee label framed Germans as Allied victims, not Nazi agents
• The FRG’s citizenship law unified diverse German groups by descent
• The GDR suppressed expellee identity to protect its pro-Soviet founding myth
• The Kohl government privileged ethnic German resettlers over other immigrants after unification
• The postwar boom both enabled displaced integration and was itself fueled by that workforce
• The uniform pied-noir vote is a recent constructed political myth
• Unfulfilled unification promises triggered xenophobic violence against foreigners
• Unification ended German territorial claims despite the expellee constituency’s objections
• Unrealistic irredentist goals alienated expellee members and marginalized their organizations
• West Germany preserved expellee cultural identity where East Germany and France sought swift assimilation
• West Germany’s redistributive integration policy followed from its pluralism and Cold-War politics
• Western Allies first banned then weaponized expellee organizations against communism
• Young East German men attacked foreigners to display nationalism against socialist ideology