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

62 published claims from this book.

• ‘Expellee’ as a political label was highly adaptable and did not track actual origin
• A constructed shared victimhood unified diverse displaced German groups.
• A mass repatriation can be managed through hundreds of adaptive laws.
• Academic critiques misread elite-voiced nostalgia as the whole pied-noir experience
• Algeria’s loss permanently entrenched wartime executive powers in French law.
• Allied authorities created expellee organizations as anti-communist tools
• Amnesty and concealment, not active remembrance, are the historical norm in Europe
• Calls for a shared reconciliatory memory intensify, not end, memory conflicts
• Clinging to lost-homeland identity actively blocked expellee assimilation
• Co-opting a grievance party into government stripped it of its protest function
• Communist East Germany declared integration complete and halted resettler support by the mid-1950s.
• Community leaders publicly excuse internal aggression to preserve a unified front
• Decades of ideological re-education failed to erase Eastern-border revisionism in East Germans
• Depoliticization can mask rather than end political influence
• Descent-based citizenship served to absorb millions of expelled Germans.
• Direct presidential election became possible only after imperial subjects lost citizenship.
• Disputes framed as being about the past really argue about the present
• East Germany’s nominally revolutionary resettler policy proved more restorative than West’s
• Electoral competition for expellee votes fossilized symbolic irredentism that no longer meant return
• Ethnic German expellees faced discrimination from their own countrymen after arrival
• Expellee lobby influence waned only after their core grievances were institutionally resolved
• Expellee organizations lost all influence once the territorial goal became moot
• Expellee organizations never enrolled more than small minorities of expellees
• Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances
• Expellee political power rested on refusing to commit to a major party
• Expellees integrated into the SPD lost their group-based identity politics
• France foreclosed repatriates’ return option to compel permanent integration.
• French authorities repatriated anti-French Algerians while abandoning loyal harkis to slaughter
• French repatriates were a small minority while German expellees were one in five Germans
• German governments avoided formal expellee commemoration to steer clear of Weimar-style revisionism.
• Germany’s ethnocultural homogeneity obsession made its empire exceptional.
• Group solidarity persists only as long as grievance-driven mobilization continues
• Groups channel their history through trusted non-state institutions when the state disavows it
• Groups invoke external enemies to justify the suppression of internal disunity
• Host reception of migrants’ food customs strengthened their return to homeland traditions.
• Hostile enemy imagery in expellee politics faded as Cold War tensions eased.
• Irredentist homeland claims that sustained the association later caused its political marginalization
• Living memory of expulsion decays and must be replaced by institutional commemoration
• Mainstream parties co-opted BHE leaders with ministries and funding, then steered their aims
• Most French Algerian settlers were actually Spanish and Italian immigrants.
• Most pied-noir OAS supporters sought to stay in Algeria rather than share its ideology
• Official state recognition of colonial memories multiplied rather than appeased conflicts
• Once expellees integrated, their protests lost power to influence party loyalties
• Once its unifying threat receded, the German ethnocultural framework loosened.
• Pasts are contested by competing memory entrepreneurs, not settled in one canon
• Pied-noir associations fragmented by schism almost immediately despite unity rhetoric
• Pied-noir FN voting stems from mapping colonial enemies onto today’s immigrants
• Postwar welfare expansion served to pacify potentially rebellious displaced groups.
• Regimes suppress group identity when it contradicts founding legitimation myths.
• Residence, not just descent, came to confer German citizenship.
• Return-homeland promises to expellees sapped their will to integrate economically
• The BHE’s patronage-hunting reduced it to a right-wing splinter group
• The French state classified settlers and harkis unequally to erase Algeria’s Frenchness.
• The key change was memories moving from local to national scale, not new remembrance
• The reputed pied-noir voting bloc existed only in political rhetoric
• Threat-hardened leaders alienated followers, so predicted radicalization never happened
• Trauma alone does not explain right-extremist voting; economic decline does
• Twentieth century divides into three eras of forced-migration norms
• Victimhood and reparation demands function as leverage in soft diplomacy, not genuine settlement
• West German expellee institutions outlived East German ones by decades
• West German expellee policy was effectively modernizing despite restorative rhetoric
• Yugoslav wars shifted European moral judgment against ethnic expulsion