Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France

Comparative Perspectives

Manuel Borutta, Jan C. Jansen, Manuel Borutta, Jan C. Jansen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137508416
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume compares one of the largest instances of 'ethnic cleansing' – the German expellees from the East (Vertriebene) – with the most important case of decolonization migration – the French repatriates of Algeria (pieds-noirs).

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Comparing Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs: Introduction

Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen

After 1945 and 1962, Germany and France witnessed immigration movements of unprecedented scale and type. Military defeat and the loss of significant parts of their territory pushed millions of refugees and expellees from Central and Eastern Europe and from North Africa to the two neighboring countries: the Germans from the East (Vertriebene) and the French of now independent Algeria (rapatriés, later often referred to as Pieds-Noirs). This demographic influx from former national provinces and imperial borderlands posed serious financial, logistical, and administrative challenges for both societies. Since many of these immigrants and their ancestors had lived far away from the core regions of postwar Germany and France – speaking unfamiliar dialects or different languages, practicing different cultural and religious traditions – they were perceived as culturally different, if not inferior, and were rejected by many of their fellow citizens.

Yet their national belonging was never officially questioned. Both states considered them as ‘nationals’ and assisted them with effective institutional help and vast financial support, making their socio-economic integration an often overlooked aspect of the expansion of postwar European welfare states. However, despite their successful socio-economic integration, expellees and repatriates alike formed distinct communities and founded their own organizations, which soon became important political factors and electoral pressure groups. Their memories of the lost homelands east of the Oder–Neisse line and south of the Carpathian Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea caused tensions on a national and even international level, and painfully reminded their fellow citizens of failed imperial projects and mass violence. The integration of these specific migrant groups had sweeping effects for both postwar Germany and France: it impacted the definition of citizenship and the construction of the post-1945 state, altered the associational and political landscape, and left deep marks in the public memory of crucial chapters in national histories.

Despite these striking parallels, already noticed by scholars of other disciplines,¹ historians have studied Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in isolation from each other. Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France breaks with this conventional approach by comparing both groups systematically and placing them within larger processes that reshaped Europe after World War II. While the existing comparative literature on twentieth-century population transfers is mainly concerned with the forms and dynamics of coercive mass migration,² this volume compares the complex processes of integration and the manifold consequences for the receiving societies that followed.³ In this way, the book sets out to reassess the lasting impact ‘reverse migration’⁴ had on European nation-states and societies.

Global context: postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and the reshaping of Western Europe

The postwar decades were a crucial period in twentieth-century European history – the continent had been devastated by the war, and was increasingly divided by the East–West conflict. Western European countries lost their colonial empires but also experienced rapid economic growth and a new integration on a supranational level. This shared historical moment was the larger context for the integration of expellees and repatriates in postwar Germany and France.⁵ France and the western part of Germany shared a more similar political and economic context. The comparison will mainly cover France and West Germany, though East Germany will be taken into account as well.

First, the dissolution of empires had lasting consequences for the conception of the nation-state. Central and Eastern Europe (especially Poland) and Algeria had been of equivalent significance for Germany and France as parts of larger ‘imagined geographies’ that nurtured fantasies of territorial expansion, provoked policies of colonial settlement and national assimilation, and sustained national imperial identities.⁶ After the loss of these territories, imperial concepts of the nation-state lay in shambles, and the place of the nation in the world had to be redefined. Thereafter, West Germany and France oriented themselves towards a supranational integration of Western Europe – an orientation that complemented their new self-conceptions as post-imperial nations, which emerged with the integration of expellees and repatriates.⁷

Second, the integration of expellees and repatriates took place in the context of economic growth far greater than the global average. Though the West German ‘economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder) and the French ‘Glorious Thirty’ (Trente Glorieuses) became part of specifically national cultures of remembrance, this economic boom was a common Western European experience. Though it is not easy to assess, apparently, expellees and repatriates both contributed to and benefited from economic growth. While the boom was obviously a prerequisite to their integration and ‘absorption’ into the labor market, the abundant and available workforce also fueled the expanding economy.⁸ The extensive socio-economic integration programs towards the two groups, for example in the house building sector, further contributed to the economic momentum.

Third, in the 1950s and 1960s, the European welfare state reached unprecedented levels. Though based on different national traditions, sometimes reaching back into the nineteenth century, the massive expansion of public expenditures on social policy was a common pattern among the Western European states. The integration programs set up by the West German and French states to provide the expellees and repatriates with labor and housing, and partly to compensate for their financial losses, were an important driving force behind this development. While the Equalization of Burdens Act (Lastenausgleichsgesetz) induced payments to the amount of DM145.3 billion to the expellees between 1952 and 2001, the French state spent FF26 billion for the integration of the repatriates (1962–70), and another FF28.7 billion for their compensation (1970–81).⁹ Both cases show that the expansion of social expenditures was also a reaction to the consequences of war and a means to pacify potentially dangerous or rebellious groups.¹⁰ The specific welfare provisions for expellees and repatriates also suggest that notwithstanding a general postwar tendency to universalize social rights (on the basis of citizenship),¹¹ particular legal claims continued to coexist.

Fourth, the emerging Cold War constituted an important international backdrop to this process.¹² This was most obvious in the case of the German expellees, who were split up between two antagonistic political and ideological systems. While the communist regime of East Germany stopped financial help for the so-called ‘resettlers’ in the mid-1950s, declaring that they had been successfully integrated and assimilated, the socio-economic integration of expellees in West Germany was soon depicted as a ‘miracle’ (Integrationswunder). It became an essential part of the West German Wirtschaftswunder myth and a crucial element of Western Cold War propaganda.¹³ By contrast, the integration of the Pieds-Noirs was barely linked to the Cold War context, though, from 1969, it was the subject of domestic rivalry among Gaullists, socialists, and communists competing to best provide for this voting group.¹⁴

Fifth, and finally, the integration of expellees and repatriates was part of a dramatic shift in global migration flows that Europe experienced during the postwar period.¹⁵ After having been a continent of emigration for more than a century, Western Europe (at least countries like West Germany and France) now became a destination of mass immigration. In most countries, internal migrants were increasingly outnumbered by foreign labor migrants, in France mainly from the former colonial empire, in West Germany by Mediterranean ‘guest workers’. Scholars in the European history of migration have long tended to focus on these forms of ‘free’ labor migration, while the study of involuntary forms of mobility (such as the slave trade or indentured labor for example) has been relegated to non-European societies.¹⁶ However, twentieth-century European societies were also shaped by unfree forms of mobility. The confluence of these different forms of migration and the continuities between them needs to be analyzed.¹⁷

A comparative approach: different settings, similar challenges

This volume examines the histories of expellees and repatriates against the backdrop of a shared postwar/post-imperial moment. Rather than pursuing a transnational approach that focuses on transfers and entanglements, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France adopts a comparative perspective. Critics of comparative history argue that historical comparisons rely on artificially separated units that are closely interconnected in empirical reality.¹⁸ Yet, as French historian Marc Bloch had noticed already in 1928, relational and comparative perspectives do not exclude, but complement, each other.¹⁹ Furthermore, some historical phenomena cannot be explained primarily by their connections and interactions. Germany and France after 1945 shared a highly entangled history (as they did before). France was among the Allied forces in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and almost vetoed the settlement of expellees in its occupation zone.²⁰ By contrast, the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) received a great deal of support from East and West Germany during its fight for Algerian independence.²¹ Many further cross-connections could be cited. However, these entanglements were not the main forces behind the integration of Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs.²²

Because historical comparisons flesh out commonalities and differences between individual cases that help to describe, interpret, and explain them in greater depth, they enable us to carve out peculiarities, to check generalizations, to defamiliarize the familiar, and to de-provincialize concepts by forcing us to reconsider assumptions about the singularity of the cases.²³ Thus, a comparison focusing on the integration of both groups does not ‘essentialize’ the two nations as static units but sheds light on their spatial and cultural variability and exposes the changing and unstable nature of German and French ‘nationhood’.

Some major differences between expulsion from the Eastern provinces and repatriation from Algeria can be stated from the outset. First, the difference in the number of migrants was large. While the repatriates numbered about a million, which made up less than three percent of the French metropolitan population, the expellees numbered more than twelve million. Almost eight million – constituting roughly a fifth of the population – ended up in the Western occupation zones (mainly in the British and American sectors), which became FRG territory in 1949. More than four million expelled Germans arrived in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), the future German Democratic Republic (GDR), making up a quarter of its inhabitants.²⁴ In a similar vein, the death toll amongst those expelled or repatriated was very different: while researchers have recently pointed to hundreds of disappearances among civilians at the end of the Algerian War, several hundred thousand people died or disappeared during the expulsion.²⁵ In both cases the numbers of the dead have been highly disputed and politicized.²⁶

Second, these two waves of mass migration took place in different historical contexts.²⁷ The ‘flight and expulsion’ of Germans from the East took place during the final period and the aftermath of World War II (1944–50) and has to be seen against the background of Nazi policies of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Central and Eastern Europe between 1938 and 1944. During this period, the creation of ethnically homogeneous states through mass resettlements and ‘population transfers’ was still internationally sanctioned as a way to build stable societies and postwar order. Hence, the expulsion of the Germans was at least in part the result of agreements between the Allied Powers.²⁸ By contrast, the ‘exodus’ of French citizens from Algeria – beginning in the 1950s, swelling in 1960–1, and culminating in 1962²⁹ – resulted from a different kind of war, the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), which has to be seen in the context of worldwide decolonization.³⁰ It was neither state-organized nor did it result from an international agreement.

Third, the postwar scenarios varied substantially. While the effects of the Algerian War with France remained largely within the political realm, causing the breakdown of the Fourth Republic and returning Charles de Gaulle to power, Germany lay in ruins in 1945. Due to wartime destruction and the number of other relocated, displaced, or repatriated persons and refugees (eight to ten million by the end of the war), an integrated ‘receiving society’ barely existed; locals and immigrants had to rebuild one together.³¹ Furthermore, Germany was not a sovereign country. Even after the foundation of the two German states in 1949, Allied occupation and territorial division strongly influenced the way the integration of the expellees was carried out.

Fourth, and finally, the lost territories had different stories. The larg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Comparing Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs: Introduction
• Part I: From Empire to Nation-State: 1945 and 1962
• Part II: Repatriation and Integration
• Part III: Self-Organization and Representation
• Part IV: Political Impact and Participation
• Part V: Commemorative Practices and Emotions
• Part VI: Politics of Remembrance
• Select Bibliography
• Index