Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
Description: At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied planning for the expulsion, when and how it took place, and the multitude of deaths that occurred as a result of it.
We know much less about what happened to the expellees after the expulsion. Where did they go? What did they do? And, perhaps most interestingly, what did they think about their former Heimat? In The Lost German East: Forced M...