The Eastern Territories Problems and National Identity in Postwar Germany

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As a result of the defeat of World War II, Germany lost about 115 thousand square kilometers of the territories east of the Oder-Nisse line and some seven million German citizens of the former Reich were expelled from there. I consider how the so-called "eastern territories" (or the Oder-Neisse territories) have been conceived and discussed in the public discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany from the end of the war to the present. Paying a special attention to the role of national identity, or national self-understanding, in the debates on the eastern territories, I explore how the revision of the Oder-Neisse line and the German "homeland rights" to the east were claimed, how the borders along the Oder-Neisse line got to be finally "recognized" and the policy of "abandoning" the eastern territories was legitimated, and how the legacies and memories of the territories have been (or are still) invoked after the final settlement of the borders.Overall in this research I illuminate … More the shift of a dominant pattern of national identity in postwar West Germany : from the "Reich identity" to the "Holocaust identity." From the late-40s through the 60s the claim to the revision of the Oder-Neisse line was made in principle on the normative base of the "Reich identity," which presupposed that despite the defeat of Nazi Germany the "German Reich with the frontiers of 1937" still exists in the legal sense. But the "Holocaust identity," a uniquely postwar pattern of German identity, which considers the "overcoming" of the Nazi past as a special duty of postwar Germans and the commitment to "reconciliation (Aussohnung)" with Poland as an important part of the duty, became conspicuous in the late-60s and played an important role in the "new eastern policy (neue Ostpolitik)" of Willy Brandt. After the 60s the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line and the "abandoning" of the eastern territories have thus been legitimated in terms of the "Holocaust identity."However, the road to the final settlement of the Oder-Neisse line was not smooth. The opposition to the "final recognition" could still invoke the revised, or "personalized," version of the "Reich identity" in the 70s and the 80s. The public debates over the eastern territories have represented the two different, conflicting patterns of postwar German identity. Considering the case of postwar German eastern territories problems, this research shows the nature of national identity, which is not a unitary entity on the basis of general consensus, but a field of public discourse with different schemes of interpretation claimed by conflicting social actors. Less