Chapter 5 - The Nation as a Redemptive Geography

Summary

The chapter examines conflicts between German expellee organizations and their critics about how the Heimat concept should be understood. It traces these conflicts through a study of annual expellee Heimat meetings – dynamic and often explosive events which involved personal reunion, cultural displays, political spectacles, children’s events, and medialized debates. Expellee leaders and their critics conflicted over whether Heimat should moderate or strengthen national sentiment. Loss of Heimat based on national ethnicity and redrawing of national borders underpinned more nationalist interpretations of Heimat in the expellee organizations. National politicization of expellee Heimat feeling, however, did not rely on personal intention to return to the East as some have argued. Nationally strident demands for a right to the Heimat in the East were also deeply bound up in recognition politics. Claims that expellee children had a right to Heimat in the East triggered further conflicts over the concept. Opponents of the expellee societies denounced their efforts to depict Heimat in the East as an ethnic inheritance and argued that personal experience of place was essential to the concept.