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3 - Expulsion Novels of the 1950s: More than Meets the Eye?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Karina Berger
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Stuart Taberner
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Karina Berger
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Summary

AT THE END OF THE 1950S, critic Karl Heinz Gehrmann spoke of the “unmanageable abundance” of literary works dealing with expulsion. Indeed, the decade produced a vast amount of texts — novels, diaries, and autobiographies — often written by expellees themselves to document or come to terms with their experience. Many of these stories retell the harrowing ordeal of being expelled, while others concentrate on the beauty and virtues of their lost Heimat. Tarnished perhaps by the sometimes aggressive calls by Vertriebenenverbände (expellee organizations) in the postwar years to reinstate the borders of 1937 and reclaim lost territories, expulsion texts from the 1950s have largely been viewed with suspicion. From the 1960s onward, expulsion literature has had to contend with the widespread assumption among critics and academics that it is revisionist or even revanchist, that it focuses exclusively on German suffering, and that it fails to engage with issues such as guilt and responsibility, and especially the victims of Nazism and the Holocaust. Thus, the Polish literary historian Ludmila Slugocka claimed in 1964 that these books were written “in the name of revanchism” and with a “readiness to fight for reaquisition,” while Germanist Jost Hermand, writing in 1979, criticized that, when reading these texts, one got the impression that Germans from the eastern provinces had been the primary victims of the Second World War, rather than Russians, Poles, or Jews. Indeed, Gertrud Fussenegger, one of the authors to be examined in this chapter, also noted that those thematizing expulsion in literature were generally regarded as “suspicious.”

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2009

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