IN THE LITERARY, CINEMATIC, AND TELEVISUAL RETELLINGS of German suffering during the Second World War that have been proliferating over the past years, some narratives recur frequently: the bombing of German cities in Allied air raids, the killing and rape of civilians by invading soldiers in the last days of the war, and the expulsion before and after the end of the war of ethnic Germans from territories east of the rivers Oder and Neisse. This last narrative constitutes as much a traumatic memory as any of the other privileged sites of German wartime suffering; even by conservative estimates the expulsions created approximately fourteen million refugees and resulted in more than 500,000 civilian deaths. Few Germans living through the war and the first postwar years were left unaffected by the impact of this mass migration — in the West, the influx of refugees caused housing problems that persisted for a decade, while the expellees had to reinvent themselves and integrate into a national community many found unfamiliar and often hostile.

Despite all these traumatic dimensions, however, there is a notable difference between the remembrance of the expulsions and narratives concerning the Allied bombings insofar as the trauma of the former has become suffused over the years with the “softer” nostalgic or melancholy memory of a lost Heimat. My essay will suggest ways in which specific conceptions of memory, history, and nostalgia are implicated in the curious “rediscovery” of extinct political entities in the contemporary German collective consciousness. After some general observations about the scope of this “revival” and the theoretical implications behind its interpretation I discuss two specific case studies, the television event movie Die Flucht (March of Millions, 2007) and a series of documentaries by East German director Volker Koepp.

The territories from which Germans were expelled, and which are contentiously often still referred to as Ostgebiete (Eastern regions), had comprised sizeable established German-speaking communities prior to 1945. Some areas had been under Prussian or Habsburg control for centuries, while others had been governed successively by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, and Russia.