Beginning in January of 1946, trains filled with Sudeten Germans—forty wagons, thirty passengers per wagon—left Czechoslovakia daily for the American Zone of occupied Germany. By the end of 1946, the Czechoslovak government completed the “organized transfer” of almost 2 million Germans, and it did so in a manner that in many respects fulfilled the mandate of the Potsdam agreement that the resettlement be “orderly and humane.” But a focus on these regularized trainloads of human cargo obscures the extent of the humanitarian disaster facing Germans during the summer months of 1945, immediately after the Nazi capitulation. By the end of 1945, Czech soldiers, security forces, and local militias had already expelled over 700,000 Sudeten Germans to occupied Germany and Austria. As many as 30,000 Germans died on forced marches, in disease-filled concentration camps, in summary executions, and massacres.

In his poem “Our Military!” published in 1919, Kurt Tucholsky describes the great enthusiasm that he, or rather his pseudonym Kaspar Hauser, felt as a boy before World War II for the sis–boom–bah of martial music when the soldiers marched by. Only when he was a soldier himself “in the Russian wind” of the First World War were the young man's eyes opened to the barbarity, desperation, and despair of war and the actual power relations in the army. While the poem's antimilitaristic intentions are readily apparent, Tucholsky nevertheless also managed to capture a view widely held during the interwar years: that before 1914 there still existed in the population an unbroken enthusiasm for the army and its colorful displays, but that the experience during the war of death on such a massive scale put an end to it. Walter Rathenau echoed precisely these sentiments in his 1919 treatise Der Kaiser: Eine Betrachtung, seeing the prewar society of the German Empire as a “militarily-drilled mass” that sought “to display their acquired military arts in grand public spectacles.” The stereotypical image of a bygone prewar era of military glory and pageantry received a more popular, less “critical” treatment in the 1934 film “Frühjahrsparade,” a musical that evoked “the good old days” of the Habsburg Empire and the k. u. k. army, and not least the passion of women for “the man in uniform.”

Languages evolve, and through the negotiations of public discourse, particular phrases acquire connotations and meanings beyond their grammatical structure. Occasionally, the meanings become contested and the resultant debate can be politically charged. The struggle to define language is fundamentally a struggle for power. This explains the current concerns of the French government to protect the French language from anglicisms. In recent years, the United States has become embroiled in debates over interpretations of the Constitution. Should our reconstruction of the eighteenth-century intent of the authors be the standard or should we reinterpret the language in the spirit of our present day context? The answer is fundamentally a political one. Perhaps nowhere has language been more highly contested than in postwar West Germany.