This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Twelve million ethnic Germans immigrated between 1944 and 1950, 4.5 million of these to East Germany. This chapter tracks the complex prehistory, in particular the Nazi aggression, that predated their flight from Eastern Europe and their hostile reception in Germany. Contrary to today’s myth of easy integration, the expellees were perceived as wholly Other. The racism of the Nazi era was applied to them – they were thought to look and smell differently and were called a “mulatto race.” Surprisingly, because of their importance as voters, around 1950 the state started to configure them in a way that foreshadowed the salad bowl model: they were allowed to retain their particularist Silesian etc. cultural backgrounds while being seen as unequivocally belonging to the German nation. This chapter suggests that contemporary German society remember their migration differently: as one of many waves, no more “natural” or important than that of Eritrean asylum seekers or Soviet Jews, and as quintessentially modern by foreshadowing the salad bowl model avant la lettre.