Katholisches Milieu und Vertriebene: Eine Fallstudie am Beispiel des Oldenburger Landes, 1945-1965 (review)

Michael Hirschfeld's slightly revised dissertation is a comprehensive study of the experiences of Eastern German expellees, mostly Silesians, in the northwest German region of Oldenburg in the first two decades after World War II.

Hirschfeld integrates the study of postwar Catholicism with the study of flight and expulsion. In recent years, both of these fields, especially expulsion, have received increased scholarly attention. Hirschfeld achieves his integration by investigating the development of the Catholic milieu, a topic previously analyzed by Raymond Sun and others. In his introduction, Hirschfeld makes a lengthy plea for German Catholic historians to broaden the scope of their research beyond church history by adopting the methods of cultural and social history. In this regard his criticism of the publications of the Catholic Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, while not entirely unfounded, overlooks some of the important work done in recent years, both on postwar Catholicism and on broader questions of Catholic culture and Catholic politics.

The Church in Oldenburg, which enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy from its diocesan superiors in Münster by virtue of Oldenburg's longstanding separate political status, was led by the Offizialof Vechta, whose superior in turn was the bishop of Münster. Southern Oldenburg was predominantly Catholic, whereas Catholics in northern Oldenburg formed small diaspora communities. Hirschfeld demonstrates that, while the Catholic hierarchy welcomed the expellees, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, when they arrived in northern Oldenburg, church officials attempted to have them relocated to the southern part of the region in order to integrate them more easily. British occupation forces, however, left the expellees where they were. In many areas, expellees spent years living in refugee camps or in the barns and lofts of local farmers. Church officials engaged in significant charitable activity to meet the most basic needs of the expellees. It was no little achievement, for example, to find a bicycle so that an expelled priest might care for his flock. Catholic families in the southern part of the region were asked to donate food, money, and clothing for partner parishes, established in 1947, in the northern part of the region. By the 1950's, Catholic communities were building new Catholic schools and hospitals, and cooperative ventures in home construction ( Bauvereine) were providing new homes to some of the expellees.

Hirschfeld demonstrates, however, that the initial integration of the expellees was a failure and that it contributed to the disintegration of the Catholic milieu long before the Second Vatican Council. The Catholic hierarchy of Oldenburg did not encourage the maintenance of Silesian customs and traditions. Expelled clergy could not become parish rectors and pastors ( Pfarrer) as long as they remained incardinated in their home dioceses, which the Vatican maintained until 1972. In a time of general turmoil and hardship, local Catholic communities in northern Oldenburg were overwhelmed by the influx of fellow Catholics with very different traditions who competed for scare resources.

Thus, the expellees, who had just experienced the trauma of forcible eviction from their ancestral homes, were grateful for the assistance rendered to them, but their willingness to assimilate was undermined by their desire, latent until at least the late 1940's, to return home. This refusal to accept the new status quo lessened the expellees' willingness to become involved in local social and political activities or even to accept the need to build new churches.

Hirschfeld argues that this failure of Silesians to develop a common Catholic identity with other Catholics in the region contributed to the disintegration of the Catholic milieu as early as the 1950's. Evidence of this is the expellees' support for political parties that voted to end the practice of separating public schools into Catholic and Protestant schools and the dramatic increase in the number of mixed marriages.

Less convincing is Hirschfeld's assertion that the experience of the Silesian expellees...