Heimkehr: Eine zentrale Kategorie der Nachkriegszeit. Geschichte, Literatur und Medien by Elena Agazzi, Erhard Schütz (review)

While the opening paragraph of Fabrizio Cambi’s analysis of East German writers and Heimkehr in this volume asserts boldly that neither the eastern nor the western occupation zones and their offspring states established a literary category of return and returners, this volume as a whole seems to want to demonstrate just the opposite. The editors have collected 16 contributions from a symposium on “Heimkehr, Kulturfragen und Generationenperspektiven in Deutschland (1945–1961),” held in November 2008 in Trient, with the goal of exploring the German return home (and the focus is strictly on Germany) as a historical, social, psychological, and national process through the lens of statistical, biographical, behavioral, literary, cinematic, and other cultural documents. The result is a compilation of some uniformity and much diversity that exposes the key questions inherent in this far-from-simple topic.

The simultaneity of trauma and guilt, the paradox of alienation in homecoming as an individual as well as collective experience, and the physicality of residence versus the mental space of Heimat are broached as problem areas. In Rainer Schulze’s foundational essay, the distinctions between the experiences of expellees from the east, refugees, and the involuntarily resettled are outlined, while in subsequent articles further distinctions are drawn between returning evacuees, exiles, emigrés, and POWs, political and intellectual elites but also unexceptional individuals, soldiers coming home from the front, Jews liberated from internment, and Germans released from Soviet prisons where they had been held as war criminals. All of these are in some sense Heimkehrer, and the context and experience of their homecoming deserves and receives appropriate differentiation by the authors in this volume.

Schulze’s analysis of Zwangsumsiedlung, Flucht, and Vertreibung identifies the personal suffering, material privation, and diminution of social prestige usually associated with loss of Heimat, and stresses honest remembering as a key to successful overcoming of the traumas linked to these historical processes, both for long-standing local incumbents and for new arrivals. The category of Heimat remains central to Schulze’s approach, and this proves problematic as it diverts what begins as a crisp, largely data-driven sociohistorical study into the murky territory of perceptions and emotion. In this article, Heimat begins as an object of analysis but gradually is accepted as a valid referent in the analytical vocabulary. By retaining Heimat, in all its slippery ambiguity, as a terminus technicus, Schulze undercuts the persuasiveness of his latter arguments.

Henning Wrage details in his article the development of the founding myth of the German Democratic Republic. By exploring the cultural transition from the morally unambiguous character types and dramaturgy evident in the various realizations of “Die Fahne von Kriwoj Rog” to the TV series Gewissen in Aufruhr, where German soldiers before Stalingrad become victims of the officer corps, Wrage traces the “empathy design” that marks the self-styling of the GDR from the early 1950s to 1961. Meanwhile Cambi’s piece on Heimkehr and socialism in the SBZ and GDR during the 1950s presents a useful overview of the cultural policy of that era with respect to returners and offers examples from the poetry of Brecht, Becher, and Huchel, and the prose of Seghers, Mundstock, Brecht, Fr. Wolf, Bredel, and others.

Arnd Bauerkämper tackles the intriguing role of prominent conservative historians Hans Rothfels and Arnold Bergstraesser, who returned to West Germany following their period of exile in the USA. Ever suspicious of political pluralism and the emotionality of the populace, these “remigrierte Wissenschaftler” advanced the cause of democracy almost without intending to. They were able to dilute authoritarian political mentalities among elites traditionally distant from principles of democracy and to help bond them with the political and social system of the emerging Federal Republic (71). Though neither advocated American models of democracy and, even after World War II, they only gradually gave up their mistrust of the unpredictable masses, their return to Germany and integration into West...