Matthias Stickler. 'Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch': Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzung der deutschen Vertriebenenverbände 1949 - 1972. Düsseldorf: Droste, c2004. 511 pp. ISBN 978-3-7700-1896-3.
Reviewed by Brenda D. Melendy (Department of History, Texas A&M University-Kingsville)
Published on H-German (June, 2006)
Biography of an Organization?
With his Habilitationsschrift, Matthias Stickler has provided an exhaustive political history of expellee organizations in West Germany. This volume is grounded in extensive and thorough research, and is a welcome, updated addition to the body of work that considers the political constellation and influence of the expellee organizations from the founding of the Federal Republic through the signing of the Basic Treaty. Stickler focuses his analysis on the central expellee group, the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), and gives a layered description of its activities as a political pressure group with respect to its primary goals--"return to Heimat" and the revision of the 1945 borders.
Stickler explores the role of the expellee organizations from four perspectives; each of the four chapters highlights a central problematic or tension that was key to the development and impact of expellee organizations. Chapter 1 details the convoluted history of the establishment of the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV). Principal obstacles to the founding of this unified organization were the initial creation of two competing interest groups with opposing views of organizational principles, and the conflict of strong personalities. While much of the ensuing description of the struggle between the Zentralverband der vertriebenen Deutschen (ZvD) and the Vereinigte Ostdeutsche Landsmannschaften for political primacy in expellee affairs covers well-rehearsed ground, the highlight of this chapter is Stickler's focus on the personalities involved. His biography of an organization is peopled with individuals striving to imprint the expellee movement with their own views and to carry out the occasional political vendetta and personal reprisals. Probably the best example of such actions are the political maneuverings of Linus Kather, head of the ZvD, who Stickler asserts intentionally sowed dissension among competing expellee groups in order to position himself as a likely candidate for a cabinet post as Expellee Minister. Similar narratives add life to what might otherwise seem a dry topic.
Chapter 2 takes as its central focus the self-perception of the BdV, which viewed its existence and its pro-expellee policy as a model of the most forward-looking foreign policy possible for the Federal Republic. In an echo of the book's title, the BdV claimed that the expellee interest in reclaiming lands for Germany lost through the Potsdam Agreement was an "all-German" interest; in other words, expellee policy coincided with German national interest. Coincident with asserting the centrality of the expellee interest to German foreign policy, expellee organizations also advanced a claim to veto rights over federal policy affecting expellees, especially foreign policy. In a delicate political negotiation, the expellee organizations (which often struggled financially) vied with the federal government (which did not want to lose the continuing political support of expellees and desired to maintain its theoretical claim to the eastern homelands in the Cold War context). As a result, the organizations exchanged some of their claims to special political rights for federal subsidies to stay afloat.
In the third chapter, Stickler details the role of expellees and how they influenced each of the major political parties of the era. The problematic explored here is the political dance between the parties and the expellee organizations--how could each use the other to advance their own ends; how could, for instance, the SPD make inroads against the CDU by playing up to expellee interests, or vice versa? The chapter would not be complete, of course, without an examination of the expellee parties themselves, notably the Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten, fighting to survive essentially as an interest group in a world of mass parties. Here again Stickler does not have much new to add to the story. The organization of this chapter leads to some repetitiveness. By taking each political party in turn, and tracing the evolution of the expellee question from 1949-72, the author retraces some of the same ground with each subsequent go-around. But this laborious approach also strengthens this chapter. Its systematic analysis provides a thorough reference for readers seeking to understand the precise strengths and impacts of the expellee groups on West German politics.
The final chapter traces the evolution of policy efforts of the primary expellee organizations with respect to foreign affairs. The principal (and contentious) issue at stake was what should the expellee voice, embodied in the organizations, be with respect to federal foreign policy? The earliest, hard-line stance centered on border revisions, with most groups taking the borders of 1937 as the starting point. Others, however--notably the Sudeten Germans--insisted on the borders drawn by the 1938 Munich Agreement. Stickler explores in great detail the policy initiatives sponsored by various landsmannschaftliche groups, but the primary thrust of this chapter is to explain the shift from the focus on border revisions to a focus on the right to Heimat ("Recht auf die Heimat"). The more the BdV generalized the right to Heimat as a collective right (not just for German expellees, but as a human right applicable to all refugees), the more broadly acceptable the BdV's position became. In many ways, this theoretical construct developed by German expellee groups--groups often regarded as a revisionist threat to European security--was their most important contribution to an emerging definition of refugee rights in the turbulent second half of the twentieth century. Essentially, the BdV changed its definition of a right to Heimat over the course of the 1960s from a demand for territorial change to a more broadly defined European collective right--the right of European nations, including those in Eastern Europe, to elect their own governments democratically. The BdV posited that upon that foundation, the German expellee right to Heimat could also be resolved. In spite of their best efforts, however, support for the BdV's position did not extend far beyond expellee circles.
The biography of the Bund der Vertriebenen presented by Matthias Stickler rests on solid research carried out in the archives of the federal government. Stickler has also consulted the archives of political parties and expellee organizations as well as the personal papers of all of the principal actors involved (Linus Kather, Waldemar Kraft and Herbert Czaja, for example). Appendices of the organizational foundation documents provide a further resource to the reader. The chronological framing of the work coincides with the years during which the question of the borders and the right to Heimat remained most open. Ostpolitik and the signing of the Basic Treaty closed the issue of revised borders for the time being, relegating the influence of expellee organizations more and more to the realms of cultural preservation rather than national-political interest.
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Citation:
Brenda D. Melendy. Review of Stickler, Matthias, 'Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch': Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzung der deutschen Vertriebenenverbände 1949 - 1972.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11885
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