Reteaching/retouchingHeimat: expellees, home and belonging in German schools' post-war curricula

This essay explores how both German and international educators mobilised history curricula to reshape German collective identity between 1945 and 1950, focusing particular attention on depictions of thedeutsche Vertriebene(German expellees) in curricular plans and textbooks. In the mid-1940s, 12-15 million ethnic Germans were forcibly ousted from Poland, the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states. However, while international authorities considered them 'German', expellees were typically understood as problematic outsiders by the local residents and officials of theirneue Heimat(new homeland). It will be suggested that, rather than helping integrate young expellees into post-war societies, post-war curricular reforms reinforced an identity rooted in loss and collective exclusion. More than 70 years later, ageing expellees still challenge public narratives, describing themselves as perpetual outsiders, at home neither in the Federal Republic of Germany, nor in the places and cultures of their memories.