Chapter 13 Commemorating vanished ‘homelands’
Displaced Germans and their Heimat Europa
Abstract
The twentieth century has been described (e.g., Piskorski 2015 ) as a century
of displacement. While globally the comparative scale of involuntary population
movement may not have diff ered signifi cantly from earlier centuries, its
perception has changed radically, leading in the early twenty- fi rst century to
the dramatic resurgence of xenophobic populism across Europe and beyond
(see Kaya 2017 ; De Cesari and Kaya 2019). Throughout the ‘refugee crisis’ of
the 2010s, the German government’s moderate policy towards new migrants
was widely criticised. The ideological foundation for that policy was, arguably,
the country’s experience of integrating millions of ethnic German expellees
and refugees from Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second
World War.