After 1945, 15,000,000 ethnic Germans from East Europe entered Germany. The successive stages of immigration included, first, ethnic Germans who were expelled by Czechoslovakia and Poland because of their collaboration with Nazi Germany. Later, when the Communists came to power, many Germans left to escape the oppressive regimes and to overcome economic hardship.¹ After 1989, when democracies were established in the East European countries, the flood of emigration did not stop. On the contrary, in 1990 alone almost 400,000 ethnic Germans entered Germany. Considered an ethnic minority in their homelands, these ethnic Germans arrived in the Federal Republic only to...

Any concept of national identity collapses when confronted with Gregor von Rezzori’s multiethnic, multicultural, and multinational background. He was born in 1914 in the Habsburg Empire, lived in Romania until 1937, experienced the Anschluß in Vienna, and lived in Berlin during the war and then in Hamburg. He spent the last part of his life in Italy and New York. He was married three times: first to a German, then to a Jewish woman, and last to an Italian aristocrat; in addition, he had a much-publicized affair with a French model while in Paris. Despite the fact that his first...

Edgar Hilsenrath’s literary work has seldom been discussed in the context of German-language authors from Bukovina, although Hilsenrath has written one of the few literary representations of the forgotten Holocaust that occurred in Transnistria. Hilsenrath was born in 1926 in Leipzig. In 1938, as the Nazi threat became imminent in Germany, his father sent him, his mother, and his younger brother to Romania. The Bukovinian town of Sereth/Siret seemed a safe haven for his family at the time. Three years later, however, they shared the fate of Bukovinian Jews who were deported by Germans and Romanians to the thirteen camps...

In December 1996, more than half a century after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the expulsion of 3.5 million Sudeten Germans² in 1945, Czechs and Germans finally agreed on a bilateral pact on wartime abuses.³ Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Václav Havel endorsed a joint declaration in which Germans apologized for Hitler’s invasion and the subsequent crimes Nazis committed in Czechoslovakia; in turn, Czechs expressed regret for the expulsion and expropriation of many innocent Sudeten Germans. But the declaration provided the expelled with no claim to compensation, an omission that the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, headquartered in Bavaria, harshly...

Among the German-Romanian writers who tried to start a new life and career in the Federal Republic of Germany, Herta Müller is currently the most successful but also the most controversial. In 1987 she left Romania after she and her husband at the time, the poet Richard Wagner, had endured persecution under Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime. In Germany, as she stated in many interviews, she and Wagner wanted to be accepted as political refugees, not as ethnic Germans. Müller and Wagner’s application for political asylum complicated and delayed the process of establishing their status in Germany, since German immigration officials were...

Many literary critics still struggle when confronted with German-language literature from East Central Europe. For the most part, the political and historical events represented in these texts are marginalized or simply ignored. Moreover, the information on the dust jackets of books by authors from East European countries seek to attract readers by presenting prospects of exotic settings and oriental ambiance. Not only is the information misleading; it also reiterates existing stereotypes that describe East Europe as oriental and non-European. The dust jacket of Gregor von Rezzori’s Blumen im Schnee, for example, quotes the Berlin Tagesspiegel: “Rezzori portraitiert mit feinen Strichen....