Resisting Change: Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and ‘Sudeten German’ Identity in West Germany after the Second World War

Abstract

This article examines the interface between the expellee experience and völkisch-nationalist literature in Germany between 1945 and ca. 1960, concentrating particularly on Kolbenheyer and the Sudeten Germans. In this context, post-war Germany highlights a number of angles from which to approach ‘culture in transit’. I will consider völkisch-nationalist responses to temporal cultural transition in the 1950s. During this decade, Germans gradually moved away from the values and customs of a society socialised by the Nazis towards a liberal, democratic culture that sought to integrate the disparate elements left in the debris after the Second World War. I will also discuss the geographic movement of culture with the refugees from the Czech territories. I finally suggest that Sudeten German culture and identity were transformed by the experience of transit itself after 1945.