Expulsion Of Germans Research Articles

Childhood Memory of Adult History. Holocaust Trauma and Migration in Z. Oryszyn’s novel «Saving Atlantis»

Zyta Oryszyn’s (b. 1940) novel «Saving Atlantis» (2012), like almost all of her work, is born of a sense of guilt – a desire to «cover with words» the pain caused by childhood memories of the trauma of participation (unwitting complicity in the expulsion of Germans from the Regainde Lands), the trauma of witnessing (the Holocaust) and the trauma of inheritance (family memory of forced migration). Children’s consciousness, adapting to adult reality, accommodates the experience of power and powerlessness, of invader, victim and witness. From this position, the novel explores – in all its fragmentation – the autobiographical memory of the former German space functioning in the paradigm of violence, a space traumatising and generating a sense of unrootedness. The dramatic stories of several families, told from different perspectives, intersect and intertwine, forming a sorrowful labyrinth of fear, resentment, orphanhood, humiliation, and insurmountable alienness.

The Polish Wild West: Forced Migration and Cultural Appropriation in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1945–1948 [Polski dziki zachód. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajanie Nadodrza 1945–48

The Polish Wild West: Forced Migration and Cultural Appropriation in the Polish-German Borderlands, 1945–1948 [Polski dziki zachód. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajanie Nadodrza 1945–48

The historical Sudetenland border and the current socio-spatial differentiation of Czechia: a quantitative look at the long-term impact of institutional changes

The expulsion of Germans after 1945 and the subsequent resettlement of the borderlands are among the most important processes that affected spatial distribution of population in Czechia during the 20th century. Although the former Sudetenland border existed officially only shortly, its effect on the socio-geographical organization of society is still apparent, even more than 50 years later. The border could be conceptualized as a phantom border which, despite its non-existence, impacts regional differences. The aim of the presented article is to evaluate the relationship of the former Sudetenland border with the current socio-spatial distribution of indicators related to regional identity, social stability, and human capital, using spatial and quantitative methods. The data are from the 2011 census and were analysed at the level of municipalities, which enabled a close examination of the effects of border proximity at the local level. A strong effect was confirmed for all indicators, proving the importance of historical context when interpreting the current socio-spatial differentiation.

Research Questions and Methodological Approaches in the Literature on the History of the German Minority in Hungary between 1945 and 1955

In my study, I summarise the content issues, methodological approaches and the most important results of the historical literature dealing with the history of the German minority in Hungary during the decade after the Second World War. It can be said that the historical research on the expulsion of Germans from Hungary up to 1990, the change of regime, was characterised by a positivist, descriptive, event-centric approach. The questions of this research were basically organised by the outcome of Potsdam and how this related to Hungary. In connection with both the content and methodological issues, I will touch on – in my opinion – the missing aspects, the possibility of more complex research approaches.

‘There is No Such Thing as an Unrepatriable Pole’: Polish Displaced Persons in the British Zone of Occupation in Germany

A group of Polish displaced persons (DPs) was stranded in the British zone of occupation in 1945, a smaller part of a much broader population upheaval in Europe in the 1940s that included Nazi forced labour and resettlement plans, as well as the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. The relationship between British military officials, welfare workers and the Polish DPs within the British zone deteriorated quickly after German surrender. Using the issue of repatriation as a focal point, this article will explore the growing tensions between the British and Polish who had fought alongside one another and place these within the wider context of increasing East-West tensions in the immediate post-war world. As the British tendency to look upon the Polish DPs as a troublesome ‘nuisance’ can be viewed as a by-product of pressure on an economically weakened Britain straining to live up to its pre-war stature, in this context the need to help the very people who embodied the provocation for going to war became irrelevant.

The Expulsion of Germans from the Chapter of Zagreb in 1458

In 1458, seven canons of the Chapter of Zagreb were expelled by Bishop Demetrius Čupor and his supporters. In their protest before the pope, they claimed that the only reason for that was because they were Germans. Upon examining their careers and the current political situation within the Kingdom of Hungary, it becomes clear that, although an anti-German and generally anti-foreigner sentiment was present in the country (which is apparent in the laws passed by King Matthias), the real reasons for their expulsion were political. Bishop Demetrius had spent more than a decade fighting for the bishopric against his rivals, who were protected by the Counts of Celje, the then patrons of the Diocese of Zagreb. Most of the expelled canons had been given their offices by the said family, and some of them maintained close relations with Emperor Frederick III. The fact that most of the expelled canons returned to the chapter soon after their expulsion further indicates its political background. Those who returned once again became esteemed and trusted members of the chapter. Those who did not return – three out of seven – were all in the emperor’s service, and the chapter took special steps to prevent them from reclaiming their offices.

Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu

Reviewed by: Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu Tomas Balkelis (bio) Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe Simona Mitroiu, editor Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xvi + 272 pp. ISBN 978-3319968322, $109.99 hardcover. This thematic edited collection features contributions by seventeen women authors from different countries, most of them with personal backgrounds in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Simona Mitroiu, known for her earlier research on memory and life writing, it presents a welcome addition to the growing fields of life writing, memory studies, and population displacement. What makes this volume special is that it focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, which is still underrepresented in the three fields mentioned above. It may be compared to similar scholarship by Vieda Skultans, Simeon Vilensky, Veronica Shapovalov, Tiina Kirss, Dalia Leinarte, Gabriele Ripple et al., Violeta Davoliūtė et al., and others that have focused on various cases of population displacement in Eastern Europe through the lens of life writing. For the contributors to the volume, Central and Eastern Europe is a political rather than a geographic designation and encompasses the space of Europe dominated by communist regimes. This space is broadly understood as postsocialist and postcolonial. However, as often happens with volumes carrying such broad geographic titles, only some Eastern European countries (mostly southeastern) are covered. The volume's thematic focus is on the role of women's narratives of displacement and their place in public memories. In their explorations of the life writing of different women, the authors are asking how these women dealt with the traumatic memory of WWII; how their memories were transmitted on individual and collective levels; and why they occupy such a marginal place in the collective memories of Central and Eastern European countries. These are broad questions that tie together a history of population displacement and women's and memory studies. The contributors should be applauded for their ambition to cross the disciplinary boundaries of these academic fields. The focus here will be on the chapters that, in my view, offer new methodological insights on how to study women's displacement in general. The key concept that reverberates throughout all the chapters is postmemory. [End Page 912] As defined by Marianne Hirsch, postmemory "describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that 'they remember' only as the narratives or images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful … as to constitute memories of their own right" (16). Throughout the volume the authors put Hirsch's theory of postmemory into practice, and indeed, they do it quite consistently and creatively. Mitroiu's introduction sets a firm theoretical agenda for the whole volume by placing an emphasis on offering a comprehensive perspective on women's untold stories of displacement and the mechanisms of their memory mediation. It sets up a historical context of post-totalitarian Central and Eastern European societies, where socialist regimes heavily interfered in the private lives of women and their families. The introduction also provides a brief and useful overview of major population displacements in Central and Eastern Europe, though it contains some stylistic and factual oddities, such as the "massacre of … Balkans" and "the German expulsion" that happened in "almost all of Europe" (14). The eleven chapters are divided into three thematic sections: on generations and narratives of postmemory, sites of postmemory and history, and postmemory. This division is useful because it helps to shift readers' attention from generational to spatial and temporal aspects of postmemory's transmission. In essence, the book offers three key arguments: postmemory is important because it creates identities; it is transmitted in various ways and uses diverse textual resources in cultural space; and postmemory is always gendered. The last point is especially significant because it addresses a theme barely examined in the academic literature—not only the physical displacement of Central and Eastern European women, but also the displacement of their traumatic memories from socialist and postsocialist societies. In Chapter 3, Sasha Colby makes the point that Hirsch's theory of postmemory...

VICTIM-STEREOTYPES OF POSTWAR-EXPELLEES AND THEIR SOCIAL IMPACTS: SOME REMARKS

Individual or collective coping with stereotypes - as actors or victims - belongs to human history, and shows different expressions, such as “Black and White” in Africa and America, “Jews”, “Sinti and Roma”, and “East and West” in Europe; also prejudices concerning generation, sex/gender, and professions belong to this context. This essay emphasizes, in an exemplary way, on a particular aspect of stereotyping: For Germans, 1945 was (also) the year of flight and expulsion from the East to the West as a kind of master-narrative; filled with stereotypes and myths, this narrative formed their collective memory and identity. Many expellees chose narrations as their strategy to cope with their traumatic experiences. Authors, such as Otfried Preussler, transferred their personal narration into literary forms. There also can be found official documents, such as decrees, which encoded the experiences into neutral information, but, nevertheless, remain traces of human tragedies. Also, modern interpretations of these events show emotional fillings and balance between close and distant style. The following short evaluation of published documents explains, how people cope with traumatic situations and experiences during a particular historical situation by using stereotypes; by evaluating different kinds of social influence on these stereotypes, the research demonstrates the complexity of stereotypes and the need of con¬textualization. Key words: contextualization, ego-documents, German expulsion, literature, memory-culture, social influence, stereotypes.

Merten, Ulrich. Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II (review)

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 582 Christopher Browning, Theo Schulte and Omer Bartov should feature Beorn’s volume as well. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Johannes Due Enstad Merten, Ulrich. Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2013. xx + 336 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Studies on the ‘German East’ have reached a curious stage. Since the renewed interest in German victimhood during the late 1990s, research has increasingly emerged that covers a fascinating and apparently inexhaustible field of study. The rediscovery of what some scholars — especially in Germany — labelled a ‘taboo’ has led to an omnipresence of the lost German past in the East, particularly the contentious history and legacy of the expulsions of Germans from East-Central Europe towards the end of and following the Second World War. So far-reaching has this interest become that even unshakable British truths about World War Two and Britain’s relationship with Europe are now up for debate. In the autumn of 2014, the British Museum, along with BBC Radio 4, introduced the British public to ‘forgotten’ German pasts with its programme Germany: Memories of a Nation. The exhibition at the British Museum charted 600 years of German history and began this tour de force with a focus on towns and cities that are no longer part of Germany, among them Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Danzig/Gdańsk and Prague. Despite this outpouring of interest in the German East, the issue of expulsions and German victims of World War Two — an interest that has long extended well beyond the erstwhile parochial Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) — has remained something that scholars feel the need to preface with claims of breaking a taboo (German victims) and covering new ground (the German East). Ulrich Merten’s book, Forgotten Voices, is no exception, as the title itself indicates. A detailed and often quite personal book on the German experiences of expulsion from East-Central Europe during the 1940s, it also claims to tread new ground. Similar to other recent publications — R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT, 2012), comes to mind — Merten takes the reader on a country-by-country journey and details the experiences of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere through their own voices. What makes this book worthwhile is Merten’s very personal insight into its subject matter. Born in Berlin in 1930 to a bourgeois family that opposed the Nazi regime, Merten and his family left the Third Reich for the USA in the late 1930s. Thereafter, he spent his life as a German exile torn between several worlds: REVIEWS 583 the USA, Nazi Germany and post-war Germany. Having lived in the shadow of the Third Reich in a country that, since the 1970s, has seen a remarkable surge in Holocaust memorialization, it is unsurprising that writing a book on German victims represented a seminal moment for Ulrich Merten’s own biography. This is evident in his preface and repeated protests (perhaps too many?) that he is not attempting to argue that the expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe was in any way comparable to the Holocaust. Despite its good intentions, however, the book repeats a number of problematic claims regarding the nature of these expulsions. Although Merten points out that the expulsions happened for various reasons, including revenge and settling old scores (pp. 3–4), he repeatedly places the Holocaust and the expulsions in direct relation to each other. This feels like a throwback to older debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s which came close to creating an equivalence between these two events. The book could have been much clearer on the differences of victimhood between the Holocaust and the German expulsions. Both Jews and Germans were placed in camps; both Jews and Germans were put on trains and deported from their homelands. But this is where the similarities end. The majority of German expellees and refugees walked into promising futures in East and West Germany: for expellees in East Germany, the first decades after the war brought the end...

A Cultural Shift in the 1970s

This essay explores how an international project between socialist nations unraveled transnationally. I explain the cultural shift toward taboo topics in the 1970s and argue that the shift was forced by two factors: first, the rise of a new generation of youngsters unaffected by World War II, and second the relative ease of transnational mobility. Starting in 1972, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia allowed citizens to travel more freely in a project called the “borders of friendship.” Exploring changes in the representations of World War II and what was later to be called the Holocaust in literature; in the celebration of rock music and film; and at international happenings, I argue that teenagers starting in the 1970s were raised with an increased sense of acceptance not only of their history but also their state. Critically, however, they also gained a greater sense of ideological irony: just as it became more acceptable to discuss taboo topics like Stalinization or the expulsion of Germans, so too was their understanding that deviations from strict ideology were more accepted.

Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses*

In German Cold War anti-communist discourses, the image of the Red Army as a “horde of rapists” worked as a strategy of exclusion in the construction of a national identity based on “Western values.” This paper analyzes the ideological dimension of the stereotypes of raped women and constructions of masculinity in two emblematic texts about the flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe, and an anti-communist American propaganda novel. The mass rapes of German women in the context of World War II were signified as the result of “Asian barbarism” and communism. The instrumentalization of wartime rapes, by demonizing the Soviet Union, fostered the two pillars of foreign policy in the Federal Republic: European integration and the transatlantic alliance.

The Economic Integration of Forced Migrants: Evidence for Post‐War Germany

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyse the economic integration of these migrants and their offspring in West Germany. A quarter century after displacement, first-generation migrants still tend to fare worse economically. Displaced agricultural workers, however, exhibit higher incomes than comparable natives, as displacement caused large-scale transitions out of low-paid agriculture. Differences in economic outcomes of second-generation migrants resemble those of the first generation.

Zum Verhältnis von Heimatverlust und Neubeginn in frühen Romanen über Flucht und Vertreibung

This article looks at early West German novels that depict flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II. It is already in the 1950s that German literature takes up on East German home loss; especially authors originating from the Eastern parts make flight and expulsion subject of their works. How then do those novels reflect the radical change – as a beginning, as an ending? What did 1945 mean to those Germans who had to flee their homes beyond Oder and Neisse? – The end of German culture in Eastern Europe? The final surrender of their homelands? And how could the expellees restart their life in the Western parts? The article interlaces these questions with the texts’ narrative time structures. Most of the novels focus on the process of flight and expulsion and skip the arrival and integration in the West. Thus, the novels attest the uncertainty inherent in the new beginning. The article argues that the authors do not narrate the ending of the transition because in the 1950s for them it has not ended yet. It investigates three representative novels: Engel, Menschen und Dämonen (1951) by Hanna Stephan, Die schlesische Barmherzigkeit (1950) by Ruth Hoffmann and Ein Abschied (1951) by Karl Borree.

Haunting the Borderlands: Graphic Novel Representations of the German Expulsion

Haunting the Borderlands: Graphic Novel Representations of the German Expulsion

The Economic Integration of Forced Migrants: Evidence for Post-War Germany

The flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe during and after World War II constitutes one of the largest forced population movements in history. We analyze the economic integration of these forced migrants and their offspring in West Germany. The empirical results suggest that even a quarter of a century after displacement, first generation migrants and native West Germans that were comparable before the war perform strikingly different. Migrants have substantially lower incomes and are less likely to own a house or to be self-employed. Displaced agricultural workers, however, have significantly higher incomes. This income gain can be explained by faster transitions out of low-paid agricultural work. Differences in the labor market performance of second generation migrants resemble those of the first generation. We also find that displacement considerably weakens the intergenerational transmission of human capital between fathers and children, especially at the lower tail of the skill distribution.

Twenty-first Century Memory Regimes in Germany and Poland: An Analysis of Elite Discourses and Public Opinion

One of the most important developments in the incipient Berlin Republic's memory regime has been the return of the memory of German suffering from the end and aftermath of World War II. Elite discourses about the bombing of German cities, the mass rape of German women by members of the Red Army, and, above all, the expulsion of Germans from then-Eastern Germany and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe have gained massive visibility in the last decade. Although many voices have lauded these developments as liberating, many others within Germany and especially in Poland—from where the vast majority of Germans were expelled—have reacted with fear. Yet, do these elite voices resonate with mass publics? Have these arguments had demonstrable effects on public opinion? This paper delves into these questions by looking at survey results from both countries. It finds that there has been a disjuncture between the criticisms of elites and average citizens, but that the barrage of elite criticisms leveled at German expellees and their initiatives now may be affecting mass attitudes in all cases.

Germans as Victims: Remembering the past in Contemporary Germany by Bill Niven

MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 905 to Paver) only partially successful narrative structures, in terms of what they 'do' rather thanwhat they 'say': Schlink inparticular iscriticized forhis undifferentiated presentation of social class, forhis assumption thathis 'generation' all share his edu catedmiddle-class perspective on theNazi past. The thirdchapter, on theother hand, which examines one work of 'documentary literature' (Helga Schubert's Judasfrauen) and two documentary films (Helke Sander's BeFreier und BeFreite and Ruth Beck ermann's Jenseits des Krieges), explores theways inwhich gender shapes post-war memory of theThird Reich. Paver contends that these female film-makers are essen tially trapped in a double bind, since their laudable attempts to replace the clichieof theauthoritative male voice-over with amore exploratory female perspective merely perpetuate thedistinction theyare seeking to subvert. The fourth chapter analyses the relationship between Marcel Beyer's Flughunde, Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes, and Volker Schlondorff's film adaptation of Tournier's novel (Der Unhold), comparing theirdepictions of an ambivalent hero and, inparticular, the implications ofusing different languages todescribe theNazi period. The finalchapter uses abroader discussion of theways in which memory has been con structed in the formerconcentration camps Mauthausen and Ebensee as the starting point for an analysis ofChristoph Ransmayr's novelMorbus Kitahara, which Paver reads as a (specificallyAustrian) 'critique of the culture of commemoration' (p. 122). This phrase could also be applied toPaver's perceptive study. If it is at times per haps a touch too brisk, if itdeliberately ignoresmany of the standard literary texts of the period, this is doubtless due to its remit as a guide to students of European cultural studies. At all times aware of its own methodological bias (the conclusion, for instance, usefully reminds us thatnot allGermanic literature isobsessed with the Third Reich), it fulfils this remit admirably, and will doubtless find itsway onto the standard reading-lists for theperiod. In taking a step back from the academic indus tryof 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung' and asking some basic methodological questions, Paver has produced a thought-provoking introduction to the critical issues of con temporary 'Gediichtniskultur'. UNIVERSITY OF KENT BEN HUTCHINSON Germans as Victims: Remembering thePast inContemporary Germany. Ed. by BILL NIVEN. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2oo6. iX + 292 pp. ?18.99. ISBN 978 1-4039-9043-3. This rich and fascinating collection gives a fresh and eminently readable overview of thememory politics which has made the years since unification so remarkable in Germany. Since the i960s Germans have been confronting the legacy of theThird Reich as a perpetrator collective. Arguably, however, since the I990S and especially since 2005, theHolocaust no longer takes centre stage in theGerman culture of memory, but rather theproblem ofGerman victimhood-from theAllied bombings ofGerman cities, or the rape ofGerman women, to the expulsions ofGermans from Eastern Europe after thewar. This volume seeks todeconstruct the idea that a signi ficant taboo was broken in 2002 with the controversial publication ofGunter Grass's ImKrebsgang (and to a lesser extentwithW G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur lec tures,published in I999), and todemonstrate instead that the topos ofvictimhood has been a constant, if largelyunrecognized, undercurrent of post-war German culture. An essay by thehistorian Robert G. Moeller sets the termsof the debate, focusing on the search for what might be termed 'a usable past': also the subtitle of his influ ential War Stories (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 200I)): a search which dominates this volume as a whole. A first section moves broadly chronologically: 906 Reviews Moeller contributes a second essay focusing on 'Victims inUniform' and analysing threeGerman war filmsof the I950s; Paul Cooke also focuses on film,but traces a trajectory from theearlyHeimatfilm through the critical impetus ofNew German Ci nema to 'a cinema of consensus' (p. 9I) as represented by Sonke Wortmann's football melodrama, Das Wunder von Bern (2003). Helmut Schmitz exposes German vic timhood as a subterranean agenda of theHistorikerstreit of the I98os and Bill Niven explores how theAllied bombing ofDresden has been figured in theart and literature of theGDR and on into thepresent. A cluster of essays then address what might be broadly termed a 'decentring' of theHolocaust discourse within public commemorative politics.With reference to re cently accessed files,Pertti Ahonen demonstrates how the killings at theBerlin...

“Die-Heimat, Verloren -.-”: “Vertreibungsliteratur” and the Younger Generation(s)

“Vertreibungsliteratur,” that is, literature dealing with the flight and expulsion of Germans from the former eastern provinces and other settlement areas at the end of World War II, has long led a shadowy existence on the fringe of post-war German literature, and––with a few notable exceptions––has until recently been studiously ignored or arbitrarily dismissed by main-stream literary scholars.1 Without going into too much detail here, the reasons were that putting an emphasis on German suffering, or injustices committed upon Germans, could be seen as relativising the overwhelming German war guilt:

Преодоленное Прошлое?: Третий Рейх в Современном Немецком Сознании

SUMMARY: Sixty years after the end of World War II, the Nazi past is still very present in the consciousness of German society. German models of remembrance, however, are changing. As the last generation of those who lived through the Third Reich passes away, new questions are being raised about the future meaning of its legacy. In this essay, Norbert Frei recalls the painful process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung , coming to terms with the past, which, after a decade of neglect in the 1950s, developed in West Germany from the early 1960s onwards. Reflecting on the Nazi past became an intrinsic feature of Germany’s political culture. While this era now comes to an end, Vergangenheitspolitik (policy of the past) still has a future. Parallel to – if not competing with – the global memory of the Holocaust, vivid recollections of Allied bombing, and the flight and expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe are regaining public salience. Driven by the protest generation of 1968, now rediscovering its war-time childhood, a readjustment of the German historical consciousness is under way.

Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe by Norman M. s> Naimark (review)

750 SEER, 8o, 4, 2002 setsout the RussianTable of Ranksand the thirdsurveysthe historyof AngloRussianrivalryin Persia.There is also an extensive and usefulbibliography. Department ofRussian andSlavonic Studies MALCOLMV.JONES University ofNottingham Naimark,Norman M. FiresofHatred. EthnicCleansing inTwentieth-Century Europe. HarvardUniversity Press,Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001. 248 pp. Notes. Index. Li6.95. AT the beginning of Nato's air campaign in Kosovo in March I999, a White House spokesmanwas askedin one of the innumerablebriefingsgiven during the war if atrocitiesagainst Kosovar Albanians had intensifiedsince the start of the bombing campaign. Could he confirm the reports of summary executions, the separation of men and women, the driving out of civilians from their homes? 'If you look at what is going on', the spokesmanadmitted to assembledjournalists,'you have what appearsto be a textbookdefinitionof ethnic cleansing.' A text book definition?Journalistspresent would have been hard-pressed to find one, even though they had been creditedwith coining the term. None existed. But they all knew what was implied: the mass killings, deportation, rape, internment and intimidation that characterized supposedly 'new-old' ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslaviaand world-wide in the I99Os. Used extensively,even by historiansinitiallysuspiciousof itsjournalisticorigins,the term was also applied inconsistentlyand arbitrarily often as a euphemism forgenocide, sometimes to describethe mildestformsof persecution. In thisambitious,comparativestudyof ethniccleansing,Norman M. Naimark , Professorof History at StanfordUniversity, seeks to give the term some much needed precision and legitimize its use as a tool for understandingthe extreme forms that state-buildinghas taken in Europe over the last hundred years. Contrary to the 'ancient hatreds' thesis popularized by Robert D. Kaplan and others,Naimarkseesethnic cleansingas a 'profoundlymodern experience' (p. 6) differentiated from religious and ethnic persecutions of previouscenturiesby the existence of a modern(izing)statewith an exclusivist brandof nationalismand an 'impetusto homogenize' (p. 8), an elite willingto carry this out and an infrastructureto back it up. He studies fives cases: the Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia; the Nazi persecution of the Jews; the Soviet deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tartars; the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia; and the wars of Yugoslavsuccession. His comparative approach has a three-fold purpose:to establish a typology of ethnic cleansing;to arrive empiricallyat a definition; and 'to underline the fact that ethnic cleansing has a terrifyingpotential for genocide'(p. 15). Naimarkisolatessixkeycharacteristicsof ethniccleansingwhich, to varying degrees, are common to all his case studies. First and foremost, ethnic cleansing involves violence, since people rarelyleave their homes voluntarily and have to be coerced to do so. Secondly, the cover for ethnic cleansing is invariablywar or its aftermath.Warleads to a habituation of killingand also provides the strategic rationale for uprooting populations. Thirdly, ethnic REVIEWS 75I cleansing has a 'totalistic quality' (p. I90), the aim being to remove all members of an alien groupwith few or no exceptions. Fourthly,and linkedto totality,ethnic cleansinginvolvesnot only the physicalremovalof populations but also the eradication of all traces of theirpresence: streetand town names are changed; books and archives burned; churches and monuments demolished . Fifthly, ethnic cleansing involves the widespread expropriation and theft of property of those who have supposedly grown wealthy off the exploitation of the majority.Finally, ethnic cleansing is 'inherentlymisogynistic ' (p. 195).Women are its primarytargetsnot only because they form the overwhelming majority of the civilian population in times of war but also because they are the 'biological core of nationality' (p. I95), which ethnic cleansing, particularlythroughsystematicrape, aimsto strikeat. Naimark arguesthat there is a crucial distinctionbetween ethnic cleansing and genocide, that is, between the intent to remove a population froma given territory and the intent to exterminate it. Yet he acknowledges that the distinction is often blurred when ethnic cleansing is genocidal in its results even if it not in its intent. That is why, Naimark argues, the cases of the Armeniansand theJews are so instructive.They show how easilywhat began as ethnic cleansingcan 'mutate'into genocide which itselfcan be 'asmuch the completion of a contingentprocessas a blueprintforaction' (p. 82). By making it clear from the outset that a distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide can and should be drawn, Naimark is able to successfully place the destruction of the Jews in a comparative framework without a hint of relativization. Nevertheless, calling the...