The Volksdeutsche and victimhood

This thesis looks into the politics of memory surrounding the German expulsion of 1944-1948, through an analysis of three autobiographies of ethnic Germans who were labelled as Volksdeutsche. These three authors emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and published their autobiographical accounts in the late 1990s and beginning of the 2000s. The three autobiographies were Valley of the shadow (1997) by Erich Anton Helfert, Barefoot in the Rubble (1998) by Elizabeth B. Walter and Casualty of War. A Childhood Remembered (2002) by Luisa Lang Owen. The two female authors, Elizabeth Walter and Luisa Owen were expelled from Yugoslavia in this period, while Anton Helfert was expelled from Sudetenland. In this research, the research question is the following: with respect to the three Volksdeutsche narratives of the German expulsion of 1944-1948; how did the authors use the ambivalent term Volksdeutsche in order to negotiate the dominant discourse of the United States in the 1990s concerning ethnic German perpetrators before and during the Second World War? Here, the term Volksdeutsche referred to the term which was put on ethnic Germans in central and Eastern Europe as a label by Nazi Germany, this was done for political reasons. This term is fluid, and the meaning of the term changes over time. In order to answer this research question, both the context of narration and the context of justification is elaborated on. The context of narration concerns the historical events discussed in the autobiographies. The context of justification is the context which influenced the authors when they published their autobiographies. In both the context of justification as the context of narration the term Volksdeutsche can be allotted to perpetrators of the Second World War and victims of the period after the Second World War. Within the dominant discourse of the United States in the 1990s however, these Volksdeutsche are put into connection to Nazi Germany and are seen as perpetrators. The authors try to use this ambivalent meaning of Volksdeutsche in both contexts in order to negotiate an alternative subject position within the dominant discourse. The authors do this in their narratives by deconstructing the notion that the Volksdeutsche were collaborating with Nazi Germany, establishing that they were innocent during the Second World War and comparing their suffering with the Jewish victims of the Second World War. Furthermore, their focus of having been targeted because of their ethnicity served to connect their sufferings to events concerning ethnic cleansing in the 1990s.