Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Andrew Port

“The leftist-dominated media,” the (now former) head of the Christian Social Party (CSU) in the Bavarian town of Zorneding angrily declared, are suggesting that a “military-service refugee” (i.e., a deserter) from Eritrea was comparable to a German expelled from his or her home (Heimat) after World War II. To their credit, local church and CSU leaders condemned this recent “ejaculation (Erguss),” in the words of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. That reaction, as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s highly contested liberal policy toward refugees, have a venerable tradition in conservative German circles, as this talk on German reactions to three earlier refugee crises, all the result of genocidal policies – in Cambodia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in Bosnia and Rwanda a decade later – will show. Based on a wide variety of published sources, unpublished archival documents, and oral history interviews, it focuses on the role that memories of recent German history – not just of World War II and the Holocaust, but also the mass expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe after 1945 – played in shaping German political, humanitarian, and discursive reactions to the plight of these refugees.