7 - Persistent Postwar Interconnections

Summary

Many interwar connections among German communities, as well as many that were much older, persisted into the postwar era as well.These continued to influence and inform people’s actions and fates. If Europe saw the greatest forced migration in human history, Germans’ migrations were not limited to Europe and many postwar migrations followed older patterns.Moreover, while a great many German communities were shattered by the war and the subsequent population transfers, in many cases older relationships were rehabilitated and older networks and connections persisted.Moreover, many people’s postwar actions mirrored prewar patterns.There was, for example, even more mobility, even more mixing in the postwar German nation-states, and a great many immigrants and refugees arriving in these states were German plus other things. Postwar and post-unification German history, like the periods before it, are aggregate histories made by Germans whose multiple subject positions have been defined outside as much as inside of the German nation-state.