The ‘Cleansing’ of Culture in Germany’s Lost East after the Second World War

Abstract

Around the end of the of the 1970s, the combined influences of cultural anthropology, literary theory, social theory and new social and political movements produced a ‘cultural turn’ in historical scholarship in Europe, North America and elsewhere. This allowed a new form of ‘cultural history’ — interested less in art, literature and music and more in representations, symbols, language, constructs, perceptions, identities, everyday social practices and material culture — to emerge as the methodologically dominant approach to historical research.¹ Since the start of the cultural turn attempts have been made to reach a compromise between ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ approaches to history, for example by probing into the language and rhetoric of political activism.² One topic of contemporary history where a compromise between political and cultural perspectives seems particularly necessary is that of ethnic cleansing. This is because ‘cultural’ issues of identity and (self-) representation are integral elements of these political acts of violence, expulsion and rupture. Yet in certain respects the cultural character of ethnic cleansing has not been given much emphasis by the historians and social scientists who have studied this phenomenon.