Resisting Change: Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and ‘Sudeten German’ Identity in West Germany after the Second World War

Abstract

This article examines the interface between the expellee experience and völkischnationalist literature in Germany between 1945 and ca. 1960, concentrating particularly on Kolbenheyer and the Sudeten Germans. In this context, postwar Germany highlights a number of angles from which to approach 'culture in transit'. I will consider völkisch-nationalist responses to temporal cultural transition in the 1950s. During this decade, Germans gradually moved away from the values and customs of a society socialised by the Nazis towards a liberal, democratic culture that sought to integrate the disparate elements left in the debris after the Second World War. I will also discuss the geographic movement of culture with the refugees from the Czech territories. I finally suggest that Sudeten German culture and identity were transformed by the experience of transit itself after 1945.