Eagle Glassheim's study traces the recent history of Czech border regions. Until the end of the Second World War, these regions were inhabited predominantly by ethnic Germans. Following the war, Czechoslovakia's Germans were “cleansed” and their land resettled by Czechs, Slovaks, and Roma. Although forced migrations in Czechoslovakia have previously received a lot of scholarly attention, here the author has offered a new and original approach, focusing his research on the social and environmental dimensions of the problem. Glassheim analyzes how the expulsion of Germans destroyed traditional ties between the land and its inhabitants and, subsequently, how this led not only to the devastation of a cultural landscape, but also to the ecological catastrophe and acute social crisis of 1980s. This perspective, as Glassheim indicates in his afterword, reflects a western- communitarian critique grounded in US urban studies as well as his personal experience.
The book begins with two chapters that trace the deteriorating Czech-German relationship before 1945 and the subsequent postwar expulsion of Sudeten Germans. Consisting of almost one-third of the volume's total content, these chapters play an important role in the whole narrative, as they implicitly set up perspectives and dominant interpretations. There are two competing paradigms often used to explain what caused forced migrations in east central Europe in 20th century: the building of nation states at the expense of national minorities versus the contagious influence of social engineering implemented by totalitarian regimes. Glassheim seems inclined to embrace the first paradigm. While acknowledging that Nazi rule had a significant impact on the formulation of subsequent Czech plans to get rid of the German minority, the author offers little context to explain the post-war forced migrations in Czechoslovakia against the background of similar operations conducted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the war. In my opinion, the author underestimates wartime expulsions, and he is just plain wrong when he writes that “the scale and ambitions of the Czechoslovak and Polish transfers were unprecedented” (59). On the contrary, important precedents were set by Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin, who in 1939–1944 adopted mass-scale deportations as part of their larger ongoing political agendas, cleansing conquered lands of real and imagined racial, national, or class enemies. The Czechoslovak and Polish post-war population transfers cannot be fully understood without this context.
The next four chapters of the book deal with post-war developments in the resettled border regions of Czechoslovakia, and with the fates of German expellees in the German Democratic Republic and West Germany. Glassheim rightly presents both topics in parallel, and describes them as closely intertwined. Whereas in communist Czechoslovakia the former Sudetenland became the playground of ruthless industrialization and rapid social modernization designed to create productive, socialist citizens, in West Germany expellees were gradually integrated into a reemerging postwar civil society. Throughout the Czechoslovak borderlands, ethnic Czech, Slovak, and Roma settlers suffered, as Glassheim puts it, a long-lasting “Heimat deficit” (176), which had a devastating impact on their health and social conditions. Here, the author focuses on the case of Most, a historical town in north Bohemia which was completely destroyed and rebuilt at another location in order to facilitate the enlargement of postwar coal-mining operations. This case study marks the climax of Glassheim's study, and it is emblematic of failed industrialization plans that eventually devolved into environmental catastrophe. Although the communists surely bore the main responsibility for this dystopia, it may be properly noted that north Bohemia was already notorious for endemic economic and social crisis in the 1930s.
Glassheim also shows how, after an initial cold reception in West Germany, the Sudeten expellees managed to overcome their traumatic experiences, owing to a large extent to strong emotional ties with their lost “Heimat.” Ironically, the memory of their roots (even though they were located in an inaccessible communist country behind the Iron Curtain) helped transplanted Sudeten expellees to find their place in the new, democratic German society. Over time, their revisionist political programs toned down, giving way to a calmer nostalgia.
The concept of rootedness, which in the language of sociology may be also called social cohesion, plays a central role in Glassheim's study. It explains both successful and failed integration of people who experienced forced migrations. Such an approach may be useful for analyzing other cases, especially in the Polish territories gained and lost during the war.
