Struggling Identities: Hungarian-German Expellees and Their Return to Hungary

By the end of World War II a total of about 12 Million ethnic Germans were forced to move from central and eastern Europe to allied-occupied Germany and Austria. A region that was also affected by these forced migrations was Hungary. As recent research estimates up to 180.000 people belonging to the German minority in Hungary had to leave the country as a result of planned resettlement operations in the years between 1946 and 1948. Even though the great majority of the expelled Germans expressed a desire to return to their original homeland in the aftermath, only a small proportion actually did. Hungarian historian Ágnes Tóth estimates that even before the founding of the two German states in 1949 up to 10.000 Hungarian-German expellees returned to their home towns. Next to personal and material losses the returnees had to face a completely altered society once they were back. In this sense the socialist idea did not only have great influence on the personal lives of the so-called “hazatértek” but also on traditional roles, concepts and values. This in particular refers to their understanding of employment which was put in question by expropriation and collectivization: the replacement of small scale farming by agricultural production cooperatives inverted social roles. By referring to oral histories with Hungarian-German returnees the contribution aims to delineate the personal struggles forced migration and return induced individually.