Border Looking: The Cold War Visuality of the Sudeten German Expellees and its Afterlife

After their expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1945–6, the Sudeten Germans continued to revisit the (West) German‐Czech(oslovak) border, a dividing line now about to undergo institutional dissolution within the expanded European Union. Until 1987, their different groups contributed to building what became a chain of pilgrimage sites located along the Iron Curtain and visited well into the present. Closely related to the so‐called ‘Blick in die Heimat’, the environment of these borderland shrines has produced a complex visual regime that I have dubbed ‘border looking’. Within this system, as I demonstrate, the Sudeten German visuality oscillates not only between a re‐appropriating revisionist gaze and a cursory furtive, fragmented glimpse acknowledging the irrevocability of loss, but also between the ‘gaze into the homeland’ and the ‘image of the homeland’. My examination of this condition is intended to be both a contribution to a cultural history of the Cold War and a study of the expellee subjectivity. It allows us to raise questions about the effectiveness of memory inscribed on a geographical margin at a juncture when initiatives advocating a centre to commemorate the expulsion of Germans (‘Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen’) are being countered by pleas for de‐centred, regional remembrance. Hier kannst du die Heimat , die Heimat seh’n ! 1