[Homecoming Amid Ruins: Returnees in the Early Years of the GDR—Between Hope, Discipline, and Downfall]

The reasons why exiles chose to return to the GDR after 1945 varied. There were those who had worked against National Socialism even in exile, who had often longed for a return and were now eager to build a new Germany. But their experiences differed; the so-called Western emigrants had different experiences than those who had witnessed Stalinist terror firsthand in the Soviet Union. The political conflicts of the Weimar Republic also continued to smolder among the returnees.

Some were denied permission to return.

A few Jewish returnees came because they had found no means of subsistence abroad, or because they felt, despite everything, that they belonged to German culture. Many of them left the GDR after signs of a new anti-Semitism became impossible to overlook in the shadow of the Slansky trial, the Rajk trial, and the so-called Doctors’ Plot in the Soviet Union. Most of the communists among the Jewish returnees stayed; despite everything, they felt committed to the project of building a socialist society.

Some were crushed by the contradictory realities of the GDR; others were very successful in their careers; a few rose through the ranks; many practiced silence and repression, withdrew from public life, or were pushed out. Quite a few also felt compelled to flee the GDR in the years that followed, even though there was no place for them to go. The lecture uses case studies to examine the diverse strategies of those who had returned full of hope for the future and whose knowledge and worldly experience—whose “grace, passion, and intellect”—were, or could have been, part of the GDR’s wealth.