This dissertation examines how the German expellees have represented and commemorated their experiences of World War II and its aftermath in the form of local monuments. More specifically, it presents a critical, interpretive analysis to investigate the historical narratives articulated by these vitally important, yet overlooked memorials. Erected in every decade following the war, more than one thousand local expellee monuments dot the landscapes of every Bundesland in reunited Germany, are located in small numbers throughout the former "German East", and can be found as far away as the USA and Africa. Drawing its material from the monuments' individual elements—their forms, inscriptions, iconographies, locations, initiators—this study also explores the commemorative ceremonies held at the monuments, which bring these objects to life.

Fusing historical, art-historical, sociological, and cultural-anthropological approaches, I contend that the monuments make profound statements about their initiators' understandings of the past and disprove the notion that German wartime suffering has been unmentionable or was not permitted in the postwar era. Moreover, while expellee activists suggest that the local monuments construct innocuous, parallel narratives which augment prevailing Holocaust-centered narratives, this dissertation demonstrates the ways monuments dedicated "to our dead"—that is, to German victims of the expulsion rather than to the victims of the Nazis—obfuscate strict perpetrator/victim binaries and contest official memories of the war. In fact, I argue that expellee organizations have used the monuments to shape postwar discussions of victimization by constructing one-sided, de-contextualized narratives of German suffering based on the loss of Heimat (homeland) and on assertions of collective innocence.

This dissertation is the first all-encompassing exploration of expellee monuments. The multifaceted approach it employs contextualizes and categorizes thematically the methods and motifs chosen to represent the fates of the roughly 12 million Germans forced to resettle at the end of and after WWII and casts new light on this under-analyzed aspect of German postwar memory culture. Thus, the study contributes to larger debates over German wartime suffering and to the enduring discussions over "coming to terms with the past" in twenty-first century Germany.