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Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, ed., Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016).
On its list of expulsions of European peoples in the twentieth century, the official website of the Foundation Center Against Expulsions lists Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Jews, Germans (of course), Poles, Greek Cypriots, and Chechens amongst a long list of other ethnic groups and nationalities who were forced to leave their homelands during the "age of extremes."1 In all these cases, the survivors of these experiences share with the German victims of flight and expulsion, "the loss of homeland including the loss of all personal property, the experience of re-establishing oneself in a new environment, families torn apart, and physical and psychological damage that lasts a lifetime." Strikingly absent from the listings compiled by the organization that initiated the commemorative space and documentation center in Berlin dedicated to the German expellees are the roughly one million French repatriates-known by the moniker Pieds-Noirs (black feet)-who fled North Africa under duress during and after the Algerian War of Independence that concluded in 1962.
As all the contributors to the pioneering new edited volume Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar Germany and France: Comparative Perspectives make clear, these two groups have very much in common. While the circumstances that precipitated their forced migrations are clearly different, the policies promulgated in West German and France, the efforts to establish lobby groups to influence the respective governments, and the forms of commemoration they have employed have indeed been very similar. The editors of this collection of essays are upfront about the other key differences, which they spell out in their introductory essay. They list four convincing examples: the dissimilarity in the quantities of migrants (German expellees far outnumbered the French repatriates), the historical contexts of the forced migration (whereas the...