"The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria 1945 to 1954" is an objective book and that is why the reading of this extremely interesting study creates a feeling of sadness, but at the same time a conviction that it is still possible to alleviate the grief of the numerous refugees in Austria, provided properly co-ordinated assistance is offered. The resultant feeling of sadness, which is most acute, is due to the characteristic of this book in which facts and figures are given in a purely scientific and sober manner, thus driving home the truly horrible human folly that was at the bottom of two world wars. Millions of people were turned from house and home, people for whom the very notion of "native country" has become a lata morgana. As flotsam and jetsam they have drifted to lands and places where they are not at all or barely welcome, and where, on the whole, they cannot find a permanent and humane existence. This thorough study which is averse to sentimentality cannot fail to make a deep impression on the reader. Allowance is made for the difficult position in which Austria found herself after the first world war, and especially after the second; it is granted that nevertheless much has been done for the refugees there. Further it cannot be ignored that various official and private agencies have contributed greatly to lighten the burden of the refugees.

In the aftermath of World War II, twelve million German expellees lost their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The overwhelming majority came to occupied Germany. However, expellees found themselves also stranded in Western Europe, Africa and the Americas, which is often overlooked by researchers and the public. Going beyond the standard narratives of flight, vigilante evictions and transfers, this book follows expellees in West Germany and Canada and shows, for example, how German prisoners-of-war, exilees or immigrants experienced the expulsions in distant Canada. As the author illustrates making extensive use of oral histories, their experiences were an integral part of the multi-faceted expellee story even though they were physically absent from their homes. Juxtaposing the record of two countries with disparate public discourses on immigration, the author also reveals how in both countries expellees eventually adopted national identities which, based on their ethno-regional heritage, reflected their experience of extreme nationalism, war and expulsion as well as the initially difficult settlement into a new political, social and cultural environment.

The oppression of minorities has been a theme in the history of Europe. It has been a cause of dispute over territory, often resulting in war. With nation states demanding undivided loyalty of its citizens, there has been discrimination and racism, which has often led to persecution, at its most extreme in the Nazi crusade against the Jews. This is a history of European minority communities. It deals with the dispersed minorities, the Jews and the gypsies, as well as the muslims of the Balkans and the diaspora of Germans in eastern Europe from the Middle Ages to 1945. Almost all countries have disadvantaged ethnic and linguistic minorities; whether minorities without their own states, such as the Breton, Scots, Vlachs and Kurds; or those such as the Russians in Estonia or the Greeks in Turkey, who form linguistic groups different from the native majorities. During wars the existence of alien communities often led to persecution, in turn bringing huge refugee migrations. The result has been the resettlement of European populations. Since World War II the demand for cheap labour has led to an influx of immigrants from outside Europe. This followed a wave in which workers from the poor Mediterranean countries travelled north to industrial heartlands. Although all EEC countries now operate strict controls on immigrants, there is pressure from the east, following the fall of Communism, and from the Third World, where birth rates outstrip that of Europe. The existence of this pressure is a determinant of Europe's history in the 21st century.

The present volume traces the history of German settlement through a series of essays designed to cover each period and to analyse specific aspects.

Austria 1867-1955 connects the political history of German-speaking provinces of the Habsburg Empire before 1914 (Vienna and the Alpine Lands) with the history of the Austrian Republic that emerged in 1918. John W. Boyer presents the case of modern Austria as a fascinating example of democratic nation-building. The construction of an Austrian political nation began in 1867 under Habsburg Imperial auspices, with the German-speaking bourgeois Liberals defining the concept of a political people (Volk) and giving that Volk a constitution and a liberal legal and parliamentary order to protect their rights against the Crown. The decades that followed saw the administrative and judicial institutions of the Liberal state solidified, but in the 1880s and 1890s the membership of the Volk exploded to include new social and economic strata from the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes. Ethnic identity was not the final structuring principle of everyday politics, as it was in the Czech lands. Rather social class, occupational culture, and religion became more prominent variables in the sortition of civic interests, exemplified by the emergence of two great ideological parties, Christian Socialism and Social Democracy in Vienna in the 1890s. The war crisis of 1914/1918 exploded the Empire, with the Crown self-destructing in the face of military defeat, chronic domestic unrest, and bitter national partisanship. But this crisis also accelerated the emergence of new structures of democratic self-governance in the German-speaking Austrian lands, enshrined in the republican Constitution of 1920. Initial attempts to make this new project of democratic nation-building work failed in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the catastrophe of the 1938 Nazi occupation. After 1945 the surviving legatees of the Revolution of 1918 reassembled under the four-power Allied occupation, which fashioned a shared political culture which proved sufficiently flexible to accommodate intense partisanship, resulting, by the 1970s, in a successful republican system, organized under the aegis of elite democratic and corporatist negotiating structures, in which the Catholics and Socialists learned to embrace the skills of collective but shared self-governance.