PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This article explores life stories of members of German-speaking minorities in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Forced to leave their homes, they stayed in Austria after the war. The methodology thereby used is based on the narrato-logically inspired analysis of oral history interviews, all of which were conducted between 2012 and 2015. Thereby, the author sheds light on what interviewees had to tell about their manifold experiences of political violence more than 65 years after the end of the war. First, the article briefly introduces the political situation and living conditions before, during and after migration. The author then shows that - contrary to narratives established by expellee organizations - their life stories were not exclusively dominated by self-identifications as victims. On the contrary, they also contained narrations of perpetratorship and complicity with National Socialist mass violence.