As the Second World War ended, ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Between twelve and fourteen million people moved into occupied Germany and Austria. Violence, hunger and exposure caused many deaths during the transfers.

The experience produced a contested body of expulsion literature concerned with guilt, victimhood and lost eastern homelands. Günter Grass's Danzig Trilogy and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood explored displacement while confronting the wider history of Nazism.