Peter Gatrell’s The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present is a tour de force, bringing together personal accounts of the fears, suffering and hopes of those on the move across postwar Europe. It also provides an incisive analysis of the factors that drove mass migration to and within Europe.
‘Every major development in postwar Europe is connected to migration’, Gatrell writes. ‘Think of the recovery and reconstruction of the continent in the aftermath of world war, the closer alignment of states that formed the economic community and then the European Union; the creation of a rival political bloc in Easter Europe; the shedding of Europe’s overseas empires and the legacy of colonial rule; the collapse of communism and the redrawing of the map of Europe.’
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There are many reasons for people moving across borders. Migrants’ stories differ dramatically. For some, migration is a terrible heart-wrenching ordeal. For others, it is an opportunity, full of hope. ‘Many made a permanent home in a strange land and raised families; their children and grandchildren put down roots’, Gatrell writes. This ‘opportunity migration’, as Gatrell calls it, was central to Europe’s postwar history. Cahit, a Turkish man, describes his feelings of hope when he travelled to West Germany in 1964: ‘As I looked out of the window of the train, noticing that we were crossing the border from Turkey into Bulgaria, I thought, I will return in five to 10 years a millionaire.’ However, many have been forced to move against their will. And others have fled persecution and war, or moved out of economic necessity.
‘Not everything can be written as a history of progress, and not all these instances of loosening of ties that bound people to particular places of origin were beneficial’, Gatrell warns. This is illustrated most starkly in the involuntary movement of an estimated 17million people across Europe in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. And it really was involuntary. As Gatrell explains, at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Allied powers agreed to ‘mass population expulsions’ as part of their ‘orchestrated programme to create ethnically more uniform nation-states’. In total, 10million ethnic Germans were forcibly moved from Eastern Europe – mainly Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania – to the divided state of Germany. Some were only given minutes to pack. More than half-a-million Hungarians were expelled from Czechoslovakia. ‘Other expulsions and deportations, affecting Poles, Ukrainians, Karelians, Turks and others, were accompanied by the expropriation of land and other assets’, Gatrell writes. Canadian historian Modris Eksteins, whose own Latvian family were forced to flee their home country, captures the tumult well: ‘Never had so many people been on the move at once. Prisoners of war, slave labourers, concentration-camp survivors, ex-soldiers, Germans expelled from Eastern Europe, and refugees who had fled the Russian advance… A frenzy.’
