Identyfikacja narodowa młodych „późnych wysiedleńców” z Polski w Niemczech
The National Identification of Young Emigrants (Aussiedler) from Poland in Germany

Summary/Abstract: Young emigrants (Aussiedler) from Poland are people who had spent their childhood in Poland and then were ‘‘uprooted from their hitherto environment and planted into a new German one’’. It is also others who decided for them about changing their citizenship into German. Other objective factors (school, family, friends, state authorities) also induced those fremde Mitbürger to adopt an appropriate attitude as a consequence of the assumed German citizenship. This ‘‘quasi-coercion’’ of migration is connected here with the issue of ‘‘second generation’’ migrants. A biographical turning point and the resulting lack of continuity, unsettled ‘‘normality’’, uprootedness and double loyalty might lead to problems with handling everyday life, and disrupt the process of forming one’s identity – a sense of group belonging, the national group included. The primary aim of the study based on narrative biographical interviews with the expulsed – students from Bayreuth – was to answer the question why young emigrants from Poland exhibit a particular type of national identification – Polish, German, double, a yet different one, which one? What decides that in the last instance, when asked to complete the sentence ‘‘I am...’’ they give this and no other answer? What factors come into play here?

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