exiles, emigrants, and remigrants

Those who returned to Germany after being driven out by the Nazis are an inseparable part of the story of democratic reconstruction in West Germany. Yet, there has been no systematic investigation of this group of people and the history of their influence. It is not even clear who can be counted as remigrants. Are they only those people and groups who had kept a close watch on Germany in their years of exile, waiting for the first opportunity to return? Or should one also consider those who temporarily returned to Germany, who came as members of the occupying forces but contributed to reeducation and the country's reorganization along constitutional lines?

This group could also include so-called cultural multipliers, especially the scholars who came individually as guest professors and played a part in helping the Federal Republic rejoin the international community. Because their expulsion from Germany after 1933 virtually wiped out German cultural life, the remigrants' reversal of the “brain drain” was of particular significance. The emigrants had made a large contribution to the leading position claimed by American scholarship since the 1930s. The blending of theoretically oriented and philosophically based traditions brought from Europe with American pragmatism qualified the former refugee intellectuals as interlocutors and interpreters between former compatriots and their liberators after 1945.