In several waves during the eighteenth century about 150,000 German peasants embarked down the Danube River from Swabia to reclaim marshland recently reconquered from the Ottoman Turks by the Habsburg Monarchy. Nearly two centuries later their descendants fled and were expelled back into Austria and Germany in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of that same region from 1941 to 1944. When they first arrived in Germany they self-identified as Yugoslavian-, Hungarian- and Romanian-Germans, according to the national states formed by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon governing the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By 1967, however, they had adopted a unitary identity as Danube Swabians in their homeland of West Germany. This dissertation explores the evolution of this identity through four phases in an effort to understand how this group consciousness formed. The first phase began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when "Swabian" settlers from various German principalities traveled down the Danube and settled in Habsburg lands as imperial subjects. The second phase occurred after the post-World War I collapse of Austria-Hungary when status as a national minority conferred political advantages in the successor states of Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania during the interwar years. The third phase witnessed the widespread adoption of National Socialism and the interruption of this national development via the flight and expulsion of the ethnic German populations across eastern Europe as a result of the Second World War. The main focus of this study examines the fourth phase as these three post-Trianon ethnic German subgroups recovered from their reverse migration to the Federal Republic.

During this post-1945 phase, the group that would become known as the Danube Swabians employed various terms to identify themselves, while also having a separate terminology applied to them by the government of West Germany. These expellees did not develop a unitary group consciousness until the 1960s, when they set aside their post-Trianon identities in order to establish institutions that would preserve their cultural heritage. The first of these, the Haus der Donauschwaben in Sindelfingen, along with events such as the "Tag der Donauschwaben" and international fundraising efforts that encouraged a greater sense of cooperation between the separate groups catalyzed the development of a common identity. This identity remains firmly established today as the Danube Swabians continue to transfer their heritage to subsequent generations through a number of institutions. In analyzing the development of this collective consciousness, my dissertation restores the importance of self-perception among smaller displaced ethnic subgroups.