National Network for Equitable Library Service

Imagined Homes examines two migrations of similar groups of ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union during the Cold War period. One group came to Canada in the late 1940s and early, 1950s, the other went to West Germany in the early 1970s. Each group's process of integration into new urban environments was influenced by their different expectations. Those who came to Winnipeg, Canada, assumed they would be adapting to a foreign society and prepared to enter a new language and culture. By contrast, the immigrants to Bielefeld, Germany, believed they were "going home'' and expected their German heritage would ease assimilation. As Hans Werner shows in a cross-cultural comparative framework, the ways in which the two receiving societies perceived immigrants, and the degree to which secularization and the sexual and media revolutions influenced these perceptions, were of critical importance in the immigrant experience.