Those memories relate to what the museum Director Neil MacGregor has called “the biggest forced migration in Europe’s history.” That migration, the ‘Vertreibung’ of 1945-47 saw millions of ethnic Germans from areas such as Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Sudetenland (seceded to neighbour countries at the end of the war) being uprooted from their homes, relocated, and made to live amongst the ruins of post-war Germany.

Whole trainloads of these refugees, between 12 and 14 million of them, were transported across a much diminished Germany and deposited on regional towns and cities. In most cases local residents were forced to give up rooms in their houses to these unwelcome visitors, and many of the newcomers remained with their hosts, as deeply resented ‘guests’, for years, until Germany’s economic recovery was sufficient to breathe back new vigour into their lives.

In many cases these populations never supported the German side in the war, and their only crime was in speaking the German language. Says MacGregor: “It’s as though in 1945 the entire population of Canada and Australia had been forcibly settled in Britain. It’s certainly the biggest forced migration in Europe’s history, possibly in all history.”

So deep was the trauma of this migration, so deep the resentment of the migrants, that numbers of residents of German towns and villages still feel unwanted today, and some original residents still discriminate between true locals and war-time incomers.

So why bring all this out now? Well, only an outsider institution like the British Museum would be able to consider this as worthy subject matter to be included in a major exhibition. Frankly, most Germans don’t like to dwell on it, seeing the migration as part of the punishment for losing the war, and overwhelmed by the shame at behaving so badly towards the rest of Europe in general, and the Jews in particular, during the conflict.

But there is another factor at work in the timing: the generation that was translocated all those decades ago is disappearing fast, and those that remain have started to open up about their memories and experience of their war years. For many of their children and grandchildren it is virtually the first time they’ve heard their parents and grandparents speak about it, and of course they are sitting up and paying attention.

The British Museum’s Germany: Memories of a Nation opens 16^th October. BBC Radio Four is running a 30 part-series with the same title, and presented by Neil MacGregor, starting from September 30^th.

On the eve of the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent reunification of Germany, there is still a striking difference between the western side of the country and the east.

I’ve just made consecutive trips, one to Görlitz, right over the far eastern corner, where Germany bumps up against Poland and the Czech Republic. And one to the Rhine/Main region, the heart of the busiest, most commercially-thrusting district of Germany. And what a contrast; the former rural, rustic, comparatively empty, occasionally derelict. The latter a heaving, bustling, rat-race – with traffic jams and overcrowded trains.

It was the Görlitz trip that was the more interesting. The train journey across from Dresden was largely rural, although it had clearly once been far less so; trackside factories and freight yards had virtually disappeared under new undergrowth. There seemed to be a lot of Schrebergärten, those glorified garden kingdoms where everyone has his own little country cottage cum garden shed.

The train itself was short, whilst the stations had clearly been built for something far larger. At Görlitz it barely occupied a third of platform 11 – and platforms 1 to 10 were empty. Outside, the town’s main street – Berlinerstrasse – looked like a Sunday morning, although it was a Wednesday afternoon. The population here has shrunk from 90,000 before reunification, to 56,000 today, and the elderly had that resting facial expression that exudes disapproval, one that can be all too common in Germany. It wasn’t until I’d been in the town a day or so that I began to meet the younger, more thrusting citizens who were making things happen, and they were mainly outsiders, from other parts of Germany.

Görlitz is particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is beautifully preserved and restored, with some 4,000 listed buildings in Gothic and Renaissance style, which has made it a mecca for film directors (the Book Thief and Grand Budapest Hotel about to be released). And secondly it incorporates the Polish town of Zgorzelec on the other side of the river, into one ‘Europstadt’. Before the war, of course, this was all one place, in the province of Silesia, but the border was moved.

Interestingly, the outlook on life on either side is rather different. The German mayor has acknowledged that Görlitz has had a very difficult last 25 years; the Polish mayor says it has been a boom time for his burgeoning town, benefiting from the proximity of a far richer neighbour.

So it is all a matter of perspective. Certainly wages are less in Görlitz – 25 percent less than the German average – but so are prices; I struggled to find a main dish for more than €10 in the restaurants, and the market was full of Poles, selling economy fruit and vegetables.

All in all it was a fascinating place to visit, although maybe not such an easy place to live.

www.goerlitz.de/en/

A little, battered milk jug – chipped, abraded and certainly no thing of beauty – is the only remainder of my family’s secret history. Such treasured items exist in virtually every household across a country that has long ignored the fact that more than 25 percent of all Germans are descendants of victims of forced migration.  I am one of them.

Shortly after World War Two an astonishing 12 million displaced people arrived in West Germany and the Soviet sector. They came from Upper and Lower Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, from the Black Sea, the Carpathians, Galicia and many other regions. Although ethnically German, many no longer even spoke the language, nevertheless their belongings, their heritage was packed up in a few handcarts, suitcases and photo albums and they were forced to return to a ‘motherland’ that many had never seen before. Scattered all over the country and forcibly accommodated in houses belonging to locals, they were not always welcome.  So they knuckled down and, in many cases, learnt to simply never mention their old life, their old homeland ever again.

When I was little, my grandmother looked after me while my mother was at work. Not once did she mention her long and arduous train journey in a cattle truck through icy landscapes with four small children. Nor the 12 years of accommodation in one room with no running water and just a little oven for heating and cooking. She never talked about Silesia, her house, her husband or her relatives. She had a funny accent, yes, but I knew not to ask. The subject was also never mentioned at school.

Now, however, I have children of my own. The Berlin wall came down in 1989, the Cold War is over and the new generation is looking for explanations, new ways of exploring history. A history that doesn’t hurt them because they didn’t witness it. And suddenly, the floodgates are opening. Günter Grass started the literary exploration of these vulnerable times with his novella Crabwalk about the sinking of a refugee ship, and passed the baton on to the younger generation, among them Julia Franck, whose novel The Dark Side of the Heart explores the fate of her grandmother, a refugee who abandons her eight-year-old son at the first station in West Germany.

At last uninhibited grandchildren are asking the dwindling number of contemporary witnesses to relate their stories, to write them down or to journey back to their old homes, before they die. Family holidays to Poland or to the Czech Republic are opening up new ties with the East. Personally, I have discovered an infinite number of second cousins in Poland, and now I want to know more.

Several specialist tour operators make German history the focus of their itineraries.