"Rebuilding the West" will open 60 years after the end of the 2nd World War. It connects post-war industrial history and the history of refugees and expellees and provides new insights into both. On the one hand it will interpret industrial history as migrant history by concentrating on the quantitative (in terms of the workforce) and qualitative (introducing new industries, modernising industrial structures and importing new technologies) contributions of migrants towards economic recovery and the economic miracle in the West. On the other hand it will fill a vital gap in the history of refugees and expellees by giving them a history and a place in post-war Germany: What did refugees and expellees contribute to post-war economy? What was their impact on the main North-Rhine Westphalian industries? Where did they instigate changes and make a difference? Where did they leave their mark economically and culturally? How did they integrate themselves into post-war West German society?

“Rebuilding the West” will also test new methods of transmitting both industrial and migrant history by presenting migrant history through the eyes and voices of migrants. This will take place on two levels.

Firstly, the exhibition will start not by looking at the migrants through the eyes of the locals, with a typical post-war scenario of bombed cities whose problems are aggravated by the influx of millions of newcomers needing to be fed and housed. Visitors to “Rebuilding the West” will “accompany” the refugees and expellees on their way to the West, and “relive” some of their experiences.

Secondly, large parts of the history of economic and social reconstruction will be told by those who were involved in it. This means that the narrative of the exhibition will be heavily informed by a biographical approach.

The exhibition will start by highlighting the situation in Germany before the refugees and expellees arrived and show why they were forced to come here. Visitors will be able to find out more about the history of the former German regions and areas of settlement in East Europe, the ethnic problems and conflicts in these regions before 1945 and the pre-history of the post-war expulsions. After that visitors will embark on a symbolic journey to the West by entering a tunnel leading to the exhibition building.

Once they have “arrived” the visitors will be confronted with the two different sorts of “welcome” experienced by the actual refugees. On the one hand solidarity and help. On the other, rejection and discrimination.

From here the exhibition moves on to deal with the actual “rebuilding of the West”, highlighting the expellees’ and refugees’ contribution to the post-war economy in North-Rhine Westphalia. It will cover those industries which employed the overwhelming majority of the refugees and expellees: coal and steel, building, glass, textiles, clothing and machine making.

Finally the exhibition will be looking for any residual traces left by the influx of refugees and expellees, as well as at different ways of remembering the past and coping with the present. It will present a number of cooperative projects between refugees and expellees with the inhabitants of their regions of origin, highlighting the relationships which have developed in the last few years and decades and the unifying force of modern forms of regionalism. In some of the regions which have been disputed for centuries by German and Slavonic inhabitants an increasing number of people from both sides have come to consider the region in question as belonging to and shaped by all its inhabitants, past and present.

"Rebuilding the West" will be shown in the headquarters of the Westphalian Industrial Museum, the Zollern II/IV colliery in Dortmund, between September 2005 and March 2006. The Westphalian Industrial Museum was founded in 1979 by the regional authority, the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, to preserve and restore a number of outstanding industrial monuments and make them accessible to the general public as museums. It is a decentralised museum consisting of eight different industrial sites representing the major industries of Westphalia and documenting the history of a heavily industrialised region and its inhabitants.