The German Exodus

[gamavor]

The German Exodus

 

DEBATE OVER COMMEMORATION OF MILLIONS EXPELLED FROM LOST TERRITORIES

 

Le Monde diplomatique

March 2004

 

By Brigitte PДtzold

 

Should there be a centre to commemorate the Germans expelled from

Czechoslovakia and Poland after the second world war? And if this

buried collective memory is to be revived, where should the centre be

located - in Berlin, Wroclaw, Geneva, Strasbourg or Stockholm? There

is nothing accidental about this debate, which has been the focus of

German public opinion for some time now; 60 years on, Germany wants to

normalise its relations, particu larly with its East European

neighbours who will join the European Union in May.

 

For years Germans seemed paralysed by their sufferings under

bombardment and during the exodus towards the end of the war and

after. Now, with the third and fourth generations to be born since

then and with the deaths of so many witnesses to the events, the

silence has been broken. Writers have taken the lead in the

debate. GЭnter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, was

the first to break the taboo. He is a native of Danzig, a keen Social

Democrat and close companion of Willy Brandt, and unlikely to minimise

Nazi crimes (1). He dealt with the exodus in Crabwalk (2), the story

of the vessel Wilhelm Gustloff, which was torpedoed by a Soviet

submarine on 30 January 1945; 9,000 refugees fleeing the Red Army died

in the icy Baltic.

 

Does this book mark a change of heart by Grass, who has always been

convinced that the lost territories were the price Germany had to pay

for starting two world wars? Not really. Grass blames himself for not

tackling German sufferings earlier and says: "We should never have let

the right make the subject its own. People of my generation had a duty

to speak out." The book has sold 400,000 copies in weeks.

 

JЖrg Friedrich's The Fire (3), which has had a similar shock effect,

is about the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne 1943-45, the

Allies' war of fire in which 161 towns were razed and some 600,000

people killed. Friedrich, a historian who has written about German

army crimes in Russia, now brings to the public a subject previously

covered only in specialist publications. This story of the sufferings

of ordinary people produced an amazing response from readers.

 

Young writers are also interested in the past and its last surviving

witnesses. Tanja DЭckers, 36, unwittingly chose the same subject as

Grass for a novel (4). The discovery of old letters in an attic led

her to question her uncle and aunt, who narrowly escaped the Wilhelm

Gustloff disaster. Other young authors - Christoph Amend, Stephan

Wackwitz, Reinhard Jirgl and Olaf MЭller - seek their material in the

German past, their grand parents' experiences during the war, the

exodus and the lost territories.

 

Hilke Lorenz, 41, interviewed war children (5). "The people I knew

didn't talk about the war. It wasn't the done thing. Pity was out." So

she decided to get survivors to talk about air-raids, their fears in

underground shelters, the rape of mothers or sisters (which sometimes

they witnessed helplessly), the loss of their parents. It is hard to

talk about these things: what are their sufferings compared with those

inflicted by the "nation of butchers"?

 

This is the background to the debate about a centre to commemorate the

Germans expelled at the end of the war. Its location has caused

controversy. A proposal for a German centre in Berlin was made by

Erika Steinbach, joint president, with Social Democrat Peter Glotz, of

the Expellees' Union and author of a history of her native Sudetenland

and the exodus.

 

Another proposal, for a European centre in Wroclaw in Poland, came

from Markus Meckel, Social Democrat member of the Bundestag and

foreign minister in the last government of the German Democratic

Republic. Supporters of this project, launched in July 2003, include

the Nobel Prize winners Grass and Imre Kertesz.

 

Steinbach launched her project in February 2000, when she had just

been elected president of the Union. She set up a foundation for a

centre against expulsion, to collect funds to build a centre in the

capital. At first all went well. The president, Johannes Rau, and the

minister of the interior, Otto Schily, whose parents had been

expelled, appeared to support it, and Chancellor Gerhard SchrЖder and

foreign minister Joschka Fischer were not against it.

 

It was officially adopted for debate but there were many hostile

reactions, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic. A caricature

photomontage appeared in the Polish magazine, Wprost, showing

Steinbach in SS uniform, astride Chancellor SchrЖder, who was depicted

as a sheep. The commentary read: "The Germans owe the Poles a billion

dollars in compensation for the crimes committed during the second

world war." This made it seem as if the Poles still feared German

revanchism, as though the good relations based on post-war

reconciliation might collapse. Politicians criticised the

project. "Chauvinism is now the order of the day in Germany," said

former foreign minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, and his contemporary

counterpart, Bronislaw Geremek, considered that the Berlin project

would not contribute to reconciliation but foment hatred.

 

In the Czech Republic the Sudeten question still poisons the political

atmosphere. History has left painful memories here. As Prime Minister

Milos Zeman pointed out, the first expulsion was that of the Czechs by

Germans after the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland in October 1938 and

Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939; he has described the Sudeten

Germans as Hitler's fifth column. The violence is well-remembered,

too, from the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May 1942 and

the reprisal massacre at the village of Lidice on 10 June 1942, to the

expulsion of most Germans from the region in 1945-46.

 

In 1991 President Vaclav Havel apologised, on behalf of his people,

for massacres of Germans during the expulsion, and even suggested that

former inhabitants of the Sudetenland might apply for Czech

nationality to reclaim their lost properties. This gesture of

reconciliation seems to belong to another age. The present Czech

government will not repeal Edvard Benes's 1945 decrees, which provided

the legal basis for the expulsion of three million Germans accused of

collective collaboration with the Nazi regime and the confiscation of

their property. Surveys suggest that public opinion is against any

such move. In this context it is not surprising that the plan for a

centre in Berlin has been opposed on the initiative of academics Hans

Henning and Eva Hahn, who have collected Czech, Polish and German

signatures.

Faced with the obvious distrust of Germany's eastern neighbours,

Marcus Meckel launched his resolutely European project in July

2003. He has the support of the Polish president, Aleksander

Kwasniewski, son of an expatriate, the former Czech president, Vaclav

Havel, two Polish politicians Bartoszewski and Geremek, and Czech

politicians, including former prime minister and current president of

the senate, Petr Pithart, deputy prime minister Petr Mares, and Tomas

Kafka, co-director of the Joint Czech-German fund.

 

Adam Michnik, editor-in-chief of the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, is

among the strongest advocates of Wroclaw as the location; it is at the

junction of two expulsions, of the Germans and of the Poles from Lvov

in Ukraine. Former Czech president Havel may be in favour of

establishing the centre at Wroclaw but his successor, Vaclav Klaus,

would prefer neutral Stockholm.

 

For Meckel the location is not important. What he wants is to set it

in a European context and persuade the future members of Europe to

regard expulsion, forced migration and deportation as a violation of

human rights. Democrats such as Winston Churchill and Franklin

Roosevelt may have thought it acceptable to uproot whole peoples to

establish ethnically homogenous communities and achieve a stable

peace, but the sufferings of civilian populations and the rise of

nationalist movements since prove that they were wrong.

 

In this context, the Germans are entitled to recognition of their

sufferings. This in no way lessens their responsibility for the war

and for genocide. The object is not to record of the number of victims

on either side but to alert nations to their duty of transnational,

non-selective commemor ation, with due respect to their

differences. As Otto Schily suggests, the centre against expulsion

should not be a museum or a court of law but a living history workshop

for future Europeans.

 

According to Peter Glotz, to offset one crime against another, even in

the name of collective responsibility, is to return to the law of an

eye for an eye. He is prepared to give way on the question of

location, as long as work on the centre starts: "If we have to give up

the idea of Berlin so be it. But we don't need to go to Srebrenica or

Stockholm." For him the most urgent task is education, starting with

an exhibition in 2005 in the historical museum in Bonn on the 20th

century, the century of expulsion, from the exile of the Armenians all

the way to Kosovo in 1999, taking in the Sudeten Germans. Meckel is in

a hurry. He does not want to wait for governments, or Europe, to

decide on a centre whose location and funding are problematic; he

wants to set up a European network against expulsion, with seminars,

conferences, history workshops, competitions and bursaries.

So the debate is still open. The Polish writer Stefan Chwin points out

that there is a difference between his mother, who was expelled by the

Nazis, and the Germans expelled from Danzig/ Gdansk by the Poles: the

difference between the aggressor and the victim of aggression. (GЭnter

Grass has never forgotten this.) But it does not alter for either the

pain of being exiled from home.

 

 

Brigitte PДtzold is a journalist

 

NOTES

 

(1) Der Brand, PropylДen-Verlag, Berlin, 2002.

 

(2) HimmelskЖrper, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin, 2003.

 

(3) Kriegskinder, List Verlag, Munich, 2003.

 

(4) Die Vertreibung. BЖhmen als LehrstЭck, Ullstein Verlag, 2003.

 

(5) Reproduced in Der Spiegel, Berlin, 22 September 2003.

 

Translated by Barbara Wilson

 

http://mondediplo.com/2004/03/14germany

 

 

PS: As a side note, the very same Edward Benesh (1884-1948) President of Chekhoslovakia was a Jew and an active member of “Ian Amos Komenski” N1 Masonic louge in Prague. Were the Sudeten Germans expeled from Czech Republic in any way affiliated with Nazis. I doubted.

 

There are many more dirty deeds contemplated against Germans and I hope they won't be left in oblivion.