The German Exodus

DEBATE OVER COMMEMORATION OF MILLIONS EXPELLED FROM LOST TERRITORIES

Le Monde diplomatique
March 2004

By Brigitte Pätzold

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. Günter 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.

Jörg 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 Dückers, 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 Müller – 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 Schröder 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 Schröder, 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. (Günter
Grass has never forgotten this.) But it does not alter for either the
pain of being exiled from home.

Brigitte Pätzold is a journalist

NOTES

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

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

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

(4) Die Vertreibung. Böhmen als Lehrstück, Ullstein Verlag, 2003.

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

Translated by Barbara Wilson