GERMAN REFUGEE EXHIBIT BREACHES EUROPEAN TABOO

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Monsters and Critics.com, UK
Aug. 10, 2006

Berlin – A new exhibit by ethnic Germans expelled from eastern Europe
after World War II carefully avoids giving greater prominence to
German refugee experiences than to the suffering of other groups
driven from their homes by the Nazis earlier in the war.

The federation of expellees, the BdV, was warned in advance that
portraying Germans as victims would breach one of history’s most
sensitive taboos. So the controversial show seeks to put the fates
of the ejected Germans into the context of a wider European drama
of expulsions.

The professionally curated show looks at European history from
a standpoint of the expulsions, refugee treks and genocide that
devastated Armenians, Jews, Bosnian Muslims and other societies.

Housed in 600 square metres of the Kronprinzenpalais museum on Berlin’s
Unter den Linden avenue, it picks a range of examples from the Armenian
genocide of 1915-17 to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of former Yugoslavia.

A link is drawn to the persecution that caused huge numbers of
European Jews to flee after the 1933 Nazi takeover in Germany. The
exhibit quotes Israeli historian, Moshe Zimmermann, who calls this
dispossession a ‘building block of the Holocaust.’

BdV president Erika Steinbach says the show does not portray the
Holocaust as such, because that is incomparably separate.

In any case, not even expulsions can be fairly compared to one another,
says exhibition curator Wilfried Rogasch. Each was uniquely wrong,
distinct from the one that preceded it.

Entitled ‘Forced Routes, Expulsions in the 20th Century,’ the
exhibition seeks to place a personal touch on history, telling of
the lifelong psychological traumas of those who lost their homes.

Emotion, it suggests, is an unavoidable part of the story.

Items on display include the ship’s bell of the Wilhelm Gustloff,
a passenger ship sunk in 1945 by the Soviet military, causing 9,000
fleeing German refugees on board to drown in the Baltic Sea.

Ultimately, 14 million Germans forced out of the region by about 1950,
often by decrees that gave them the choice to leave or starve.

A toy car once clutched by a Greek boy as he was expelled from northern
Cyprus witnesses to a child’s sense of loss.

The curators say they wanted to avoid placing each refugee’s suffering
in a scales to compare, and simply to suggest that each misdeed was
an assault on humanity collectively. Eminent German scholars and
writers were consulted during the show’s making.

In eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and the Czech Republic,
there is deep disquiet over the exhibition, starting with the fact
that it is being put on in Berlin, once Adolf Hitler’s capital,
rather than in the refugees’ former home, eastern Europe.

The BdV set up a foundation headed by Steinbach to create
the exhibition, with the ultimate aim of integrating it into a
documentation centre as a permanent memorial to expulsions. She has
stubbornly defended the plan despite angry protests in Poland.

The exhibition runs to October 29.

On the other side of the street, the federally funded Germany
History Museum is showing another exhibition touching on the refugee
experience: how the millions of uprooted and hungry people were
integrated into West German society after the war.