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GERMANY'S HISTORY PROBLEM
e-politik.de
http://www.e-politik.de/lese n/artikel/2008/germany%E2%80%99s-history-problem-p art-2/
Sept 17 2008
Germany
Member of Parliament Erika Steinbach (CDU) in her officeEuropean
refugees are once again at the center of identity politics in Germany
and Eastern Europe. Sixty years after the Second World War ended, the
construction of a museum in Berlin for the victims of twentieth century
"expulsions" - including an estimated 15 million ethnic Germans -
is testing what it means for Germans to see themselves as victims and
for postwar Germany to be at peace with their neighbors. Part 2. By
Amanda Rivkin, special to /e-politik.de/
Erika Steinbach leads an organization whose youngest members
were children when they were expelled from their homes across
Eastern Europe. More than sixty years after the fact, they are now
elderly. Many have passed. When Steinbach became head of the Federation
of the Expelled at the age of 52 following a succession of elderly men,
she brought new life and youthful energy into a stodgy postwar German
organization that many see as no longer relevant in the post-Cold
War world. Given the very mortality of her organization, Steinbach
has turned her efforts as head of the Federation of the Expelled
toward the most German of activities: the construction of a museum
to human suffering.
The Center Against Expulsions, as Steinbach has named the museum she
seeks to build, is something she will define only in the broadest
terms. In her office last September, Steinbach said the Berlin Center
Against Expulsions would serve as a place "to document twentieth
century expulsions in Europe". She has lobbied the Bundestag,
prominent German-Jewish leaders and attempted to woo her moderately
opposed critics in neighboring Poland.
She secured funding and support for a pilot exhibition in Berlin in
2006, curated by Wilfried Rogasch. The entrance was a black and white
space containing a borderless map of Europe that spread across the
floor and climbs up the walls like tentacles: Iberian, Scandinavian,
Anatolian. The exhibition catalogue featured historical objects from
twentieth century Europe's most significant genocides.
Prominent among those was the postwar population transfer - or
expulsion - of German civilians from Eastern Europe. The exhibit
garnered more than 1,000 pages of reviews and critiques in German
and international news media. Rogasch keeps a stack of print-outs
waist-high on a chair in the study of his spacious and sparsely
decorated West Berlin flat.
He told me in his living room that he built his exhibit around "the
unfortunate ideas which caused a lot of harm and violence" in the
last century. The artifacts in the catalogue included instruments of
Ottoman Turkish crimes to Serbian ones. "It's very obvious that 1933
happened before 1945", Rogasch said.
Most of the German academics and historians I spoke with said Rogasch's
exhibit was an inoffensive account of twentieth century Europe's most
significant racist crimes. The accoutrements of Hitler's effort to
wipe out the Jews and others including the Poles figured prominently
with no distortion, they argued. Many prominent German academics said
the exhibit was remarkable for how unremarkable it was.
Even with the inclusion of two of the most hotly disputed events of
the past century, the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of ethnic
Germans from Eastern Europe, the academics and historians I met in
Germany said they anticipated much more controversy. But the expulsion
of German civilians in the postwar period was more that just part of
the exhibition; it was the occasion for the exhibit.
Should mass atrocities be isolated, or should large-scale human rights
violation be examined comparatively? Over the course of my travels
in both Germany and Poland last fall, I quickly learned the answer
to this question depended on which side of the border I was on.
The divide between victor and victim is acute across Germany's eastern
border in Poland, which lost every city but Krakow to Nazi and Allied
bombings. After the Second World War, communist authorities rewrote
the Polish future and the Polish past. They chose a system based on
lies, personality cults and distortions. Soviet crimes from the war
years were rewritten as Nazi atrocities, like the massacre at Katyn
where Polish officers and civilians were murdered wholesale in the
forest twenty kilometers west of Smolensk.
The obsession with Erika Steinbach in the Polish media may be a means
of reclaiming a history of wrongs, distortion and manipulation. Her
Polish critics argue that Steinbach picks and chooses her expulsions
in order to make Eastern Europe's ethnic Germans look good and places
little emphasis on Polish suffering at German hands. More extreme
critics argue that she is the last person who should discuss Polish
suffering as the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer.
When I met Steinbach in her office this past September, she crafted her
proposal like a sculptor, meticulously employing the language of the
new Europe to define her vision for the Center Against Expulsions. At
the end of our hour together, she politely but hurriedly excused
herself and left with an aide to what she described as a "commemoration
ceremony" at the Armenian Embassy, victims of a genocide the Turkish
government denies ever having occurred.
Historian Alfred de Zayas, the most prolific writer on the expulsions
in the English language, has suggested Soviet troops played an active,
participatory role in the murder of Eastern Europe's ethnic German
civilians. He sits on the board of Steinbach's unfulfilled Center
Against Expulsions alongside prominent German Jewish intellectual
Julius Schoeps.
"She has great legs!" De Zayas exclaimed over the phone from his
home in Geneva when I asked him about Steinbach in late 2007. He
also boasted of her stellar human rights credentials, citing his own
time working for the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights
in Geneva.
e-politik.de
http://www.e-politik.de/lese n/artikel/2008/germany%E2%80%99s-history-problem-p art-2/
Sept 17 2008
Germany
Member of Parliament Erika Steinbach (CDU) in her officeEuropean
refugees are once again at the center of identity politics in Germany
and Eastern Europe. Sixty years after the Second World War ended, the
construction of a museum in Berlin for the victims of twentieth century
"expulsions" - including an estimated 15 million ethnic Germans -
is testing what it means for Germans to see themselves as victims and
for postwar Germany to be at peace with their neighbors. Part 2. By
Amanda Rivkin, special to /e-politik.de/
Erika Steinbach leads an organization whose youngest members
were children when they were expelled from their homes across
Eastern Europe. More than sixty years after the fact, they are now
elderly. Many have passed. When Steinbach became head of the Federation
of the Expelled at the age of 52 following a succession of elderly men,
she brought new life and youthful energy into a stodgy postwar German
organization that many see as no longer relevant in the post-Cold
War world. Given the very mortality of her organization, Steinbach
has turned her efforts as head of the Federation of the Expelled
toward the most German of activities: the construction of a museum
to human suffering.
The Center Against Expulsions, as Steinbach has named the museum she
seeks to build, is something she will define only in the broadest
terms. In her office last September, Steinbach said the Berlin Center
Against Expulsions would serve as a place "to document twentieth
century expulsions in Europe". She has lobbied the Bundestag,
prominent German-Jewish leaders and attempted to woo her moderately
opposed critics in neighboring Poland.
She secured funding and support for a pilot exhibition in Berlin in
2006, curated by Wilfried Rogasch. The entrance was a black and white
space containing a borderless map of Europe that spread across the
floor and climbs up the walls like tentacles: Iberian, Scandinavian,
Anatolian. The exhibition catalogue featured historical objects from
twentieth century Europe's most significant genocides.
Prominent among those was the postwar population transfer - or
expulsion - of German civilians from Eastern Europe. The exhibit
garnered more than 1,000 pages of reviews and critiques in German
and international news media. Rogasch keeps a stack of print-outs
waist-high on a chair in the study of his spacious and sparsely
decorated West Berlin flat.
He told me in his living room that he built his exhibit around "the
unfortunate ideas which caused a lot of harm and violence" in the
last century. The artifacts in the catalogue included instruments of
Ottoman Turkish crimes to Serbian ones. "It's very obvious that 1933
happened before 1945", Rogasch said.
Most of the German academics and historians I spoke with said Rogasch's
exhibit was an inoffensive account of twentieth century Europe's most
significant racist crimes. The accoutrements of Hitler's effort to
wipe out the Jews and others including the Poles figured prominently
with no distortion, they argued. Many prominent German academics said
the exhibit was remarkable for how unremarkable it was.
Even with the inclusion of two of the most hotly disputed events of
the past century, the Armenian genocide and the expulsion of ethnic
Germans from Eastern Europe, the academics and historians I met in
Germany said they anticipated much more controversy. But the expulsion
of German civilians in the postwar period was more that just part of
the exhibition; it was the occasion for the exhibit.
Should mass atrocities be isolated, or should large-scale human rights
violation be examined comparatively? Over the course of my travels
in both Germany and Poland last fall, I quickly learned the answer
to this question depended on which side of the border I was on.
The divide between victor and victim is acute across Germany's eastern
border in Poland, which lost every city but Krakow to Nazi and Allied
bombings. After the Second World War, communist authorities rewrote
the Polish future and the Polish past. They chose a system based on
lies, personality cults and distortions. Soviet crimes from the war
years were rewritten as Nazi atrocities, like the massacre at Katyn
where Polish officers and civilians were murdered wholesale in the
forest twenty kilometers west of Smolensk.
The obsession with Erika Steinbach in the Polish media may be a means
of reclaiming a history of wrongs, distortion and manipulation. Her
Polish critics argue that Steinbach picks and chooses her expulsions
in order to make Eastern Europe's ethnic Germans look good and places
little emphasis on Polish suffering at German hands. More extreme
critics argue that she is the last person who should discuss Polish
suffering as the daughter of a Wehrmacht officer.
When I met Steinbach in her office this past September, she crafted her
proposal like a sculptor, meticulously employing the language of the
new Europe to define her vision for the Center Against Expulsions. At
the end of our hour together, she politely but hurriedly excused
herself and left with an aide to what she described as a "commemoration
ceremony" at the Armenian Embassy, victims of a genocide the Turkish
government denies ever having occurred.
Historian Alfred de Zayas, the most prolific writer on the expulsions
in the English language, has suggested Soviet troops played an active,
participatory role in the murder of Eastern Europe's ethnic German
civilians. He sits on the board of Steinbach's unfulfilled Center
Against Expulsions alongside prominent German Jewish intellectual
Julius Schoeps.
"She has great legs!" De Zayas exclaimed over the phone from his
home in Geneva when I asked him about Steinbach in late 2007. He
also boasted of her stellar human rights credentials, citing his own
time working for the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights
in Geneva.