Picking at an old sore
Berlin Sixty years on, the Germans seem determined to reopen the argument over what happened when millions of them were driven out of Central Europe in 1945. Perhaps the Germans feel that they have listened enough since the war to tales about how horrible they were to everyone else and now they want to turn the tables. At any rate, following what seemed like a minor row between the Czech prime minister on an electioneering roll and the Austrian and German government, the Germans are now determined - with their usual grim thoroughness - to take the argument one step further and open a ,,Centre for Expulsion", whose aim would be to study the various bouts of ethnic cleansing which have afflicted Europe and the world in general, but especially the expulsion of some 15 million Germans after the war.
Created in September 2000, the Centre is demanding that the federal government give it a building. 300 towns and communes have already made donations. No doubt for internal German political reasons, moreover, the Association of German Expellees, run by a woman called Erika Steinbach and usually considered a very conservative movement, has become popular even among Social Democrats. One of these is the veteran Social Democrat, Peter Glotz, who is now the co-president (with Steinbach) of the new centre. Glotz explained his own sudden interest in expulsions and in his own family roots in Bohemia: ,,As a young man, I lost my identity. Expelled from Bohemia to Bavaria, I tried to adjust to Bavaria. I even tried to do this with my accent and spoke as if I had been born in Fürstenfeldbruck. In the course of the decades, this has changed. I became more and more interested in the history of my family and of my ethnic group (Volksgruppe)."
Glotz goes on to say that expulsion is a problem all over the world and that the new Centre must study expulsions of Germans as well as those of other peoples. Glotz explicitly says that he now rejects the old left-wing view, which dominated progressive thinking throughout the years of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, that the Germans should take the expulsion as an inevitable result of the things which Hitler did to other peoples. ,,This was wrong,"he now says. ,,It was unjust to expel the Germans collectively. To say that between 1968 and 1995 was almost impossible. If you did, you were branded right-wing."But that was then and now is now, it seems. Asked about Kosovo, Glotz says it is unjust for the Albanians to have chased out the Serbs simply because the Serbs chased out the Albanians previously. Glotz also dismissed vehemently the Czech prime minister's defence of the Benes( decrees which post facto legalised the expropriations of Germans. Glotz says, ,,This are quite unacceptable statements which have damaged the chances of the Czech republic to enter the European Union."( Mr. Glotz evidently thinks that the future of the Czech republic lies in his or in Germany's hands.) Other prominent people who support the Centre are Rolf Breuer, the head of the Deutsche Bank and Peter Scholl-Latour, the veteran journalist. It is currently seeking 6.5 million euros for its first grant. [Die Welt, 31st March 2002]
Indeed, the whole question of expulsions has exploded in the German press with the suddenness that one associated with a subject long suppressed for political reasons. The fashionable left-wing weekly Der Spiegel put a picture of German refugees in 1945 on its front cover and carried long articles about massacres committed against Germans in Central and Eastern Europe during and after the war. One newspaper carried an enthusiastic article about how even the Poles were now talking openly about expulsion - the clear implication was that they were far more open-minded than the obstinate Czechs.
Apparently there is also to be European Centre for the Study of Expulsion, this time in Wroclaw, the former Breslau and capital of Silesia. The advantage of this ,,European"one over the German one which Glotz advocates is that it will be apparently more even-handed. However, the German Association for Expellees is behind this project too. It has decided that it would be far better to put the centre in Wroclaw rather than in Berlin - perhaps because Breslau was indeed entirely ,,cleansed"of Germans after 1945 and their houses occupied instead by a load of Poles from around Lvov, which became part of the Ukraine. The project is not entirely uncontroversial, however. The Socialist newspaper Trybuna has attacked the proposed Centre as a revanchist project; the liberal Rzespospolita, however, has said that Wroclaw would be an ideal place to house the institute. [Thomas Roser, Frankfurter Rundschau, 28th March 2002]
European Intelligence Digest, April 4 th 2002