Member of Parliament Erika Steinbach (CDU) in her office

European refugees are once again at the center of identity politics in Germany and Eastern Europe. More than 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 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 climbed 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 violations 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 still unbuilt 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.

Or return to Part 1 of the article.

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