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 3. By Amanda Rivkin, special to /e-politik.de/

Steinbach might be more marginal in Germany than Poles would believe, but she is not without support. Fellow Christian Democrats and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are supporting the idea. The Bundestag’s current parliamentary coalition agreement even has a one-line provision acknowledging the need for “a visible sign” of remembrance in Berlin. But nobody knows quite how to interpret “a visible sign”. Many on the left hope it is a provision that can be stalled until the conservatives are out of power.

Steinbach’s original concept, a museum located near the Daniel Libeskind-designed Museum of the German Jews in central Berlin, led critics to charge that its close proximity to a museum about the Holocaust was wholly inappropriate. Such a center, they said, would place the expellees’ trauma on par with the extermination of at least six million people. Steinbach bowed to critics. She has since done her best to move past the earlier controversies.

In the German capital, where monuments to twentieth century atrocities overwhelm the landscape, Steinbach’s proposed Center Against Expulsions would likely suffer its biggest trauma by going largely unnoticed in a place where the proliferation of such monuments makes them all obsolete. “If we cannot remember our own victims”, Steinbach asked towards the end of our time together, “how are we expected to feel sympathy for a Polish or Czech citizen?”

While Steinbach might not be pursuing decades-old land claims in Silesia and Pomerania, lands once part of prewar unified Germany, Rudi Pawelka, a regional leader of a Silesian nationalist organization, Landsmannschaft Schlesien, is spearheading a case against the Polish government. Under the auspices of the Prussians Claims Trust, Pawelka is suing the Polish government at the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg seeking the return of homes once owned by ethnic Germans before 1939. He stands to gain nothing materially from a victory because as he told me, his father was a poor craftsman who never owned the Silesian house Pawelka grew up in.

Pawelka, a tall, sandy-haired man, said he is seeking fair compensation for the violation of human rights on behalf of the expellees he represents. His case, he said, is about human rights and a shared European future. Pawelka argued his case for my microphone for close to two hours in a community hall for ethnic German expellees in Düsseldorf. Like Steinbach, he was fluent in the language of the new Europe as much as any Brussels bureaucrat.

“There are no awards for the states that have expelled”, Pawelka said when we met on a rainy day last fall. “Even Jewish people who were German also did not get back their properties [in Poland].”

While many of Pawelka’s critics on both sides of the German-Polish divide say Pawelka thinks of 1945 as year zero, I became convinced he is preoccupied with a world that once existed before 1939 but no longer does. He did not see the transformative nature of the Second World War and questioned why Germans and Poles could not be neighbors and friends, despite his own personal distaste for the Poles. He repeated what one hears occasionally about Poles from Germans and how anti-Semitic and backwards they are as a people. He was a boy when the event, the catastrophic expulsion took place, but he described the events with great passion and a sense of righteous indignation.

He pointed to a Jewish friend, an ally, as Steinbach had done, whom I could call (my subsequent phone calls went unanswered), who would explain the wrong that had been done to Pawelka and the other expellees. One got the sense that this was all a terrible revenge plot against the Poles or as one Der Spiegel staff writer Hans Michael-Kloth told me in reference to Pawelka: “Some people enjoy holding a match under the Poles.”

Steinbach does not agree with Pawelka. “Human destinies are ignored by only looking at the properties”, Steinbach said in her Bundestag office last fall. But she added that “legally speaking, it’s identical” to the law suits Jewish groups have brought against German companies who profited from the Holocaust.

In the late 1990s, Steinbach advocated for reparations from the German government for the German expellees she represents. If distributed, reparations would have cost Germany’s federal government billions of Euros. Rather than seek compensation from Poland and the victims of Nazi Germany’s aggressions, the way Pawelka has done, Steinbach turned to Germany’s national treasury to dole out compensation for historical wrongs.

But since she first kicked the idea around in the 1990s, Steinbach has distanced herself from this position and set her sights on the creation of a Center Against Expulsions. Pawelka, possibly her fiercest critic on the right, argues Steinbach has betrayed the very people she represents. “She almost went to court in 1999. Today she doesn’t mention it, she doesn’t know it”, Pawelka said last fall.

Or return to Part 2 of the article.

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