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

The Federation of the Expelled is also unprepared – or unwilling – to confront its past. In 2006, a nearly six-month long Der Spiegel investigation into the membership of the Federation of the Expelled before 1982 uncovered evidence that nearly one-third of the organization’s high ranking members were Nazi party members. While Steinbach was not head of the Federation of the Expelled before the late 1990s, questions linger as to why this information did not surface sooner in the way that is has at nearly every single German company and organization. The co-authors of the story, Klaus Wiegrefe and Hans Michael Kloth, said the organization served as a place that both hid and helped reintegrate more than just your average, run of the mill Nazis. Kloth said over lunch near the Der Spiegel offices in Hamburg that the Federation of the Expelled in its early days was filled with “quite important Nazis.”

The Polish press follows Pawelka’s political power plays carefully whereas the German press seldom reports on Steinbach. Pawelka is almost universally believed to be fighting a losing battle, and therefore makes for a great quixotic nationalist in the newspapers. Everyone from Adam Michnik, the one-time Polish dissident jailed for four years under communism who is now editor-in-chief of the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, to Markus Meckel, Steinbach’s strongest parliamentary critic in the German Bundestag, used the word “idiotic” to describe Pawelka’s endeavor to seemingly reconquer German land.

Steinbach opposed Poland’s NATO membership and accession to the European Union in 2004. In part for these reasons, Steinbach may very well be public enemy number one in Poland. The debate surrounding the Center Against Expulsions and Erika Steinbach is more often a monologue, a resounding and feverishly emotional nie!

One of the few Polish intellectuals moderately open to the idea is Adam Krzeminski. He traveled to Berlin for the opening of Rogasch’s exhibit, a friend who Rogasch called “a Polish spy” for attending.

“She [Steinbach] is the daughter of an occupation officer,” Krzeminski reminded me first thing when we met at a café in central Warsaw.

“You cannot place the Holocaust on the same level as any of these other expulsions.” If the Center Against Expulsions goes forward, Krzeminski added, Steinbach should step aside. Krzeminski must realize that without Steinbach’s fierce determination, the proposal to build the Center Against Expulsions would likely not go very far.

Hans Ulrich Klose, an opposition Social Democrat (SPD) Member of Parliament and head of the foreign relations committee, has a childhood story of expulsion much like Erika Steinbach. Klose’s father was not a Nazi party member like Steinbach’s father, but his family was uprooted from their home in Breslau (the present-day Polish city of Wrócław) to make way for Polish people being transferred from the one-time Polish city of Lwów, now in Western Ukraine.

“My god what would I do with a few square meters in Silesia?” Klose asked, referring to the southwestern Polish region where he was born. “I would try to get rid of it as soon as possible.” Klose probably speaks for the majority of those who could be called expellees and who do not belong to any expellee organizations or social clubs and have never felt the need.

Steinbach has publicly disagreed with Pawelka’s Prussians Claims Trust. But in 2003, Steinbach undermined her own efforts when she told members of the Polish press at a conference in Warsaw, “I feel expelled.” The nearly three hour-long encounter with the Polish media was later rebroadcast in its entirety on Polish television during primetime that night. One German journalist, Thomas Urban, who has spent the last 20 years in Warsaw reporting on the region for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, said he had never seen his colleagues as emotional as during their encounter with Frau Steinbach.

“People I have known for twenty years were sitting beside me shouting, ‘She’s lying! I know she is lying!’” Urban said. With most Germans under 25 now too young to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, Steinbach’s proposal comes at a curious juncture in Germany’s historical conscience after the Second World War. Steinbach does not believe that she is trying to move her country away from the forces of collective guilt. Whereas younger Germans may be ready to look towards a day when German history is not treated exclusively with the weight of responsibility for madness and murder, Poles are considerably less excited.

As a group, the expellees missed the half century long forced experiment in Soviet-inspired socialism. To many left to endure the nearly half century behind the Iron Curtain, the expellees can be considered the lucky ones. Countless individuals in communist Eastern Europe sought to uncover evidence of German ancestors in order to obtain West German passports.

Nineteen eighty-nine opened a new page in German history. But in Poland, history appears to have begun anew in 1989. Last fall, Adam Michnik, the former Polish dissident turned newspaper editor, asked me over coffee in his Warsaw office if I had ever been to Hiroshima. “One day, it will be impossible to tell from the monument whether the Japanese were the victims or the aggressors,” he said.

The following weekend, I was driving through eastern Poland and towns like Bełżec, the site of a former Nazi death factory, and Tomaszow Lubelski, a one-time “shtetl” until the Jews were taken away to the camps. I found it hard to imagine a past that has been so cleanly stamped over. Train tracks ran past the entrance to the memorial site in Bełżec and an exhibit led visitors through the destruction, depravity, and eventual death of so many of the camps inmates.

But the drab constructs of communist-style housing blocks and the total absence of Jewish life in a corner of Europe where it once flourished suggested to me that Michnik did not have to travel as far as Hiroshima. It seems if people cannot remember, museums will always forget.

Hoher Wellengang an der Oder

Ein kleiner Schritt

Deutsch-polnisches Bermudadreieck