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NUREMBERG: Hannelore Fuchs was only six when her parents were led away to a Czechoslovakian jail at the end of World War Two. Their crime: her mother was photographed shaking Hitler’s hand.
She and her aunt and uncle trekked west, among three million ethnic Germans and Hungarians forced to abandon homes in Czechoslovakia. When reunited with her parents in Germany five years later, they were strangers to her.
As a guilty Germany swallowed its own pain from the war, Fuchs and her family tried to build a new life and suppress the memories of flight and persecution. But now, aged 62, they haunt her more than ever and she is seeking counselling.
“I can still see it now, when my mother was taken away. It repeats itself like a video film,” she said, wiping away tears as she told her story on the sidelines of the annual meeting of ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, the Sudetens.
Her story illustrates a new phase in a process for which there is a distinctively German word: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, or coming to terms with the past.
Mainstream politicians, particularly those on the left, have long dodged the suffering of Germans in the war, fearing it would be seen as diverting attention away from Nazi horrors.
After half a century trying to atone for German atrocities, however, the country is gradually shaking off this old taboo.
HUGE FLOOD OF REFUGEES: Until recently, few Germans, and even fewer people elsewhere, were aware of the biggest single refugee movement in European history. Some 14 million ethnic Germans fled the Soviet advance or were expelled after the Allies agreed to their eviction from Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Since German reunification in 1990, when the borders were properly settled for the first time since the end of the war, Germans have gradually started to feel more comfortable talking about the loss of old territories.
The issue gained new poignancy as wars in the Balkans revived memories of ethnic cleansing, and as the European Union prepares to expand eastwards and embrace territory the expelled Germans once called home.
While Poland and the Czech Republic fear an influx of Germans seeking to reclaim property or demand compensation, Germany has been making increasingly assertive calls for such prospective EU members to acknowledge the suffering they inflicted in the expulsions.
Young Germans, two generations removed from the war, are also hungry for a more balanced portrayal of that period.
Gudrun Wilm, 60, was four when she and her family were packed into a cattle truck and deported from their home near Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic.
“The same thing that happened in Yugoslavia also happened to us, but we were supposed to forget about it. In schools they learn nothing about it,” she said, proudly displaying her stall of dolls dressed in colourful, embroidered Sudeten costumes.
“A few years ago, it was packed in here,” she said, pointing to the thin crowd at the Sudeten gathering in Nuremberg, Bavaria. “Who will tell the children when we are gone?”
Too proud to admit defeat might be possible, Hitler forbade evacuation plans in Germany’s eastern provinces, and as the Red Army reached the borders of the German Reich in the winter of 1944-45, it was too late to organise exit by rail.
Hundreds of thousands of German civilians died on the trek west, many from exposure or starvation; others were executed. Many hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers.
TABOO TUMBLES: Groups representing the displaced were all but silenced as the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s forced Germans to confront crimes committed in their name.
For years, organizations representing those expelled were branded reactionaries wanting to restore Germany’s pre-war borders. Suddenly it seems almost hip to be an expellee.
Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder tested the water with a speech in 2000 at the annual gathering of expellees. Now, the Nobel prize winning author Guenter Grass has been credited with finally busting the taboo.
His latest book “In Retrogression” tells the story of what has been dubbed the German Titanic — the sinking in January 1945 by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship carrying thousands of refugees from the eastern front. Despite mixed reviews, the book has topped the German best-seller list for months.
Grass is by no means the first writer to explore the subject, but the fact that he, an icon of the left and critic of post-war revisionism, has done so, seems to have opened the floodgates for the rest of the liberal establishment. Since the book came out in February, Der Spiegel weekly has run a four-part series entitled “The Germans as Victims,” and a TV documentary on the subject recorded huge ratings.
It is not just Germans who are taking a new look at this period. In the new “Berlin: the Downfall 1945”, Anthony Beevor, author of the best-seller “Stalingrad”, vividly portrays the destruction and rape reaped by the advancing Soviet army.
ISSUE STILL POLITICAL: Karl Schloegel, east European history professor at Viadrina University in Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, says that while academics used to be ostracised for studying the subject, his lectures are now packed.
“The generation of my parents and some of my generation still found this subject difficult,” he said. “But young students are less inhibited by the past — they can view this subject as history and not as a political issue.”
But the subject has not yet been fully de-politicised. With elections due in the Czech Republic in mid June and in Germany in September, politicians have opened old wounds.
Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman has called the Sudeten Germans “Hitler’s fifth column” who were lucky to have been expelled rather than sent to a concentration camp.
Meanwhile, German politicians are demanding the repeal of the Benes decrees that legitimised the removal of citizenship and property from ethnic Germans and Hungarians.
Despite the rhetoric, most exiles just want to make peace with the past and have no desire to return to their former homeland.—Reuters
