In the English-speaking world, dominant narratives about the nature and meaning of the Second World War and its aftermath left even less space for public acknowledgment, far less discussion, of the episode. The new postwar generation retained no memory whatever of the expulsions, which featured almost nowhere in historical or media treatments of the war. Nor was it anxious to form such memories. Martha Kent, the former child detainee in Potulice, found while a postgraduate student of psychology at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s that even in a cosmopolitan academic environment, the image of wartime Germans in any other category than as perpetrators caused intense discomfiture to her American hosts. Sometimes the anxiety and embarrassment this generated was displaced through inappropriate stereotyping, as when one of her professors “greeted me with a mocking Sieg Heil!” More typically, though, she discovered that any reference in the United States to her own experiences would be interpreted by her hearers only as an attempted delegitimization of the sufferings of the true victims of the war. “I could hardly mention my childhood in captivity. On rare occasions when the subject came up, people said that Potulice was ‘nothing.’ The mere mention of my captivity called forth statements of distress and grief over the atrocities of the Nazi era. That was the harm I should have experienced, some people said…. Indeed, I [had] got off lightly.” As a result of the rigor with which her silence was socially policed in her new homeland, Kent succumbed to a psychological syndrome not uncommon among those who undergo severe trauma as children, especially when the experience is repressed or denied in adulthood. “By 1985 I found that I had lost all language for myself. I couldn’t speak or write anything about myself.”19
Back in Germany, expellee children were subjected to the same pressure to maintain their lifelong “duty” of silence. While a great deal of sociological angst was expressed in the immediate postwar years about the possible rise of an alienated, “asocial,” and conscienceless generation of juvenile delinquents, early postwar studies found that according to most measurable psychological indices, expellee children were almost indistinguishable from their counterparts within the indigenous population. Some authorities, notably Karl Valentin Müller, an anthropologist who had himself been evicted from his home in Prague after the war, inferred from this seemingly extraordinary resilience a Darwinian mechanism at work, in which the “fittest” had emerged from the “struggle for existence.” By the 1950s, as a result, expellee children were almost entirely passed over as objects of study or concern, while both Germanies congratulated themselves on the striking success of their integrational capabilities. The symptoms of what later would be recognized as “post-traumatic stress disorder” thus went unrecognized, and by the time some of the children had grown to adulthood and were capable of processing the memories they had almost uniformly repressed—usually so as not to increase the burdens borne by their equally damaged parents or carers—they discovered a society more determined than ever not to hear them. In the words of Volker Ackermann, “from the perspective of ‘1968’ the expulsions were a deserved punishment for ‘1933.’”20 These youngest victims’ continued silence, therefore, was demanded in a variety of subtle and unsubtle ways in the interest of avoiding a different, but equally unsettling, set of questions about the past that a new generation of Germans desired strongly not to ask.
Almost entirely overlooked at the time, though, was that a similar process of national self-questioning was also taking place in Czechoslovakia and Poland, that from analogous premises began pointing in a different direction. After the crushing of the “Prague Spring” of 1968 and the final dashing of hopes that “Socialism with a human face” was possible within the Soviet empire, young Czechoslovak intellectuals and historians, many of whom would be associated with the Charter 77 dissident movement, set out to address the question of how their country had fallen prey with such ease to the depredations of a second foreign totalitarian domination so soon after having emerged from the clutches of the first. A notable and provocative contribution to this debate was a set of “Theses on the Resettlement of the Czechoslovak Germans,” published in samizdat form by the Slovak historian Jan Mlynárik under the pseudonym of “Danubius” in 1977. For Mlynárik, the expulsions had less to do with Czechoslovakia’s security or national integrity than with the Czechoslovak government’s and people’s anxiety not to confront their own ignominious record from Munich until V-E Day. In this interpretation, the “senseless” postwar assault upon the Sudetendeutsche was explicable in terms of the population’s desire “to compensate for their own [wartime] inactivity, if not collaboration, by identifying themselves with the victors and by their ex post ‘heroic feat’ directed against the defenseless …”21 This, Mlynárik suggested, was the original sin of the Third Republic that had left it so psychologically vulnerable to Communist and Soviet supremacy. It was also a moral challenge to the current generation of dissidents, who could hardly consistently demand from their own government the unconditional respect for the rights of the individual that the expellees had been denied in 1945 and 1946.
The call to “liquidate” the Germans was an invitation to carry out a patriotic duty: public executions, burning people as human torches, shooting Germans in broad daylight on the streets of Bohemian and Moravian towns, and, ultimately, inhumane expulsion of people from their homes in the years to follow: all this was a massive, practical, everyday training in contempt for the notion of the human person, his dignity, and his rights as the world’s highest value…. [A] nation that behaves brutally towards others will itself succumb to the poison of these crimes.22
Mlynárik’s revisionist theses touched off a furor in Czechoslovakia, and by seeking to acquit the Sudetendeutsche of collective guilt provided an ironic counterpoint to those contemporaries of his in West Germany who at precisely the same time were insisting upon it.23 But his bombshell was only the starting point for a broader onslaught against the moral collapse that he and his followers perceived as following from this negation of the ideals of Masaryk’s republic. Communism, an economic system that had systematically expropriated and impoverished the people, was not solely a foreign imposition by the Soviet Union, but the logical consequence of the abdication of fundamental values by the Czechoslovak people in the expulsion-generated “gold rush” of 1945. “The expulsion with its consequences taught the nation no longer to respect either material values, or the principle of property, a value built up over generations. It… taught [the nation] to steal on a colossal scale…. [T]he theft of property …has its root and its origin not only in the introduction of socialism, but, already present here, in the unprecedented despoliation and plundering of the three million Germans.”24
In Poland, similar though much less influential critiques were also offered, the most notable being the dissident intellectual and future senator Jan Józef Lipski’s 1981 essay, the main thrust of which is indicated by its title: “Two Fatherlands—Two Patriotisms: Thoughts on the National Megalomania and Xenophobia of the Poles.”25 As Norman Naimark observes, however, “For most Poles, like the Germans, the immediate postwar period was dedicated to forgetting their own culpability for the horrors of the immediate past…. The utter brutality of the wartime period, the petty collaboration, Polish complicity in the occupation, and the indifference among the majority to the murder of the Jews—the many instances when survival trumped morality—were wartime phantoms that were pushed into a deep psychological freezer.”26 It was not entirely surprising, then, that the initiative in Poland to move beyond the defensive national-mythological narratives of the past should have come not, as in Czechoslovakia, from intellectuals, but from the Church. Responding in part to a conciliatory statement on the expulsions and the Polish-German frontier by the German Evangelical Church, the Catholic bishops of Poland, influenced among others by Karol Wojtyła of Kraków, the future Pope John Paul II, addressed a letter to the German episcopate in 1965 that referred obliquely to the expulsions with the words: “We forgive and ask for forgi
veness.”27 Although the bishops were accused at home of “nonpatriotic behavior and of acting against Poland’s interests,”28 their acknowledgment of mistakes made did not signify any second thoughts on the part of its authors about the justifiability of the Oder-Neisse line. Bishop Wojtyła himself was in the habit of referring to the western borderlands as the “Recovered Territories”—as, significantly, did Pope John XXIII for the first time in 1962.29 This is not to deny that the bishops’ gesture of reconciliation was important, and that it contributed to the partial thaw that made Brandt’s Ostpolitik possible. Even so, as Pawel Lutomski reminds us, in Poland “the ideological freeze on any open discussion of the status and manner of the expulsion of the Germans and the Poles [in the east] lasted practically until the changes of 1989.”30 It was not until the unification of Germany and the conclusion of “final status” agreements with its neighbors the following year that psychological space was created for fresh explorations of previously taboo topics. Helmut Kohl’s explicit declaration of his desire for “the Poles to live in secure borders” and his assurance that “[t]here will be no Fourth Reich” contributed powerfully to that sentiment. A noteworthy product of the new atmosphere was the undertaking in the 1990s of joint research projects into the causes and consequences of expulsions by teams of German historians working alongside their Polish and Czech counterparts.
By the end of the twentieth century, therefore, the ice floes appeared finally to be melting. In a March 1990 resolution, the Hungarian Parliament described the expulsion of the Volksdeutsche from that country as an “unjust action.” Though cynics saw in this initiative an attempt by Hungary to revive its own claims against its Czech and Slovak neighbors in respect of the displacement of Hungarians in 1946, the resolution did much to mend bridges between Budapest and Berlin.31 An address the same month by Václav Havel in one of his first acts as Czechoslovakia’s first postcommunist president was even more significant, being widely perceived as a breakthrough in relations with Germany. Critically evaluating the manner in which ethnic Germans had been treated in 1945, Havel acknowledged in terms strikingly similar to those of his erstwhile Charter 77 comrade Ján Mlynárik that “Instead of judging those who had betrayed their nation, we hunted them out of the country, passing a sentence unknown to our jurisprudence. That was no punishment, that was revenge.” Havel’s statement was widely taken to be an official apology to the expellees, and since then has almost invariably been described as such. According to the president himself, though, it neither was, nor was intended to be, any such thing. As he later remarked, “I used far more diplomatic language and did not directly apologize for anything, one reason being that I had no clear mandate to do so.”32 A close reading of the speech supports Havel’s contention—most notably his reference to the “justified, but overstated outrage” of the Czechoslovak people, a formula which implied that the fault lay if anything in denying the guilty parties due process before removing them, as well as his insistence that the Nazis had been responsible for injecting the “bacillus of evil” into the Czechoslovak body politic. The misunderstanding was to have long-lasting and unfortunate consequences, however, because it implied to foreign and especially to German observers a change of mind on the part of the Czech and Slovak peoples and their governments that had not in fact taken place.
Thus when after the “Velvet Divorce” of 1993 the new Czech Republic began preliminary discussions about joining the European Union, Helmut Kohl’s government was dismayed by what appeared to be a significant retreat on the part of the Czech president, particularly when contrasted with an apparently more generous Polish stance as represented by an address by the Foreign Minister, Władysław Bartoszewski, to a joint session of the German Parliament.33 A February 1995 speech by Havel, which referred to a “fatal failure of a large part of our ethnic German citizens” as the true reason for their eventual expulsion differed more in tone than content from what he had said five years previously. Followed as it almost immediately was, though, by the Czech Constitutional Court’s finding in the Dreithaler case that the Beneš decrees remained in effect, the contretemps brought about a significant and accelerating deterioration in relations between the two countries. A Czech-German declaration of January 1997, in which each state “deplored” the suffering inflicted upon the other during and after the war, attempted to arrest the downward slide by tiptoeing carefully around what had become a political landmine for both sides. While the aspect that captured the headlines was the two governments’ mutual expression of “regret” for the sufferings each other’s peoples had undergone in the 1930s and 1940s, a narrow reading of the text, which had been drafted to take maximum advantage of creative ambiguity, permitted the interpretation that the Czech government regretted the “excesses” that had occurred as a result of the expulsions, rather than the deportation of the Germans itself. Even this, though, may have been a concession too far for the Czech people, only 49 percent of whom supported the declaration in an opinion poll.34 The previous year, indeed, 86 percent of respondents in another survey stated that they would “not vote for a party that supported the issuing of an apology to the Sudeten Germans for the expulsions in the post-war period.”35
What became clear, in fact, as the 1990s drew to a close was that if it could legitimately be said of the German people that they had still not adequately confronted their wartime past, the same held almost equally true of the populations of the expelling countries. Merely because communism had passed away in central Europe, deeply held convictions about responsibility for the war and for the events that succeeded it had not. It is unlikely that in pressing so hard for statements of regret from its neighbors, the Kohl government ever fully appreciated how deeply the narratives of wartime victimization, martyrdom, and justified retribution had entered into the national mythologies that the central European regimes, their Marxism notwithstanding, had successfully constructed. To a still greater degree even than in the Czech Republic or Slovakia, questions in Poland about collective German guilt ran counter to half a century of official promotion of “Western thinking” (myśl zachodnia), as well as to a “Polish-national martyrological paradigm” that “offered Poles an identity based in common suffering … and at the same time provided a model of national solidarity that could be projected onto the challenges of reconstructing the Polish state and building socialism.”36 The resilience of these concepts, even after the abandonment of the collectivist nostrums that they had been intended to some degree to reinforce, came as an unwelcome surprise to the new Social Democratic administration of Gerhard Schröder, which in 1998 found itself squeezed between what seemed to be a newly militant stance on the part of the governments of both Poland and the Czech Republic—whose gaffe-prone prime minister, Miloš Zeman, escalated tensions still further with a series of intemperate public statements about the Sudetendeutsche having been “traitors” and a “German fifth column”—and a Christian Democratic opposition at home that seemed eager to make the unresolved questions of the past into election issues.
Despite Schröder’s attempts to lower the rhetorical temperature by assuring Prague in 1999 that his government would neither allow the Sudeten question to stand in the way of the Czech Republic’s accession to the EU nor support any claims made by expellees to restitution of or compensation for confiscated property, the controversy continued to escalate. In part this was the result of a renewed sense of Czech vulnerability in the face of a newly unified, self-confident, and increasingly assertive Germany. Czech insecurity, Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff remind us, “to an extent … can be explained by simply glancing at a map. The Czech Republic is smaller than some German Länder.”37 It was also enhanced by a perception that neighboring countries were joining with Germany in “ganging up” on Prague. All too predictably, then, interventions in 2002 by Hungarian politicians, who demanded that the Czech Republic repudiate the Beneš decrees that had legalized the expropriation of Magyar speakers as well as Germans in 1945, and by the obstreperous and
irresponsible far-right Austrian governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, merely had the effect of provoking the Parliament in Prague into affirming the decrees’ inviolability.
The final straw, so far as Czech and Polish opinion was concerned, was the announcement in 2003 by Erika Steinbach, a Christian Democratic member of the Bundestag and leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Expellee League), that a “Center Against Expulsions” would be opened in Berlin to draw attention to the problem of forced migrations in the modern world. Steinbach had established a foundation for this purpose in 2000, but failed to secure public funding. She now made it clear that the initiative would go ahead regardless, using private money. Once again, the timing was inauspicious. Ever since the controversy over the Beneš decrees in the mid-1990s, German commentators in and out of politics had not troubled to conceal their opinion that the Polish and Czech peoples and governments were some distance behind Germany in their willingness to confront the disturbing aspects of their own recent pasts and now needed to make up the lost ground—advice that the recipients keenly resented.38 Alarm was added to anger in Poland when an expellee trust organization, the Preussische Treuhand, was founded in 2001 to pursue expropriated expellees’ restitution claims through the European courts. The appearance of two bestselling books the following year—Günter Grass’s novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk), which referred allusively but sympathetically to the expellees, and Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), an accusatory history of the Allied strategic bombing campaign against German cities in the Second World War—added fuel to the flames. These works betokened, in the view of many foreign observers, a renewed obsession with the image of the innocent and victimized wartime German, and an indifference to the sensibilities of those who had suffered at his or her hands. Steinbach’s announcement, and the first intimations that the Center Against Expulsions might be located in close proximity to the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, seemed to many Poles and Czechs who already considered themselves under a state of psychological siege to be final confirmation that powerful German politicians were intent on using the expulsions as a means to whitewash their own country’s disgraceful wartime record as well as to advance financial, and perhaps even territorial, claims against the victims of Nazi Germany.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 53