They see themselves as victims of historical events… As a result of those events, fathers and grandfathers died a senseless death, held accountable by Poles and dispatched by a desire for revenge. Above all, older Germans in Silesia believe that they, more than any other community, have been made to pay for the war that Germany started. Again and again you hear it said: ‘We are at home, but we cannot even write in Polish. Without the help of others we cannot even write a letter to the authorities, barely read a newspaper. Of us it has always been expected to simply accept our fate, to remain quiet, don’t make a fuss, don’t ask for anything…’(8)
Forgotten and neglected, then as now, the largest German minority outside of Germany’s post-war borders pulled in its head and knuckled down, hoping and praying their plight might one day be remembered.
One long-standing representative of the German minority in Upper Silesia whom I interviewed, speaking about his post-war experiences, told me, ‘The Germans, in what remained Germany, avoided us like the Bermuda Triangle. At a local level things got better and we reached an accommodation with the local Poles and new arrivals, but the higher you went to district, or regional level, the worse it got, and the worst place of all was Warsaw.’(9) As Marshall Aid to Western Germany began to bite, and the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) took off, the prospect of Silesia ever again becoming part of Germany became increasingly remote. The German community’s prospects in post-war Polish Communist Silesia began to look less attractive than a future in the West. When the first opportunities to apply to leave Poland for the purpose of ‘family reunion’ in West Germany came, after Stalin’s death, the Polish authorities were stunned and overwhelmed by the flood of applications.
Over 250,000 who had taken the Polish Option now wanted out and put in their requests to leave. The authorities could not afford to lose so many useful workers in one go and they dragged out the paperwork, the older ones getting the right to leave first. Another wave were allowed to leave after the ‘success’ of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik,cccix and the opening up of dialogue between the West and the East during the 1970s. This time Germany paid dear to have its former citizens gain the right of ‘family reunion’; for the right of a further 150,000 to emigrate they had to pay 1 billion Deutsche Marks toward the pension contributions of the German minority and give Poland a further billion in cheap economic credits. More, mostly elderly, Germans were allowed to leave in the 1980s, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the remainder immigrated to Germany.
Stats on the size of the remaining German minority in Upper Silesia vary from the BdV (Federation of German Expellees) at 300,000 to the SKG (Social-Cultural Association of Germans in Poland) at 700,000;cccx somewhere in the middle is probably about right. There are 270,000 who now have dual nationality. The 2002 Polish census, which gave its citizens the option of ticking boxes for German and Silesian, had 153,000 ticking the former and 173,000 ticking the latter; indicating that there are many who prize their Silesian regional identity above a national one. But it still gives a somewhat distorted picture, as after decades of communist hate propaganda, repression and destruction of the German heritage of Silesia, many still fear to, or prefer not to, wear their identity on their sleeve. One venerable old Silesian estimates that the true figure of the size of the German minority that remains in Upper Silesia, including the area around Kattowitz, is around 500,000.(10)
The German minority is, however, still well represented at local level at least in a good part of Upper Silesia. In the key electoral region centred on the voivodeship (the Polish term for an administrative region) of Oppeln/Opole in Upper Silesia, the German minority in mid-2008 had seven out of a total of thirty councillors, but more importantly they were part of the ruling coalition with the P.O. (Polish Prime Minister Tusk’s party) in the region. In May 2007, the region had twelve districts where there were five with local councils in which the German minority were in the majority. There were seventy-one local councils, in forty-nine of which the German community were represented and in a further twenty-five they had a member of the German minority elected as Mayor.(11)
In terms of schools in the region, since 1990 German has been taught as a second or minority language in sixteen pre-schools, in forty kindergartens, two hundred and sixty-eight primary schools and eighty-two secondary schools. There is one college in the region, in Ratibor, where German is used as a language of instruction for some subjects. The long-term ambition has been to achieve the establishment of a German Gymnasium (high school); an idea first mooted in 1990 by Chancellor Kohl and which has been supported by the local leading figure in the Catholic Church (himself a member of the German minority), Cardinal Nossol, but nothing has come of it to date. There was incidentally a Polish Gymnasium for the Polish minority in the region when it was part of Germany right up until 1938.(12)
The year 2008 was the first year in which more members of the German minority returned than left. The former German Socialist government of Gerhardt Schröder was going to let funding for the German minority lapse. Thankfully the CDU/SPD coalition gave the German minority in Silesia 76 million Euros in support until 2010, and guaranteed their support beyond that date, primarily for projects to help support and preserve the use of the German language and the German cultural heritage of the region. There is also an all-parliamentary group of forty MPs in the German Bundestag whose roots are in Silesia, who work to keep support for the remaining community alive. The proposal to hopefully open a new Mercedes manufacturing plant in the region of Upper Silesia has been rumoured in part, at least, to have been based on the fact that a German-speaking community still exists there. However, this is something which would naturally benefit both Germans and Poles in the region in terms of jobs and increased local revenue.
The great irony is that the largest concentration of the German minority is in the area that once had the largest Polish minority in German Silesia. Those who took the Polish Option remained in Upper Silesia, primarily in the area east of the Glatzer (eastern) Neisse rivers. The largest communities where the German minority remains are centred around Groß Döbern (Dobrzen Wielki), Oppeln (Opole), Tarnau (Tarnow), Klein and Groß Stein (Kamien Slaski), Gogolin, Kandrzin-Cosel (Kedrierzyn Kosel) and south towards the Polish-Czech border around Ratibor and east in and around Kattowitz. These communities are a sight for sore eyes after the rundown and decrepit towns of Lower Silesia. Upper Silesia was blessed in that a significant part of its population was allowed to remain ‘as Poles’. They continued to maintain their homes, businesses and cultural heritage, where their ancestors were buried. Neat gardens and houses, picket fences, flower baskets and well-maintained barns stand in stark contrast as soon as you cross into the region of Lower Silesia, where, just like in the Sudetenland, the landscape is littered with abandoned and crumbling buildings, barns with no roofs and collapsing walls.
Lower Silesia looks uncared for and abandoned, not so Upper Silesia, and that is of benefit to Poles and Germans alike.cccxi The reaction of the Polish community to the German minority in the region is still very mixed. One of the MPs in Upper Silesia whom I spoke to has had rocks thrown through his windows twice, and on the day I visited, the local Verband der Deutschen Sozial-kulturellen Gesellschaften in Polen, (Union of German Social and Cultural Associations in Poland) who have their head office in Oppeln/Opole, had just had their German flag stolen from outside the office.
Today, the lack of any understanding of this forgotten community in Germany was aptly demonstrated during the European Football Championships in 2008. Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski, both of whose families had immigrated to Germany from Upper Silesia in the 1980s, were repeatedly classed as Poles. ‘Our Poles are better than their Poles,’ many joked during the game between Germany and Poland, or they said, ‘Podolski has scored against his own side.’ The fact that, by fortunate coincidence, the team captain Michael Balak is also a Silesian, but from the town of Görlitz just on the German side of the border, in th
e part of Silesia that remained in Germany, was beyond them. There were three Silesians in the German national squad, and these three scored virtually all the goals of the tournament that took them to the final. One can only wonder if any Polish football fans asked themselves, ‘If we had only been nicer to our German minority, perhaps they would have played for Poland!’ Instead, the Polish equivalent of the British newspaper, The Sun, (which is German-owned incidentally) had a front-page banner headline which read ‘Bring Us Their Heads’, with a mock photo of a Polish player carrying the decapitated heads of the German team. While the Dutch coach of the Polish team honourably apologised and called for calm before the game, the editor of the rag refused to retract or apologise for his appalling front page.
Such is the fate of history; it is arbitrary and cruel. Some Germans were lucky to be born on the one side of an arbitrarily drawn frontier, but the terrible irony is that many of today’s affluent West Germans regard themselves not only as ‘more German’, but also as ‘better Germans’ than their counterparts in the former German Democratic (read Communist) Republic, let alone the poor bastards stranded even further east. When successive waves of German immigrants from Silesia, Romania and Russia came to Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, the German tabloid press were full of criticism of these ‘supposedly’ German refugees, ‘many of whom do not even speak German’.cccxii There was no empathy for the fact that the German language had been banned on the street, as well as in schools, in the eastern territories and beyond for decades, during which time members of the minority could face dire consequences even if they were overheard speaking German at home, perhaps through an open window. Those Germans born west of the Oder-Neisse were just more fortunate, nothing more and nothing less, but their self-imposed ignorance and intolerance puts many of them to shame, along with the successive German governments who have failed to educate their citizens about the country’s national history. The German media’s ‘neglect’ of any issues that might upset Germany’s eastern neighbours has also played a part. Self-imposed censorship has been a very considerable part of the post-war German psyche; one that has gone on for so long, Germans have developed a form of permanent amnesia about their national identity. You can test this out by asking an average German whether Stettin, Breslau, Danzig and Königsberg are German cities, and then asking them where they are. The answers you get will vary considerably depending on the age group you ask and whether you ask West or East Germans.
The Poles have been brainwashed for decades by legions of Communist-era, politically-inspired Polish historians who told them that the Germans arrived in Silesia in 1871, a very selective writing of history, akin to what you will hear in Colmar and other parts of Alsace if you take a city tour.cccxiii Germans only come into view when Bismarck’s Reich emerges; the history of Germans in these regions before that is glossed over or ignored. But the fact that Silesia was an overwhelmingly German region prior to 1945 has been harder to ignore; Polish refugees arriving there after the war described how they felt like they were entering an entirely alien environment; a feeling that no amount of communist propaganda could remove.cccxiv A modern-day Polish Breslauer recently wrote, ‘Breslau is a city that has had its past amputated. I have only gotten used to this city with some difficulty, because with every step I am disturbed by the injury done to this city. You cannot walk the streets of Breslau without thinking about it. For that reason it does you good to drive away and spend time in other cities, in cities that commemorate their history, where the past is at one with the present… Breslau’s history was kept secret, like in an aristocratic family which attempts to conceal the embarrassing secret of the true origins of one of its ancestors.’(14)
Before the war, Wolfgang Eichborn wrote this poetic overview of Breslau’s history:
The view of the island with its Cathedral and the church, gave the observer from the south bank of the river a picture of the medieval skyline of the city into which the Austrian baroque city had grown, the great chapels of the electors added to the Cathedral for example, and they displayed the special character of our city, which, in its fundamental attitude to life, became so Prussian Protestant but which, in its atmosphere, remained so Austrian Catholic… That was the special peculiarity of our beautiful capital… the unity of these conflicting world views, between worldly wealth and spiritual power, puritanical strength and catholic universality, sober and businesslike with world class educational institutions and finally the mix between the easy going nature of the Austrians and Prussian discipline.(16)
In Prussia, Silesia was the largest state and Breslau was Prussia’s second city after Berlin. In Germany, Silesia formed the third largest state after Prussia and Bavaria, and Breslau was Germany’s fifth largest city. Silesia was the birthplace of many great Germans and gave rise to a host of Germany’s Nobel Prize winners.cccxv Those still remembered in the West today include: the Moltke military dynasty and Karl Clausewitz; Baron von Richthofen, who was also known as the ‘Red Baron’ and as the most prolific fighter ace of the First World War; Fritz Haber, the Nobel Prize winner and inventor of synthetic fuel; Ferdinand Lassalle, the founder of the Social Democratic Party in Germany; the writer and Nobel Prize Laureate, Gerhardt Hauptman; Max Berg, the architect and creator of the UNESCO-listed Jahrhunderhalle, built in 1913 to commemorate the victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig a century earlier; the modernist architect, Hans Poelzig; the Impressionist painter, Eugen Spiro; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the protestant pastor and anti-Nazi who died in a concentration camp; and the recently beatified Catholic nun of Jewish origin, Edith Stein, who died at Auschwitz.
Most of Silesia is now as integral a part of Poland as it once was of Germany. The region is divided between three nations: Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, each claiming a part of its heritage. German Silesia lives on in the tiny piece of Silesia around Görlitz that remained part of Germany, as well as through the memories of its surviving minority in Germany, and those that remained behind in Upper Silesia as ‘Poles’, not least also through the contributions of German Silesians down the ages to Science and the Arts. There are currently some positive signs emerging, especially in old Breslau/Wrocław, where the mayor is positively embracing all aspects of the city’s past, whether planning to wrest back its treasures from the clutches of Warsaw, or giving his citizens a deeper sense of a regional identity alongside their Polish one.
When I visited Breslau in 1988, it was still partly in ruins from the Second World War. When I returned twenty years later, in 2008, I was amazed to see the incredible transformation. The city is well on its way to becoming the beautiful and vibrant metropolis it once was during the late Middle Ages. Uniquely, its German heritage is not obscured or denied anymore, but celebrated. The German Herder Institute, based at the University of Marburg, in conjunction with the Mayor’s office, has put on a display of aerial photos of the city that were taken in 1932. These have generated huge interest on the part of the city’s new inhabitants, who are often seen standing alongside the grey-haired former German residents of the city nicknamed ‘homesickness tourists’, collectively recognising what remains, what the Polish authorities have beautifully rebuilt, and mourning those architectural gems that are no more. Rafal Dutkiewicz, who has been the Mayor of Breslau (Wrocław) since 2002, a former member of the Solidarity movement, and a student of Wrocław, Lublin and Freiburg universities, is a rare exception, and were he ever to seek high office, this man could make a huge difference and set Poland and Germany on an entirely new course toward a better and mutually beneficial future. Speaking about the aerial photo display, Dutkiewicz stated, ‘The exhibition album will undoubtedly help former and current Wrocław (Breslau) inhabitants, as well as guests coming to the city, to have an insight into the historical dimension of the city; they should revive the city’s history and encourage the viewers to discuss the common cultural heritage of Poles and Germans, and to care for this city.’(18) The city is once more bedecked with German plaques and memorials. The ol
d inscriptions on the churches in particular have been uncovered, replaced or even restored; not least on the Elisabeth Church, just off the market square. Once the main Protestant church of the city, the Elisabeth Church is now the garrison church of the Polish military, and outside a bronze memorial now stands, with inscriptions in both German and Polish to a famous son of the city: the Protestant Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the Nazis at Flossenberg Concentration Camp in April 1945, for his opposition to the regime. Some of the city’s old street and square names have also been returned, such as the Matthiasplatz; or they have been renamed after their former German residents, such as after the Nobel Prize winner Max Born, or the beatified Edith Stein.
The city has readopted its 1530 Habsburg coat of arms in favour of the one the Communists introduced in 1948.(19) A number of the city’s surviving notable German citizens were invited to the university’s celebration of its 300th anniversary in 2002. There now stands a monument of reconciliation to Cardinal Boleslaw Kominek, erected in December 2005 to commemorate his and the Polish bishop’s courageous letter to the Bishops of Germany in 1965, in what became known as the ‘Manifesto for Reconciliation’. A sentence from the letter is written on the monument, as a symbol of the efforts at reconciliation between the Polish and German nations. It reads, ‘We forgive and ask to be forgiven.’ The city guide explains how this ‘has a special meaning in this historically unique city’.(20) The third generation of Breslau’s Polish residents is hungry for knowledge of the city’s past and keen to establish a deeper regional identity. Lower Silesia is one of the most decrepit regions of Poland and still largely rots for lack of care and attention. In stark contrast, Breslau (Wrocław) is booming and benefiting from old and new German investors and tourists alongside their Polish neighbours. There is no doubt Wrocław will become a popular tourist venue to rival Krakow, Riga, Tallinn and the other cities that are benefiting from growing tourist numbers since the advent of cheap air travel in Europe. This will be beneficial to the city and will help the region to embrace its past, and all Silesians old and new. Despite the appalling suffering Germans and Poles have inflicted upon one another, they have shared tragic histories, and have a shared cultural heritage. Some may feel that ‘they have been sentenced to be neighbours’, but enlightened politicians on both sides should take note of the stirrings in Wrocław (Breslau) and seize the opportunity to build upon important beginnings before extremists attempt to trample on these fragile green shoots of reconciliation.
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