Only a few months after the wall had come down, my uncle Helmut went off eastward.
I remember observing a kind of nervous tension in him since the events of Nov. 9, 1989. When Uncle Helmut came back from Silesia in southern Poland, which until the end of World War II had been part of Germany, he brought an escutcheon of the Silesian eagle that even now decorates the entrance of his house.
It has taken me a long time to understand the importance that the collapse of Soviet communism played in my uncle’s life.
He finally got the chance to cross the border and walk into his own history.
Borders, which for decades had been sealed, suddenly had become ordinary checkpoints, opening their gates for generations of Germans searching for their roots.
I was angry when Uncle Helmut posted his eagle on the wall.
I was just 17 years old, and this iron eagle reminded me too much of the common symbols of the Nazi era. In a remote way, it also symbolized a part of German history that held perhaps the biggest taboo of the 20th Century: die Vertreibungen, the displacement.
I was born in 1973, growing up in a typical midsize city in Western Germany, educated by teachers whose thinking had been influenced strongly by the 1968 movement and its leftist ideas.
One of these ideas was that the displacement had been nothing more than just revenge for what the Germans had done to their neighbors during the Third Reich.
Anyone viewing it differently was at least suspicious, if not reactionary.
While we studied Nazi history in all its dimensions at school, no teacher ever taught us anything about the displacement.
More than 15 million Germans had to flee their homes at the end of World War II, most of them from territories that now belong to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states and Russia.
Mainly, they fled the Soviet Red Army and the unimaginable violence it carried with it–massacres, rapes and tortures. Crossing the vast fields of Pomerania on foot or in coaches, hundreds of thousands of the displaced made their way toward the West.
Many died of starvation or froze to death on this endless snowy horizon.
In the backwaters of Kaliningrad, there are still wrecks of the trucks fleeing the Russian tanks that tried to cross the frozen sea. The Russians blasted holes into the ice and sent many of the refugees to the bottom of the sea.
Six decades after the end of the war, Germans finally are talking about this part of their history.
The revelations began in 2001 with the publication of “Crabwalk,” the latest book by German Nobel Prize winner Gunter Grass. He tells the story of the destruction by a Russian submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a Nazi cruise ship refitted to rescue German refugees from the approaching Russian army in January 1945.
In the ice-cold Baltic Sea, 9,000 people died.
Grass, a key figure of today’s German left, was one of the few writers with the “moral right” to scratch the taboo about the displaced and talk about the suffering they faced. Since then, the question of the displacement has become one of the hottest topics in public discussion and politics.
At the same time, the German Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV, Federation of Displaced Persons) launched the Center Against Displacements. The center, planned for Berlin, is to include information, archives and documentary sites.
“Germans are afraid of this issue,” said Frankfurt publicist Ulrike Ackermann.
“In the beginning, they were afraid of causing revanchism. Nowadays they are afraid of jeopardizing a successful European enlargement.”
Pomerania, Poland, Lithuania. Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia–more than 60 million people were displaced during the 20th Century.
But there was no coping, no common discussion of this part of European history until the end of the Cold War.
Instead, huge rifts, full of distrust, misunderstanding and exploited versions of history, had grown and cemented.
The Czech “Benes decrees” are one example.
These decrees, formulated in 1945, legalized the expulsion and expropriation of 3 million Germans. In the 1990s, when the Czech Republic became a candidate to join the European Union, German interest groups insisted that Prague had to abolish the decrees.
But many Czechs feared their neighbors would claim former properties and reoccupy a country that had been freed only recently after decades of occupation.
Above all, there was the conviction that Germans had not been victims.
The Czech government in fact didn’t even touch the decrees, and EU law experts found them to be irrelevant anyway.
But the ball had started rolling. And the debate’s weight reveals the huge sentiments that had been repressed over the years.
A declaration published last July, signed by prominent personalities such as the former ministers of foreign affairs of Poland and Germany and the Czech president of the Senate, clearly rejected the “mainly national project” of the German Federation.
Last year, Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder publicly confirmed their conviction that any center for the refurbishment of common history had to be a European project and by no means was to be established in Berlin.
“I don’t want the Poles to think we were rewriting history,” said Erika Steinbach, president of BdV.
She takes Poland’s fears seriously, she said.
But in her opinion, Germans first and finally have to start learning about their own past–and, by doing so, break down prejudices and stereotypes. Without a place for study and education, but also for remembering and mourning, Germans will never cope with the displacement, Steinbach said.
When I visit Uncle Helmut’s house now, his Silesian eagle still stares at me from the lobby’s wall.
It doesn’t make me feel angry anymore.
Helmut and I started talking about his escape from Poland in 1945. I started talking to my friends about it too. We realized that almost all of us have some family member who suffered displacement.
The Silesian eagle, I realized, is a part of my story too.
