Friday, October 11, 2013

Selective Historical Memory




At the end of war world two, Germans who lived in Poland and the Czech Republic faced harsh and cruel expulsion under the guise of reconstruction.  As Naimark describes in Fires of Hatred, both new and old wounds allowed the Czechs and Polish to expel their German minorities, with no resistance from the Allied forces, and even direct encouragement from the Soviet Union.  With the goal in mind making it sure that a reunited Germany had no ties to lands in either Poland or the Czech Republic in the future, the expulsion of the Germans was a popular idea at the time.  No matter how uncomfortable the situation made certain Allies, the expulsion of the Germans to create an ethnically consistent Czech Republic and Poland was carried out.  Germans had little time to leave either country, were forced into work camps, raped, stolen from, treated no better than “work animals.”  Poland even criminalized the usage of the German language in public and in private.  Though reparations have been made on both sides, tensions between the three countries are still at times visible.
The current relationship between Germany and Poland is much more positive since Germany’s reunification and reemergence as a major player in European politics.  Poland’s former president Lech Walesa recently stated he believed that Poland and Germany should unite as one country.  Walesa, who was instrumental in the  fall of the Soviet Union, claimed that uniting the two countries was a “logical conclusion” going on to say “the Germans have done us a lot more evil, and the relationship we have  now is much better than that with Russia. Why?”  Walesa believes the reason why the relationship between Germany and Poland has reached such a point that the two countries (as he believes) can become one is “because after the war, Germany fully confessed to all its dirty tricks. It’s necessary to say once and for all who did something evil, full stop. Until we do, the wound won’t heal.”
However, the relationship between Poland and Germany is not all flowers and roses.  Only recently did Poland’s Foreign Minister Randoslaw Sikorski criticize Germany’s “selective historical memory,” when speaking on a German miniseries Our Fathers, Our Mothers about the Polish underground Home Army in world war two.  Just this year Miloš Zema, the Czech Republic president said “When a citizen of some country collaborates with a country that has occupied his state, an expulsion is a subtler [form of] punishment than, for example, a death penalty," insinuating that the Germans were lucky that they were only expelled from their homeland and not killed.
Meanwhile Germany is criticized for a planned holiday that would honor the millions who were forced to leave Eastern Europe after the end of the war.  While understandable if the only argument was that the supposed holiday should not share the same date as Holocaust Memorial Day, the proposed date that is not the only critic critiques have offered.  Most critiques come from linking the holiday to the Charter of German Expellees, which offers nothing about the “cause of the war, about the mass crimes of the National Socialists, about the murder of the Jews, Poles and Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and other persecuted groups.”  In fact, the main argument seems to be against equating the suffering of German “expellees” to the victims of Nazism and that doing so looks bad for Germans and is not politically correct.
It would seem as if Sikorski’s comment on “selective historical memory” is an apt comment.  Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic all wish to recognize and honor the horrific effects of war world two on their countries, while forgetting what their country has done to its neighbors.  Zema’s comments are particularly absurd, while Sikorski skates over his own selective memory.  Walesa’s idea on the unification of Germany and Poland was met a harsh reaction and waved off by his countrymen.  Germany’s idea for a holiday commemorating the atrocities faced by its people in the Czech Republic and Poland while poignant, seems offensive when the proposed date for the holiday is shared with Holocaust Memorial Day, but it is equally offensive to simply wave the idea off because it is linked to an outdated charter.  The “insensitive” nature of the proposed holiday has little to do with the holiday itself and much more with “selective historical memory.”



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