From Expellee to Refugee: Absolute Victimhood and the Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung

Abstract

The expulsion of millions of people and the loss of Germany's eastern territories at the end of the Second World War have been a part of ongoing public discussions about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or Germany's “mastering of the past.” These events have deeply shaped personal and family memories in East and West Germany, even if political discourse about them had been marginalized in the German Democratic Republic. In the Federal Republic, the issue of expellees has been especially fraught because it represents the intersection of two discourses of German victimhood: war victims and victims of communism—here specifically the postwar East European governments that organized postwar expropriation and “resettlements.” Memorials range from the eternal flame on Theodor-Heuss-Platz in Berlin to the small plaque affixed to the wall outside of Bayreuth's train station for the almost 40,000 expellees from the Sudeten region who arrived on thirty-three freight trains in 1946. The expulsions have made their way into popular culture as well, as can be seen in the works of artists who had had little or no direct experience in the “German East.” In the 1969 song “Erstes Morgenrot,” for example, Alexandra (born as Doris Treitz in 1942 in today's Lithuania) wistfully looks forward to the dawn that brings greetings from the land where “my cradle once stood.” Heinz Rudolf Kunze, born in 1956, emphasizes his uprootedness and a sense of not belonging in his 1985 song “Vertriebener.”