Merten, Ulrich. Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 582 Christopher Browning, Theo Schulte and Omer Bartov should feature Beorn’s volume as well. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment Johannes Due Enstad Merten, Ulrich. Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2013. xx + 336 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). Studies on the ‘German East’ have reached a curious stage. Since the renewed interest in German victimhood during the late 1990s, research has increasingly emerged that covers a fascinating and apparently inexhaustible field of study. The rediscovery of what some scholars — especially in Germany — labelled a ‘taboo’ has led to an omnipresence of the lost German past in the East, particularly the contentious history and legacy of the expulsions of Germans from East-Central Europe towards the end of and following the Second World War. So far-reaching has this interest become that even unshakable British truths about World War Two and Britain’s relationship with Europe are now up for debate. In the autumn of 2014, the British Museum, along with BBC Radio 4, introduced the British public to ‘forgotten’ German pasts with its programme Germany: Memories of a Nation. The exhibition at the British Museum charted 600 years of German history and began this tour de force with a focus on towns and cities that are no longer part of Germany, among them Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Danzig/Gdańsk and Prague. Despite this outpouring of interest in the German East, the issue of expulsions and German victims of World War Two — an interest that has long extended well beyond the erstwhile parochial Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) — has remained something that scholars feel the need to preface with claims of breaking a taboo (German victims) and covering new ground (the German East). Ulrich Merten’s book, Forgotten Voices, is no exception, as the title itself indicates. A detailed and often quite personal book on the German experiences of expulsion from East-Central Europe during the 1940s, it also claims to tread new ground. Similar to other recent publications — R. M. Douglas’s Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT, 2012), comes to mind — Merten takes the reader on a country-by-country journey and details the experiences of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and elsewhere through their own voices. What makes this book worthwhile is Merten’s very personal insight into its subject matter. Born in Berlin in 1930 to a bourgeois family that opposed the Nazi regime, Merten and his family left the Third Reich for the USA in the late 1930s. Thereafter, he spent his life as a German exile torn between several worlds: REVIEWS 583 the USA, Nazi Germany and post-war Germany. Having lived in the shadow of the Third Reich in a country that, since the 1970s, has seen a remarkable surge in Holocaust memorialization, it is unsurprising that writing a book on German victims represented a seminal moment for Ulrich Merten’s own biography. This is evident in his preface and repeated protests (perhaps too many?) that he is not attempting to argue that the expulsion of Germans from East-Central Europe was in any way comparable to the Holocaust. Despite its good intentions, however, the book repeats a number of problematic claims regarding the nature of these expulsions. Although Merten points out that the expulsions happened for various reasons, including revenge and settling old scores (pp. 3–4), he repeatedly places the Holocaust and the expulsions in direct relation to each other. This feels like a throwback to older debates of the late 1990s and early 2000s which came close to creating an equivalence between these two events. The book could have been much clearer on the differences of victimhood between the Holocaust and the German expulsions. Both Jews and Germans were placed in camps; both Jews and Germans were put on trains and deported from their homelands. But this is where the similarities end. The majority of German expellees and refugees walked into promising futures in East and West Germany: for expellees in East Germany, the first decades after the war brought the end...