Forget, Forgive and Move On: the memory spaces of German ...



Forget, Forgive and Move On: the memory spaces of WWII German Expellees

Andreas Kitzmann

School of Arts and Letters

York University

This has been a difficult article to write. The reasons for this difficulty are, however, cagey and of the sort that resists being grounded within a stable context of definition. One could assume, as indeed I myself have assumed, that the difficulty of writing such a piece has to do with the material itself – which is to say the discomfort and emotional upset created by engaging with individuals who have suffered traumas far beyond my own life experience. Yet, sitting with my video camera while listening to stories of suffering, brutality and remarkable survival, I remained primarily in a state of sympathetic attention that at times bordered on a kind of formalized detachment. This is not to say that I did not feel anything while listening and later transcribing my interviews with survivors of the Vertriebung (or Expulsion of Ethnic Germans post WWII). In many cases the interviews were emotionally draining for both the interviewees and myself and many of the recollections continue to haunt me. Adding to the emotional weight of the interviews is the fact that my mother and her immediate family were among the 15 million who were forced to flee their homes as the war ground towards its bloody conclusion. So mixed in with the traumatic details of the recollections of strangers are self-created images of my mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles also enduring great hardships, injustices and humiliation. Yet once again, while such thoughts certainly arouse emotions, my difficulty with writing cannot be connected solely to this personal connection. No, there is something else that lurks in the background that makes committing pen to paper, or more precisely, pixel to screen, annoyingly troublesome.

This “something,” has a lot to do with history and especially, the relationship between memory, testimony, and history. Indeed, my act of collecting the testimonies of surviving expellees constitutes, according to Ricoeur a kind of primal historical act which, as I will explore below, immediately catapults my seemingly “well intentioned” act of collecting stories into exceedingly complex and difficult territory.

Yet we must not forget that everything starts, not from the archives, but from testimony, and that, whatever may be our lack of confidence in principle in such testimony, we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves that something did happen in the past, which someone attests having witnessed in person, and that the principal, at times our only, recourse, when we lack other types of documentation, remains the confrontation among testimonies (147).

The image of testimonies engaged in a confrontation with one another is an especially arresting one in this case and is perhaps one of the root causes of my writer’s block, so to speak. At the core of the confrontation is, of course, the matter of Germany’s crimes against humanity during the period of National Socialism and the ongoing issues and concomitant discourses around accountability, responsibility and guilt. Such issues and discourses make the articulation of specifically German suffering problematic in so much that it counters the normative representation of Germans as the perpetrators of evil as opposed to victims themselves. Such a dilemma, if it can be phrased as such, was made strikingly clear in the course of my own investigations. During a phone call to set up an interview, I was asked by one individual what my “agenda was.” I did not exactly know how to respond given that in my perhaps naïve self-designation as the objective, impartial collector of data, I never considered the idea that my project could be conceived as one driven by an agenda, whether explicit or hidden. But of course, this is resolutely not the case, as I quickly discovered. Why bring up the issue of how ordinary Germans were mistreated during and after the war if not to correct a gap in the historical narrative or even more confrontational, to extend the list of victims beyond those normally associated with the Second World War? Or, as one of my respondents repeatedly attempts to convince me, to help initiate steps towards addressing the injustices enacted against the Volksdeutsche, which in some cases should include the re-drawing of borders that now define contemporary Germany. Or, as is more common and benign, the message that the hardships endured by the 15 million expellees serve as a kind of universal marker of inhumanity and injustice and thus should be used to shout the message “never again” to present and future generations.

What such “agendas” make clear is the extent to which testimonies can be deliberately “enframed” in ways that either hinder or assist an array of historical and ideological projects and ambitions. Michel de Certeau, as cited by Ricoeur, notes how materials, in this case testimonies, are placed within archives and thus “situated in a chain of verifying operations, whose provisory end is the establishment of documentary proof.”

Before explanation, in the precise sense of establishing answers in terms of “because,” there is the establishing of sources, which consists, as Certeau puts so well, “in redistributing space” that had already been marked out by the collectors of “rarities,” to speak like Foucault. Certeau calls “place” “what permits, what prohibits” this or that kind of discourse within which cognitive operations properly speaking are enframed” (Riceour 168).

This idea of place is particularly relevant – how my testimonies, once contained within an archive (if only of my own making), are redistributed into places that allow, discourage or forbid specific discourses and interpretive assemblages.

It needs to be said that testimonies written or spoken “in pain” “raises a question, to the point of soliciting a veritable crisis concerning testimony,” a crisis that effectively separates this form of documentary proof from the general process of historiography. (175) Why is this the case?

Because it poses a problem of reception that being placed in an archive does not answer and for which it even seems inappropriate, even provisionally incongruous. This has to do with such literally extraordinary limit experiences – which make for a difficult pathway in encountering the ordinary, limited capacities for reception of auditors educated on the basis of a shared comprehension. This comprehension is built on the basis of a sense of human resemblance at the level of situations, feelings, thoughts, and actions. But the experience to be transmitted is that of an inhumanity with no common measure with the experience of the average person. It is in this sense that it is a question of limit experiences. (175)

The Holocaust serves as one of the definitive markers of such limit experiences that are far in excess of normative frames of reference. As a number of thinkers explore, with Primo Levi and Hanna Arendt being amongst the most well known, the act of recollecting and speaking of these limit experiences poses a particular challenge.

This is why we may speak of a crisis of testimony. To be received, a testimony must be appropriated, that is, divested as much as possible of the absolute foreignness that horror engenders. This drastic condition is not satisfied in the case of survivors’ testimonies. A further reason for the difficulty in communicating has to do with the fact that the witness himself had no distance on the events; he was a “participant,” without being the agent, the actor; he was their victim. How “relate one’s own death?” asks Primo Levi. The barrier of shame is one more factor with all the others (Riceour,176).

In the case of the expelled Volksdeutshe, there is the added barrier of collective guilt, which has dominated much of the political and cultural discourses of post-war Germany. via the project of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung – “of effectively working through, coming to terms with the immediate past” (Freund, 51). To a significant degree, Germans who had immigrated to North America have not been part of such discourses which, according to Alexander Freund, has compelled them to confront the past in a manner that is significantly different from Germans living in Germany.

The first difference between Germans’ Vergagenheitsbewaltigung in Germany and in North America is an issue of power relations. In Germany, Germans were insiders; they belonged to the nation and defined themselves in opposition to the Other, “the foreigners.” In North America, however, they were (at least at first) outsiders and themselves defined as Other. The relations of power were reversed and this included the power to speak about the past. In Germany, Germans could feel strong or at least safe, because as insiders it was they who could choose to talk about the Holocaust or – as they did in public in the 1950s and 1960s and in families up to the present – to remain to a large extent silent. As people who had suffered displacement and personal as well as material losses during and after the war, members of the First Generation could and did easily present themselves as victims of the war and as a people betrayed by Hitler. (53)

In North America, as Freund notes, Germans were directly confronted by the historical realities of the Second World War and the Holocaust in a manner that made it “rather difficult – although not impossible – to demand to be seen as a victim or to ignore the discourse.” Such a denial (or at least suppression) of victim hood has been a source of frustration amongst some of the individuals I have interviewed . For many, the historical account of the Second World War cannot be complete without making the Vertriebung a part of the public discourse. Indeed, what some of the former Expellees want is mainly to be written back into history and its offshoots in popular culture (such as films, historical novels, etc.).

That said, the social and cultural dynamics of collective guilt within Germany post WWII are of an intensity and longevity not experienced in North America. Consequently, while Germans in Germany may indeed be “insiders” as Freund suggests, they are concomitantly compelled to confront issues of accountability, responsibility and moral culpability in a way that is integrated deeply into the formation and evolution of their identity as Germans. By contrast, Germans in Canada or the United States have the choice of forging a new identity around their adopted nations. They can choose, as many have, to downplay their German roots and assimilate as seamlessly as possible into the mainstream of society while at the same time celebrating and practicing relatively apolitical aspects of German identity and culture (such as music, food, folklore, customs, etc.) without the burden, as in Germany itself, of nationalist discourses and identity formations.

Such dynamics complicate the discursive and material formations of history. As a way through such complications, it is worth considering Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of the concept of history, which can be briefly summarized via four major assertions. The first is that “historical process is marked by a distinctive kind of temporality different from that found in nature. Second, historical reality is social reality, an internally differentiated structure of functional relationships in which the rights and interests of one group collide with those of other groups and lead to the kinds of conflicts in which defeat is experienced as an ethical failure requiring reflection on what went wrong to determine the historical significance of the conflict itself. . . . Thirdly, a critical historical consciousness is born of an awareness of a gap between historical events and the language used to represent them – both by the agents involved in these events and by historians retrospectively trying to reconstruct them…” (xii-xiii).

What is informative here for the purposes of this brief paper is the understanding that historical knowledge “knows itself to be always provisional and open to revision,” which is not to say that it disintegrates into a kind of formless relativism. Rather, Koselleck’s “concept of history” provides a means to navigate through the various “falsifications of history,” in a manner that provides a stable base from which to assess and augment that space of experience in which men build a notion of humanity that is both always changing and ever more becoming itself.” (xiv )

Gil Eyal’s term “will to memory” nicely encapsulates the use of memory for historical practice and resonates with the assertions developed by Koselleck. “Memory might well be somewhat imprecise and indeterminate, but it is only when we expect it to answer some pressing need that we begin to problematize it as such, or to become concerned with its quality and quantity. And it is not enough to say that memory is expected to reflect accurately the collective or individual past, because this merely begs the question: why do we need an accurate representation of the past to begin with? How accurate should it be? For what purpose” (6)?

How then to proceed? In addition to working through some of these theoretical concepts and issues, I feel compelled to include in my presentation at the workshop at least some of the personal accounts rendered by my interviews. Yet towards what ends and for what purposes? And how are (or should) these testimonies to be “enframed” and contextualized? To a significant degree my inclination to include the accounts stems from my respect and empathy for the individuals themselves. In other words, their stories need to be told, if only as an expression of support and validation of suffering and that their memories “matter” and have “meaning” beyond the context of individual experience.

For the longer version of this paper I have constructed a number of frames within which are situated a number of testimonies that are in turn employed as vehicles to question and probe the frame in which they are placed. I will briefly present these frames and short excerpts from my interviews during the workshop, time permitting.

And to the inevitable (and repeated) question “to what ends?” I offer this reply (for the moment): to affirm that the act of accumulating testimony is an act of historical practice that can and must be understood in terms of potential and material (mis)uses and effects. This “act” is not without its responsibilities and, as such, those that materialize the memories of the past must not do so lightly. By deliberately identifying and foregrounding potential frames I hope to make explicit the material effects of writing the memories of trauma into history.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor et al. The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice (New York: Harper, 1950).

----- “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” in Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Agamben, Giorgio. Remanants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

Anderson, Mark. “Crime and Punishment.” The Nation, Oct. 17, 2005.

Eyal, Gil. “Identity and Trauma: Two Forms of the Will to Memory”. History and Memory. Volume 16, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2004.

Freund, Alexander. “Dealing with the Past Abroad: German Immigrants’ Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and their relations with Jews in North American since 1945.” GHI Bulletin. No. 31 Fall 2002.

Frisse, Ulrich . Anna Tuerr Memorial Park. Kitchener, Ontario: Trans Atlantic Publishing, 2004.

Ludtke, Alf. “Coming to Terms with the Past: Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 65, No. 3 Sept., 1993.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Schneider, Peter. “In their side of world war II, the Germans also suffered.” Arts and Ideas. The New York Times, Jan. 18, 2003.

de Zayas, Alfred. A Terrible Revenge: The Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

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