Page 74 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

raises the claim of working through a complex which cannot be sidestepped, before accessing
past and sets a very narrow historical framing, the spaces dedicated to the expulsions and the
which contradicts the usual narrative of the as- new post war order.
sociations of expellees. The remembrance and
commemoration of “flight and expulsion” must The Aporias of the Musealisation
take place “in the historical context of the Sec- of the Negative
ond World War and the National Socialist pol- In order to determine now how concretely this
icy of expansion and extermination and its con- museumification project is located in the Ger-
sequences” and “in the spirit of reconciliation”. man public memory and museum landscape, in
And finally, the topic has also “to be anchored which tradition(s) and to which practice of mu-
in the centre of society”, outside of the remem- seum representation it belongs, I will start to
brance milieu and transferred into a publicly ac- consider three seemingly very simple questions
26
74 cessible memory form. posed by Reinhard Koselleck (2002, 26) in his
If the explicit wish expressed by politics reflections on the “forms and traditions of nega-
for memorialisation of this historical episode tive memory” which help highlight the complex- ti
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
is in accordance with the documentation prin- ity of the project.
ciple, the necessity to fight negationist tenden- “Who is to be remembered?” Through this
cies or, to use the words of the association of ex- question, Koselleck aimed at reflecting on the
pellees, its “tabooisation”, is very questionable aporias of the memorialisation of Nazi crimes to ta
(Hahn and Hahn 2010; Beer 2011, 135). Neither which the newly unified German State had com-
are flight and expulsion contested, nor their vi- mitted itself. Since reunification, an official
27
olence negated. The sufferings and crimes relat- state-led negative memory culture, that put the
ed to this mass violence have been extensively Shoah and the crimes committed by Germans
documented by the West German State author- in the centre of Germany’s national commemo- di
ities (Beer 1998) and the episode has always been rations, had become mainstream (as symbolised
present in (West-) German politics, historiogra- by the erection of the memorial to the murdered
phy, and memory. Further the very tight histori- Jews of Europe and its location in the heart of
cal frame laid down in the statuses of the Foun- the new capital in 2005). In this context, Kosel-
dation Flight, Expulsion and Reconciliation by leck pleaded among other things for a memorial-
the Federal Government seems to contradict the isation not only of the victims (as the Holocaust
documentation principle, in that it heavily con- memorial does) but also of the crimes and their here
strains the scope of interpretation of the histori- perpetrators. In fact, Germany’s official memo-
cal episode, obliges to a narrative and more so di- ry landscape contains institutions dedicated to
rects this narrative. “Flight and expulsion” must
be presented as a consequence of World War II both: commemorating the victims and docu-
and not – as the federation of expellees and the menting the crimes and the perpetratorship of
heads of expellee organisations have done so of- the Germans. Yet, the roles are clear cut. A clear
ten – treated as an independent historical event, distinction is made between both victims and
that happened because of circumstances that 26 Who is to be remembered? What is to be remembered?
were out of the control of the individuals. And 27 How is it to be remembered?
First and foremost, he shows the impossibility of making
indeed, this has been practically implemented sense of those crimes. Contrary to previous memorialisa-
on the second floor of the Documentation Cen- tion of defeats that turned the dead into heroes and used
tre, dedicated to “the displacement and expul- the negativity for nationalistic positive aims, such as group studiauniversitatis
unity and identification, in this case, according to Kosel-
sions of the Germans”. The visitor is obliged to leck, the remembrance of the suffering cannot be trans-
start the tour with a module about the “German formed into such a thing as a collective memory nor be
used to lay the foundation of a collective identity. Quite
expansionist policy and the Second World War” the opposite (Koselleck 2002, 24).