Page 80 - Studia Universitatis Hereditati, vol 11(2) (2023)

tive guilt from microlevel victimization”, which fluence between mass violence and social crisis, a
echoes Harald Welzer’s, Sabine Moller’s and very central element to the understanding mass
Karoline Tschuggnall’s findings about the gap violence such as population displacements (Ger-
between historical knowledge and successful re- lach 2011, 265), are missing.
connaissance of German guilt and perpetrator- But maybe the most striking feature of the
ship among young Germans on the one hand, permanent exhibition of the Documentation
and on the other hand its paradoxical correla- Centre is that it is not about cultural loss, as
tion with representations of the family past that one could have expected. It is noteworthy that
are mostly that of the moral integrity of grand- in contrast to the state museums financed by the
parents portrayed as victims or heroes (Welzer federal and state governments under so-called
40
et al. 2002, 53). Kulturparagraf of the Federal Expellees Act (§96
In addition, choosing an individual ap- BFVG – Bundesvertriebenengesetz), the Docu-
41
80 proach can also be explained by the fact that loss mentation Centre is not dedicated to presenting
is easier to grasp at the individual level than at the historical East German provinces or the set-
studia universitatis hereditati, letnik 11 (2023), številka 2 / volume 11 (2023), number 2
the group level, where it is much more difficult tlement areas of the Germans in Eastern Europe. ti
to clearly define who has lost what. For what ex- According to the curators, this was conscious-
actly this “loss of home” is, what belonged to ly avoided. If no culturally outstanding arte-
42
whom and who belonged where, is more am- facts are exhibited (such as can be found in the
biguous and politically much more controver- pre-existing §96 Regional Museums and ex- ta
43
sial at the group level, as Eva and Hans Henning pellees Heimatstuben and museums) which tes-
Hahn (2018, 37) have stressed. Contentious col- tify to the cultural accomplishments of the Ger-
lective aspects of loss (such as territorial loss or mans in their respective settlement areas and by
the border issues that point to the theme of in- which one could measure the loss; and if no at- di
justice) and their collective relevance (for the na- tempt is made to display the history of the lost
tion) are present in the exhibition, but they are territories nor of the very diverse territories of
only addressed indirectly (e.g. through maps, settlement of German minorities in the east, it
through political posters of the 1950s or through might also be because cultural loss has been a
the recording of later Bundestag debates) in the central trope in the German discourse about the
last part of the exhibition. Yet, even on the in- East and more so in expellees associations’ dis-
dividual level the questions of property loss and courses and practices (Lotz 2007). Loss was in- here
transfer are only touched. As Chu (2002, 591) strumentalised to legitimise discourses about
observes, “more could have been done in the ex- historical injustice and the non-recognition of
hibition with how German and ‘Volksdeutsche’ the new borders in the interwar period until the
property, often itself ‘aryanized’, played a role
in the expulsions on a national and local level”. 41 Preserving “the cultural assets of the expellee territories in
the awareness of the expellees and refugees, of the German
Thus, “the process character” and the mutual in- people as a whole and of foreign countries …” is the official
reason for the federal funding via the §96 BVFG (Weber
40 In this respect an analysis of the testimonies collected in 2012). This funding dates back to 1953 and is financing the
the frame of the contemporary witness project Zeitzeugen- Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion, Rec-
project of the Documentation Centre would be of inter- onciliation but also the numerous other regional museums
est. This Zeitzeugenarchive (collection of personal reports dedicated to “the lost territories of the Reich and to the ter-
about the flight) goes hand in hand with the exhibition. ritories of expulsion” (Bundesamt für Justiz n.d.a.).
“Contemporary witnesses” are supposed to “convey par-
ticularly vividly how forced migrations affect the individ- 42 Interview conducted by the author with one of the main
ual” (Stiftung Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung 2018, 3–4) curators of the permanent exhibition inDecember 2021.
as well as families and societies. Their testimonies provid- 43 Such as the Silesian Museum in Görlitz, the Pomerani- studiauniversitatis
ed the content of the green biography flaps. However, all of an State Museum in Greifswald or the East Prussian State
them must have been children at the time of flight and ex- Museum in Lüneburg, the Danube-Swabian Central Mu-
pulsion. The victimhood bias might thus have been rein- seum in Ulm, the Transylvanian-Saxon Museum in Gun-
forced. delsheim and many others.