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  • The Aesthetics of Collective Innocence:Shifting Narratives about Flight and Expulsion after Ostpolitik1
  • Jeffrey Luppes

Introduction

In an address given at the dedication ceremony of a local expellee monument in Karlsruhe on Volkstrauertag in 2000, the chairman of the local Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV; League of Expellees) affiliate offered insights into some Germans’ historical understandings concerning the place of the expulsion – and of the wartime suffering of German people in general – in the memory culture of the Federal Republic. Though the monument’s inscription addresses only the plight of the expellees, the speaker talked at length about the victimization of the expellees and other Germans during and after the Second World War, mentioning the more than eleven million Germans who perished due to the war, among whom he counted

3,250,000 Deutsche Soldaten durch Kriegseinwirkungen, bzw. Kampfhandlungen; 1,000,000 Frauen, Kinder und Greise infolge des völkerrechtswidrigen Bombenterrors; 3,242,000 Deutsche Soldaten in alliierter Gefangenschaft; […] 3,000,000 Frauen, Kinder und Greise bei der Vertreibung aus der Heimat nach 1945; 500,000 Ermordete beim Einmarsch der Sowjets in Ost- und Mitteldeutschland; 60,000 Ermordete beim Einmarsch in Österreich.

(Bund der Vertriebenen 8)

Moments later, the BdV functionary added, “An dieser Stelle wollen wir nicht richten, wir sprechen vielmehr vom Erleiden eines harten Schicksals und von Opfern ohne individuelle Schuld (Bund der Vertriebenen 8).

The presumably guiltless women, children, and elderly forced to leave their homes in the German East specifically addressed in the speech are lumped together with their compatriots killed by Allied aerial raids in the cities, who were in turn thrown in together with fallen soldiers. Equally as disquieting as the speech’s inaccuracies and omissions (the inflated numbers, the exclusion of [End Page 83] Germany’s victims, the inclusion of Austrians in the listing of German war victims) and its criticism of contemporary German memory culture, particularly as practiced by younger elites, was the speaker’s proclamation of innocence (twice) not only for all the victims of flight and expulsion but also for all German war dead (Bund der Vertriebenen 8–10).

The speech encapsulates the exculpatory assertions of collective innocence made regularly by functionaries of the expellee organizations in reunified Germany. More important, it also exemplifies the shift in historical narratives articulated by the expellee organizations that began in the 1970s and have continued until today. Based on a sample of the hundreds of such expellee monuments erected from the 1970s to the present day, this article sheds light on the shift and the modifications in commemorative strategies and historical narratives employed by expellee organizations for representing their experiences of the Second World War and its aftermath in this form. More specifically, this article – as the first investigation of this type2 – uses the analysis of local monuments erected by expellee organizations to outline how those groups have changed the representations of their war experiences since Ostpolitik.

Taken as a whole, expellee monuments make profound statements about their initiators’ understandings of the past – understandings which deviate from standard post-war historical narratives that have focused on Nazi crimes. Erected in every decade following the war, more than one thousand monuments stand in the reunited Germany; they are located in small numbers throughout the former “German East” and can even be found as far away as the United States and Africa. The monuments have been key components of the expellee organizations’ visual and discursive repertoire, and with them they have sought to ensure that their experience during and after the war will never be disregarded. Moreover, monuments represent German expellees’ wartime experiences in ways that go beyond simple commemoration and instead reflect the concrete and symbolic political objectives of the expellee organizations. These material examples of cultural production constitute an important and substantial part of Germany’s memory culture and make unequivocal but overlooked statements about the expellees’ understandings of their war experiences (Luppes, “To Our Dead”).

What prompted this shift? In the first two decades of the Federal Republic, the expellees were a highly coveted voting bloc because of their large numbers (approximately eight million expellees ended up in West Germany). In fact, Konrad Adenauer’s first government established a separate Federal...

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