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  • Böhmisches. Allzu Böhmisches? Verwischte Lebensbilder im Südwesten, herausgegeben von der Ackermann-Gemeinde der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart und der Erzdiözese Freiburg by Kateřina Kovačková
  • Franz Posset
Böhmisches. Allzu Böhmisches? Verwischte Lebensbilder im Südwesten, herausgegeben von der Ackermann-Gemeinde der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart und der Erzdiözese Freiburg. By Kateřina Kovačková. (Münster: Aschendorff. 2018. Pp. 384 pp. €24,80. ISBN 978-3-402-13296-8.)

The title needs some unpacking. “Bohemian, all too Bohemian” is not a reference to an unconventional lifestyle but to a geographical term designating the central European region of Bohemia. More recently the territory was called Czechoslovakia, and since 1993 it is the Czech Republic. Verwischte Lebensbilder may be translated with “sketchy, smeared, smudged, or blurred, biographies.” These German speaking people lived in that region for centuries in what (only since the beginning of the twentieth century) was called Sudentenland. Südwesten is a reference to the southwestern corner of present-day Germany, the State of Baden-Württemberg, where many of the Heimatvertriebene (“those chased from their homeland”) were assigned for resettlement after World War II.

We are dealing with twenty biographical sketches of Catholic ethnic Germans who were born in Bohemia before or during World War II and the Nazi terror regime, but grew old in southwestern Germany after the war. They were chased from their homeland in revenge for the atrocities committed by the Germans in Hitler’s Third Reich. Their stories represent the fate of ca. 2,5 million people. The subtitle explains that the book editor is Ackermann-Gemeinde, a West-German, Catholic association to which the contributors belong. Ackermann is actually a literary figure: Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (German for “The Ploughman from Bohemia”) is a work by Johannes von Tepl, written around 1400. The subtitle reveals, furthermore, that these exiled German Catholics had found a spiritual home in the Archdiocese of Freiburg and in the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, as they were supported by local priests such as Father Heinrich Magnani [1899– 1979] (p. 147) or friars of the Augustinian Order who themselves were Heimatvertriebene (p. 153f). For the historian it is always very difficult to assess the role of [End Page 169] faith in horrible life situations, but it can be done as these autobiographical sources of witnesses of that time (Zeitzeugen) demonstrate.

It is quite remarkable that it is a Czech researcher (born in 1981) who is presenting these life stories of ordinary Germans. The book is an important contribution of oral history to Zeitgeschichte and, more specifically, to a neglected element of central European Catholic church history. Most helpful to the uninitiated reader are the map of Bohemia (pp. 16/17), the glossary (pp. 265–379) and the familiar and not so familiar Nazi-abbreviations (p. 381). Within the glossary the most important name is Beneš (German: Benesch), the Czech president in 1935, who was responsible for the postwar “evacuation” (preferred Czech term, although a euphemism), or “forced emigration” (German: Vertreibung) of ethnic Germans. The so-called Beneš-Decrees allowed the exiling of the Germans without compensation for their loss of homes, farms, or businesses. They also provided impunity for everybody who had tortured or murdered Germans. The word Němec is the Czech designation for a German. Any German in Bohemia had to wear a white badge on their arm (German: Armbinde) with the letter ‘N’ in black that designated them as “guilty German” whom one could spit at.

The German Heimatvertriebene refused to be called “refugees” because they did not “flee” but were chased out. They survived by clinging to their Catholic faith (although some committed suicide, often women, when “the Russians were coming” [p. 185]). Usually, the exiled were not told about the destination to which they were being deported in windowless cattle wagons (Viehwaggons [p. 191]). The memoirs also testify to the successful rebuilding of their lives from scratch, after denazification, always happy to have been relocated to the American Occupation Zone in western Germany. Any historian of recent general European history or anyone interested in World War II and its aftermath will benefit from studying the...

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