Berlin’s most haunted street is the Stresemannstrasse: a ragged artery that was once a bustling avenue for arrivals, adjacent to the cavernous Anhalter train station. The station was a main departure point, too, for countless German Jews, communists and others who, from the 1930s on, fled the ever-tightening Nazi net. From May 1945, the station was the end of the line for ethnic Germans fleeing from eastern territories in modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic.
The ruined front portal is all that remains of the Anhalter station, but a new museum directly opposite has just opened its doors with a portentous message. The flow of people we are seeing today from Ukraine, or in 2015 from Syria, is the rule, not the exception, in human history.
Berlin’s Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation is the right idea at – by tragic coincidence – the right time.
Berlin is filled with museums about the Nazi dictatorship, but this new institution tells the story of what happened afterwards, when the postwar wave of German refugees fleeing the Red Army turned into something much, much larger. In total, up to 14 million Germans and German speakers were forced to leave their homes across central and southern Europe in what historians describe as the largest movement of people since the Book of Exodus.
At least 500,000 people died along the way – of exhaustion, malnutrition or worse – as neighbours turned on them and borders shifted the wrong way. For decades this loss of lives, homes, culture and land has been a contested source of pain and shame in Germany (irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/back-in-bohemia-the-sun-shines-on-a-return-to-the-sudetenland-1.1867276) – and a massive blind spot in Europe's postwar narrative.
‘Culture of remembrance’
Two objects at the heart of the exhibition sum up the documentation centre’s main aspiration. One is a battered wooden hand cart, the kind used by countless women to transport their belongings from East Prussia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland. Adjacent, a simple nylon rucksack carried by a Syrian arrival during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis that brought more than one million people to Germany.
For director Gundula Bavendamm, the centre is an attempt to move Germany’s postwar remembrance culture beyond the victim-perpetrator model to “acknowledge the ambivalence of our history and of history in general”.
“Our exhibition is not about national navel-gazing but rather aims to contribute to a more mature culture of remembrance, one that weights our history in a responsible, nuanced way and puts it in a European context,” she says.
In airy, modern new 6,000sq m (64,600sq ft) exhibition spaces the first floor takes a broad historical approach to the theme of forced migration. It focuses in particular on how the rise of the nation state in the 18th century opened the door to nationalism which, when exaggerated to create an idealised sense of identity, has served as kindling for mass murder and countless wars.
Providing this broad context as a foundation, before moving on to the specific German case, was a long and controversial battle but has, Dr Bavendamm suggests, found tragic confirmation in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The need to homogenise a society, or to make a societal minority part of a majority, is something you can see today in Putin’s rhetoric, such as him offering Russian passports to people in eastern Ukraine,” she says. “Our exhibition has a lot to say about how often citizenship has been used to extend – and revoke – rights from people and thus to engineer the relations between individuals and a society, a state or a nation.”
Visitors move up a spiral staircase to the second floor where, with restraint, curators let hundreds of authentic exhibits tell their own tales of lives interrupted. Like a white cloth with the half-finished hand-stitched text: “Let your heart be as pure as your kitchen.” In addition to the exhibition spaces, a library allows visitors to explore more than 12,000 reports of eye witnesses.
In today’s terms, historians say the postwar expulsion – pushed by Germany’s neighbours but organised by the victorious Aallies – would be classified as ethnic cleansing.
The millions of mostly women, children and the elderly arrived on foot or in cattle wagons of the sort previously used to transport European Jews to their death. With curious accents, traditions and outfits, many were an alien sight, and an ideal scapegoat for other Germans’ guilt and frustration as they struggled to feed their families and rebuild their lives.
There was little compassion or capacity to help the army of new arrivals and discrimination was rife. And when, eventually, Germans began to deal with their Nazi complicity, the suffering of the expellees soon became subordinate to the primary victims of Nazi genocide. Efforts by expellee groups to keep their lives and losses in the public eye grew more desperate, sometimes tipping over into revanchism, and were sidelined by many in Germany as revisionist and relativist.
Emotional debate
It was only a decade ago that the first major scholarly study of this era appeared:, “Orderly and Humane”, written by US-based historian Ray Douglas.
Born in Derry and raised on Dublin’s northside, Prof Douglas remembers his book tour through Germany as an exhausting series of encounters with grateful survivors and – particularly shocking for him – their deeply traumatised adult children.
“At a signing in Munich a very distinguished psychiatrist came up to me, dropped her book and started weeping into the soaking shoulder of her husband,” he recalls. “She was born on an expulsion train from Silesia in December 1946 and, though she was a psychiatrist, she was unable to put the trauma of her past behind her.”
Prof Douglas is impressed at how, after two decades of emotional debate, the Berlin centre has finally opened its doors, even if the pandemic means that many people – including himself – have not yet managed to visit.
As the world faces ever-growing numbers of displaced people, he says it has never been more important to build resilience and counter racism among Germans, and other visitors, by reminding us that all people have a shared migrant past.
“People being moved around by exposure to conflict is seen by many as a foreign concept, in every sense of the word, but the numbers of displaced people are growing exponentially,” he said. “This museum is coming at a marvellous time. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: the past hasn’t happened yet.”
