German, Polish, and Czech scholars and citizens have so far been unable to divorce their enduring ethnic pride, revanchism, and nationalistic versions of history from the basic need to simply commemorate the universalized removal of a people on ethnic grounds. Despite the new rhetoric of multi-cultural cooperation in the European Union, the seemingly sacral nature of ethnic identities, nationalism, and national history have remained unshakable. Old wounds persist unhealed, and inter-cultural tensions endure strongly in Europe today. As a result, the contradictory distortions of history by each involved culture has been one of the major obstacles to commemoration of the ethnic cleansing, and in shaping our general politics of forgetting.
Due to the maelstrom of brutality, genocides, and population transfers by so many different belligerent actors during World War II, as well as the role of these struggles in creating national myths, each European culture views the war and its aftermath through its own distinct lens of historical memory. Each version of history as framed by these ethnic identities is severely biased and obfuscatory.
The Germans are ambivalent. For some, the expelled Germans were the last victims of Hitler's war, subjected to ethnic cleansing as a byproduct of the brutality of the German army and National Socialism. For others, the diasporic Germans were victims of Red Army atrocities and often-exaggerated mass rapes. In both interpretations, the expelled German civilians are, in general, depicted as innocent victims of a brutal ethnic cleansing. For nationalists (and a sizable portion of Germans), the somber memory of ethnic cleansing is tied to the romanticized loss of Germany's eastern territories and Prussia, the founding locus of German statehood and reunification in 1871. Nationalists equally overlook the mass forced relocation of native Polish families to make way for German “living space,” portraying the conquest of Poland as the mere “recovery” of ancient German territory. The expulsion of Germans from the forfeited territories are, for most Germans, not seen as the removal of criminal Nazi settlers, but of innocent German families who settled centuries ago and laid the foundations for state-building and modernization in Eastern Europe. As in all cases, historical memory is vastly distorted by chauvinism, nationalism, and irredentism. In the eyes of most Germans, therefore, a great crime has been committed against civilians and must be acknowledged. The perpetrators of this crime are understood differently, either being primarily the Soviets, Poles and Czechs, the Allies, or all of the above. However, due to the German government's effective betrayal of the memory of the ethnic cleansing and the other factors outlined in this essay, even many Germans are unaware of this history.
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