Monuments to displaced persons
Monuments to displaced persons
1. Definition
Memorials to displaced persons are permanent monuments in public spaces that commemorate displacement or were erected by displaced persons. The monuments to displaced persons that exist in Germany were erected after 1945 and specifically commemorate the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East during the Second World War and immediately afterwards, their dead, and the regions they left behind. Beyond the community of displaced persons, these monuments are intended to serve as media of remembrance for the general public and to firmly anchor a specific aspect of historical memory within society. The lasting impact of these fixed monuments is occasionally reinforced on specific occasions through ritual acts of remembrance, for example at homecoming gatherings or on specific commemorative days such as ‘Day of the Homeland’ or ‘National Day of Mourning’.
2. Number and distribution
There are over 1,500 memorials to displaced persons in Germany, which – with a clear concentration in the ‘old’ Federal States – are now spread across the whole of the Federal Republic. They were mostly erected at local level by local associations of displaced persons in close co-operation with the respective local authority, which is responsible for public spaces. Many monuments were created as part of twinning arrangements between West German local authorities and displaced persons from a formerly ‘East German’ town. Some regional associations also have their own monuments, such as the Transylvanian Saxons in their twin town of Dinkelsbühl. Various Federal States have provided, and continue to provide, financial support for the erection of memorials as part of cultural funding under Section 96 of the Federal Displaced Persons Act. The Free State of Bavaria is the only Federal State to have had a central memorial to displaced persons in Nuremberg since 1998.
3. Shapes and motifs
Most memorials to displaced persons are relatively simple in form and artistically unambitious. They are dominated by plain memorial stones, which often serve merely as a medium for inscriptions. In the early days of the Federal Republic, the cross was a widely used form of memorial. As a traditional Christian symbol of mourning, it served to commemorate the dead; as a symbol of the Passion, it represented the suffering endured by the displaced. During the Cold War, however, it was also used as a symbol distinguishing the Western world and, beyond that, as a symbol of political hope for a revision of borders.
To this day, coats of arms remain the most common motifs on monuments to displaced persons. They represent the homeland left behind, but as German national emblems they were also long intended to symbolise a territorial claim.
Since the mid-1980s, the motif of women and children during flight or expulsion has become increasingly common. At a time when awareness of the victims of National Socialism was generally growing, the suffering associated with the experience of flight or expulsion, as well as the victim status of German displaced persons – who were generally portrayed as innocent – thus came more strongly into focus as motifs.
4. Historical overview
The 1950s marked the first wave of the erection of memorials to displaced persons. The need for places of remembrance for those who had died whilst displaced, combined with territorial revisionism and the political context of the Cold War, led to the creation of almost 400 memorials during that decade. In the following two decades, the number of newly erected monuments was lower, before a second boom in monument construction began in the 1980s. This was politically facilitated by the ‘spiritual and moral turnaround’ promoted by the Federal Government under Helmut Kohl and the associated increase in funding for the causes championed by associations of displaced persons. However, it also came about in response to the growing commemoration of the victims of National Socialism in public spaces. Following the reunification of the Federal Republic with the GDR, monuments to displaced persons also began to appear in the new Federal States, where they had previously been politically undesirable. Monuments to displaced persons continue to be erected in western Germany to this day.
Places of mourning
Around half of all monuments to displaced persons are located in cemeteries or at churches. These locations, together with the fact that a large proportion of the inscriptions commemorate the dead amongst the displaced, highlight the significance of these monuments for the remembrance of the dead. Particularly in the early years following the end of the war, they often served as substitutes for abandoned or unknown graves in the East. Here, the dead left behind, those who had died during flight and expulsion, and in particular the relatives of the displaced persons who had fallen as soldiers during the war, were commemorated. In this respect, memorials to displaced persons frequently served as additions to the existing war memorials of the local population in the host society of West Germany. In doing so, they integrated the displaced persons into the construct of a German community of victims.
Places of integration
With regard to integration in the West, the monuments to displaced persons played an ambivalent role. Erected as part of a reciprocal symbolic act of land-taking and land-granting, they served, on the one hand, as symbols of settling in a new home and of social recognition. Through the erection of public memorials, the displaced people became part of the collective topography of memory. On the other hand, memorials to the displaced could also work against the process of settling into a new home by marking it as merely provisional through their appeal not to give up the old homeland. In recent years, the successful integration itself has increasingly been commemorated in monuments.
Venues for the political appeal
Until the Oder-Neisse border was finally recognised by the state as part of German reunification in 1990, memorials to displaced persons repeatedly served as sites of political mobilisation. They were intended to counteract the definitive recognition of the territorial loss and, rather, to help maintain the state’s claim to the lost eastern territories. As political memorials, they were often symbols of the right to return and the claim for revision – particularly through the speeches delivered at them – as reflected in their form, motifs and inscriptions. Inscriptions and motifs deliberately kept vague contributed to the constructionof an imaginary‘German East’, whose territorial boundaries usually remained blurred. In this respect, monuments to displaced persons followed in the tradition of the revisionist discourse of the interwar period.
Today, monuments to displaced persons increasingly serve the political appeal to condemn expulsions in general as an injustice.
Places of historical interpretation
To this day, monuments to displaced persons remain sites of historical interpretation, intended to shape historical consciousness through their ongoing public presence. Flight and displacement are generally presented in isolation from their historical context. The causal link to the Second World War is obscured. Instead, the memory of loss and the status of the displaced as victims are enshrined. As places of remembrance for victims, monuments to displaced persons in public spaces are in latent competition with memorial sites for the victims of National Socialism.
Whilst the territorial revisionism expressed in many monuments had already been the subject of occasional social or political controversy since the 1960s, in recent years, the relationship between the memory of expulsion and the memory of the Second World War and the victims of the Nazi regime has increasingly been the subject of heated debate in the planning and erection of monuments to displaced persons.
Bibliography
- Federation of Expellees – United Regional Associations and State Associations (eds.): Memorials and Commemorative Sites for German Expellees. Bonn 2008.
- Hans Hesse, Elke Purpus: Monuments and Commemorative Sites for German Expellees. In: Bill Niven, Chloe Paver (eds.): Memorialisation in Germany since 1945. Basingstoke 2010, pp. 48–57.
- Jeffrey Luppes: To Our Dead. Local Monuments to Expellees and the Contestation of German Post-war Memory. PhD thesis, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor 2010, URL: deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78786/1/jluppes_1.pdf.
- Retterath, Hans-Werner: The ‘Cross of the German East’ near Bad Harzburg. A central memorial to displaced persons as an expression of Western ideology, the cult of war memorials and ethnic protectionism. In: Acta Ethnologica Danubiana 13 (2011), pp. 67–100.
- Stephan Scholz: Memorials to Displaced Persons. A Topography of a German Landscape of Remembrance. Paderborn 2015.
- Stephan Scholz: ‘Monuments’. In: Ibid., Maren Röger, Bill Niven (eds.): ‘The Memory of Flight and Expulsion: A Handbook of Media and Practices’. Paderborn 2015, pp. 75–88.
Citation
Stephan Scholz: Monuments to the Displaced. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2014. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/62398.html (as at 1 December 2020).
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