Destination: The Americas
Brazil
Entre Rios | Sao Paulo | Immigration
A Lost Homeland, a Reinvented Homeland: Diaspora and the ‘Culture of Memory’ in the Colony of Danube Swabians of Entre Rios by Méri Frotscher, Marcos Nestor and Beatriz Anselmo Olinto, 14 August 2015
II.
Flucht und Vertreibung in Religious PracticesIn the construction of a ‘culture of memory’ in Entre Rios the theme of ‘flight and expulsion’ from south-east Europe assumed great relevance. In 1966, the recollection of Flucht und Vertreibung was formalized in a religious site of memory when a small chapel was founded especially to remember the Danube Swabians who had died in Yugoslavia during World War II. To this day, every year in October a procession is organized leading to the chapel, which is located in the middle of cereal crops at the point of intersection between the five villages that comprise the colony. At the front of the procession, crosses are carried bearing the names of so-called ‘extermination camps’ ( Vernichtungslager ) in Yugoslavia, where the Danube Swabians were confined until the end of the war.31 This reference to the word Vernichtungslager is taken from the caption for a photo of the procession in the book Entre Rios, published in 1976.32
The construction of the chapel in memory of the Virgin Mary was the result of a promise made by the Danube Swabians who were deported to camps in Yugoslavia, linked to a plea that they might be saved.33 Wendelin Gruber, the priest who was with them at the time of this promise, served in the Entre Rios colony between 1966 and 1971. He laid the foundation stone of the chapel to honour that vow.34 Inside the chapel, behind the small altar, a mosaic triptych can be seen (see Figure 1). In its left-hand panel, beneath a scene of destruction and death in the former homeland, there is an image of the vow. In the centre there is an image of the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus in her arms. To the right there is a depiction of a family giving thanks for the fulfillment of the vow, showing the landscape of Paraná’s pines—the symbol of the state—and a representation of the five villages surrounding the chapel behind.35 It is interesting to note the role of agriculture in this triptych. While the first panel shows agriculture in Yugoslavia with a plough pulled by a horse, the final image shows a tractor, thereby visually symbolizing the discourse of progress in the new homeland.
Figure 1:
Mosaic triptych in the pilgrimage chapel in Entre Rios
Source : Author’s own photographIn 1966 another monument was erected near to the chapel (See Figure 2 ). The following dates were carved in a block of cement: 1716–1966 and 1946. While the first two dates symbolize continuity—250 years since the beginning of colonization in Banat, Hungary—the third date suggests a rupture, the year of the ‘extermination’ of ‘compatriots’ in Yugoslavia.36 Reference to the year 1716 gave a sense of antiquity to Danube-Swabian settlement in south-eastern Europe. Reference to that year also reiterated the idea that there was a long tradition of colonization among the Danube Swabians. In 1966 those who had lived through this ‘long trajectory’ remembered family members and friends who had passed away twenty years earlier. Thus two identifications, as settlers but also as victims of war, were carved in stone and materialized in the local culture of memory.
Figure 2
Altar and monument to family members and friends who had passed away in Yugoslavia in 1946.
Source: J. Lichtenberger, Entre Rios: Documentário ilustrado da colonização suábio danubiana/
Bilderbericht einer donauschwäbischen Siedlung in Brasilien (Campinas, 1976), n.p.
This monument, which has a religious character, and also the practices centered on the ritualization of memory that took place around it, made it possible for the colonists to recall and fix sentiments about the past both as individuals and as a collective group. By remembering the dead, they mourned their own losses. Through the construction of the chapel, the Danube Swabians from different areas of south-eastern Europe sought to reproduce their cultural identity within the diaspora. As Jan Assmann points out, such ritual repetition ensures the coherence of the group in terms of time and space. The rituals provide the transmission of knowledge that ensures cultural identity.37 According to the historian Marcos Nestor Stein, the annual repetition and ritualization promoted by pilgrimage in Entre Rios constitutes a strategy of myth-building that associates the Danube Swabians with a Christian identity.38 In publications and in interviews with immigrants, the events that the Danube Swabians experienced at the end of World War II are often associated with the idea of Christian sacrifice.39Suffering and sacrifice, linked to Flucht und Vertreibung , are also elements that are present in works published by Danube Swabians outside Brazil.40 Christian identity was often referred to in Entre Rios in opposition to communism. According to an article published in 1994 in the local newspaper, for example, the pilgrimage chapel had been built ‘in thanks for escaping the revenge of the Red Dragon’.41
The strong association between Christian religious practices and a ‘culture of homeland’ is visible even in the cemetery of the main village in the colony. It can be seen in the form of a cross with an image of Jesus Christ, erected during the tenure of the same priest who built the chapel in remembrance of the dead in Yugoslavian ‘concentration camps’. On the pedestal of the cross there is an inscription in German: ‘On 8 June 1951, the Danube Swabians who had been expelled from their homeland found a new homeland here, thus acquiring an eternal homeland before God’.42 Such monuments were part of a ‘culture of the homeland’ in cities settled by groups of Germans expelled after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, between 400 and 500 monuments were built in Germany in memory of Germans who died in the so-called ‘lost homeland’.43 However, on the cross in the Vitória cemetery in Entre Rios, apart from the ‘lost homeland’, two other homelands are mentioned: the new, in Brazil, and the eternal, after death. The Christian imagery of the resurrection is therefore mobilized in the construction of a new homeland and the promise of eternity.
The association between Christian sacrifice and Flucht und Vertreibung is constantly renewed in publications by the Danube Swabians who emigrated to Entre Rios, as well as by those who went to Germany. In part of the booklet at the House of the Danube Swabians in Bavaria ( Das Haus der Donauschwaben in Bayern ), published in 1992, flight is represented as the ‘Danube-Swabian Passion’ in an image and short text. In the caption for an illustration in which a crucified person appears next to a fleeing family, the Passion of Christ is represented as the ‘Danube-Swabian Holocaust’.44 The use of the term ‘Holocaust’ to refer to deaths due to the expulsion of the Danube Swabians erases the boundaries between the victims and the perpetrators of World War II and it also politicizes the trauma of expulsion because it claims victim status for the Danube Swabians. In her analysis of ‘narratives of German victims’, Aleida Assmann points out that while the rapes of German women that occurred at the end of World War II are seen by some as a social trauma, which remains a taboo topic in Germany, the topic of ‘expulsion’ is a politicized trauma and open for debate.45
However, in Entre Rios death is not only related to the idea of the lost homeland; on the cross in the cemetery at Entre Rios and in publications about the colony, it is also used to affirm a sense of belonging to a new homeland. For example, in the 1982 book Donauschwaben in Brasilien, this idea is used to refer to the first generation of immigrants to Entre Rios, most of whom were already dead by then: ‘Where the first burials took place, legitimate and permanent housing is now guaranteed’.46 It is worth noting that Sebastian Leicht, the co-author of this work, and the one responsible for the illustrations, also created the above-mentioned illustration ‘Danube-Swabian Passion’, revealing the movement of people and ideas between communities of Danube Swabians in Brazil and Germany.
NEXT: III. The Old and the New Homeland in Commemorative Narratives
Author notes:
31 For photos of this procession, see J. Lichtenberger, Entre Rios: Documentário ilustrado da colonização suábio danubiana/ Bilderbericht einer donauschwäbischen Siedlung in Brasilien (Campinas, 1976), no page number.
33 There is some controversy over where and when the promise was made, either in Yugoslavia or in Austria. See, respectively, ‘Wallfahrt’, Jornal de Entre Rios , 96 (31 Oct. 1991), p. 4, and J. Boing, Pfarrei Erzengel St. Michael von Entre Rios (Entre Rios, 2006). On the plaque affixed to the chapel in 2002, it states that the promise was made in Yugoslavia.
39 Between 2009 and 2013, interviews were carried out with 22 immigrants and their descendants in Entre Rios through two research projects. The first project interviewed people who were adults at the end of World War II. The second project interviewed immigrants from the same generation, together with some of their descendants, because one of the goals was to analyse how different generations of the same families narrated their life stories and how they connected them to family history and the history of the Danube Swabians.
40 See the catalogue of publications by the Danube-Swabian Cultural Foundation publishers, Munich ( Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung ) in H. Prokle et al.,Genocide of the ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, 1944–1948 (Munich, 2006), pp. 211–28. The catalogue contains, for example, the publication of the work documenting the genocide of Germans in the former Yugoslavia, in 4 volumes, with the suggestive title Leidensweg der Deutschen im kommunistischen Jugoslawien [The path of suffering of Germans in Communist Yugoslavia], published in 4 volumes between 1991 and 1995.
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