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
V. Danube Swabians as War Victims:
RememberingFlucht und Vertreibung For the Agrária cooperative, ensuring the ‘economic success’ and the ‘proper functioning of community life’ of the colony also depended on a policy of memory, which asserted a common past for all generations in order to maintain group cohesion. This was one of the main purposes of remembering the 50th anniversary of ‘flight and expulsion’ in 1994, when the Agrária cooperative sought to link the younger generations to the past of their parents and grandparents. Throughout that year, the Deutsches Wort, a supplement written in German in the Jornal de Entre Rios newspaper, which was founded in 1987, published excerpts from interviews with eyewitnesses of flight and expulsion in a series entitled: ‘A people fights for its future. The expulsion of the Danube Swabians. Settlers of Entre Rios reporting their lives’.100 Published in the newspaper, the memories of those who lived through the tragedy at the end of World War II were extracted from a private universe and entered a public space, not due to their uniqueness, but because of their generalizability. The newspaper wished to show the eyewitnesses as examples of a collective destiny. The process of connecting some ‘reported’ individual memories with the Swabian ‘people’ reinforced the relationship between ethnicity and the individual.101 The exposure of individual suffering was an attempt to transform readers into witnesses of these experiences as well. The narratives had to be selected, edited and fragmented so as to reach the ideal collective reader: the ‘Swabian people’.
Jakob Lichtenberger conducted some of the published interviews in 1983 and 1984. By interviewing immigrants who had experienced Flucht und Vertreibung , he produced testimonies that fitted his own perspective on history, and he sought to have the interviewees structure their narratives around the most dramatic events at the end of World War II. As a result, he constructed ‘narratives of victims’, which were made available for posterity in the local museum. The previous history of collaboration with the Nazis was spared and the Danube Swabians appear as passive victims of history during the war.
The timing too was important. The series with interview excerpts was published at the same time as the Yugoslavian wars, when thousands of deaths, mass flights and expulsions were occurring in the territories from which many of Entre Rios’ people had come. These events interfered in the discourses of memory at a local level, as can be seen in the speech made by the president of the Agrária cooperative during the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of Entre Rios, in 1992:
When I was a child, I had to watch as our people died. I felt the pressure that weighed on us all during that murderous guerrilla war, which is now also understood because others are in the same situation. Between 1941 and 1948, we ‘Swabians’ were in that situation.102
Moreover, just as the president of the Agrária cooperative evoked the Balkan wars to reinforce the Danube Swabians’ identity as war victims, this same idea was reaffirmed in the series of newspaper essays about flight and expulsion published in 1994. The newspaper gave political meanings to the past and politicized the trauma experienced by those who had been expelled.103 At the end of a dramatic ‘report’, the editor, Heinrich Sattler, referred to a ‘duty of memory’: ‘Human destinies, of which no film of denunciation has been made, and also which might not be in accordance with the guidelines of the associations of expelled Germans: Forgive, but do not forget’.104 This final motto hints at the existence of disputes surrounding memories of the war at a global level and the use of the word ‘denunciation’ denotes the claim of the status of victims for the Danube Swabians.
When connecting the past and the present to the future, as evidenced by the title of the series, the newspaper also wanted to present to the younger generation examples of overcoming difficulties. The memory of expulsion should continue to reside in their minds, because it was part of their ongoing ‘fight for their future’. In part, that stemmed from generational shifts, and a concern among the leaders in the colony about both the low level of cultural activities promoted by the Jugendcenter (the cultural centre dedicated to young people) and young people’s lack of historical awareness of the past.105 The editor made it clear that the series was aimed at the younger generations:
[EXT] Danube Swabians—regardless of where they sought a new homeland for themselves—could provide a strong presence to their descendants through their proverbial diligence. I want to emphasize this to show the current Swabian youth that they can be proud of their parents and their grandparents.106
Thus by publicly remembering the past, they sought not only to come to terms with the loss of their former homeland and to promote the construction of a new Heimat in Brazil, but also to provide for its maintenance, for its ongoing construction. Here again, in that effort, the remembrance of ‘flight and expulsion’ was intertwined with the affirmation of the old pioneering spirit, which had created a ‘new homeland’ in Brazil. Nevertheless, while they affirmed the overcoming of the past in economic terms, their eager need to publish narratives about the traumatic experiences shows that the past remained unresolved.
NEXT: VI. Conclusion
Footnotes:
DVHH < Destination: The Americas < Brazil < Entre Rios < A Lost Homeland, a Reinvented Homeland: Diaspora and the ‘Culture of Memory’ in the Colony of Danube Swabians of Entre Rios < V. Danube Swabians as War Victims: Remembering Flucht und Vertreibung
