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
This article is republished at DVHH.org 9 Sep 2020 by
Jody McKim Pharr with expressed permission from authors:
Méri Frotscher, Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná, Brasil;
Profa. Dra. Beatriz Anselmo Olinto, Universidade Estadual do Centro-Oeste;
Marcos Nestor Stein, Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná - UNIOESTE.
Translation: by Sean Stroud. A Lost Homeland, a Reinvented Homeland: Diaspora and the ‘Culture of Memory’ in the Colony of Danube Swabians of Entre Rios, 14 August 2015; German History, Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2015, Pages 439–461. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. Rios, Guarapuava-Paraná). Tempo [online]. 2014, vol. 20, pp.1-26. Epub Oct 24, 2014. ISSN 1413-7704.
Marcos Stein Beatriz Olinto Méri Frotscher Article Contents
Abstract and Introduction
Abstract
This essay details the emergence of an idea of Danube Swabians as eternal colonizers, created by and about one group that settled Entre Rios, in the state of Paraná in postwar southern Brazil. This essay traces the wanderings of these Danube Swabians from south-eastern Europe to Brazil, and it explores how the intersection of their memories of multiple expulsions and survival were coupled with their characterizations as Germans in both Europe and Brazil. In turn, it shows how the colonists and others used those couplings to construct the basis of their trans-Atlantic identity as Germans/Swabians/Brazilians.
INTRODUCTION
Flucht und Vertreibung ) into a ‘site of memory’.1 According to historians Eva and Hans Henning Hahn, the emergence of this expression was the result of a specific policy related to memories that developed after the arrival of German refugees and expelled Germans in the occupied zones of Germany. This site of memory was promulgated through political speeches, publications, exhibitions and monuments, which were mainly funded by the expellees or people associated with them.2 However, although ‘narratives of German victims’ ( deutsche Opfernarrative ) played an important role in many families’ memories and found ever greater resonance in the public sphere, it was not possible to develop a central location within Germany itself to recall these expulsions or to house collective sentiments relating to these pasts.3 Two exhibitions about the expulsions took place in Berlin in 2006, one organized by the House of History ( Haus der Geschichte ) in Bonn and the other by the League of the Expelled ( Bund der Vertriebenen ), and they had very different arrangements and expressed very different sentiments, demonstrating the subject’s polysemic character in the public sphere.4
In stark contrast, in the colony of Entre Rios in southern Brazil, which was founded in 1951 by approximately 2,500 Danube Swabians ( Donauschwaben ) who had been expelled from Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary at the end of World War II, the theme of ‘escape and expulsion’ was one of the founding elements of the local ‘culture of memory’.5 These past events led not only to the production and circulation of discourses in the local public sphere but also to the inauguration of several places of public remembrance. Although the latter were obviously unable to compete with speeches and ‘sites of memory’ related to Brazilian history per se, the ‘culture of the lost homeland’ that was embodied in them was central to the expellees’ idea of building a ‘new homeland’ in Brazil. 6
This article discusses the development of this ‘culture of memory’ in Entre Rios by analyzing a set of its key articulations—particularly monuments, religious rituals and publications—focusing on the meanings of the notion of homeland (old and new) in the local public sphere. In his study of the history of German expellees after 1945, Andreas Kossert argues that memories and longing make spaces become familiar, transforming them into ‘homeland’ ( Heimat ).7 This essay asks how that process works within the context of expellees in diaspora, exploring the memories that they tied to the idea of a lost homeland, and their functioning over time. Its central question is how memories of Flucht und Vertreibung combined with the experiences of immigration and colonization in Brazil to contribute to the invention and creation of a new homeland there.Author notes
This article is the result of a research project entitled Deslocamentos e (des)encontros: refugiados da Segunda Guerra Mundial e brasileiros na Colônia de Entre Rios (Guarapuava—PR ) [Migrations and (Dis)encounters: Expellees of World War II and Brazilians in the settlement of Entre Rios, Guarapuava/ Paraná] supported by CNPq—National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Brazil). I would like to thank Marcos Nestor Stein, who collaborated in the project, for his critical reading of a preliminary version of this text and for the loan of various sources.
NEXT: I. Refugees and Colonizers: The Danube Swabians in Entre Rios
Footnotes1 The term Lieux de mémoire was coined by the French historian Pierre Nora, who analysed ‘sites’ of memory in which the memory of the French nation had been condensed, embodied or crystallized. See the three volumes: P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1984, 1987, 1992).
2 E. Hahn and H.H. Hahn, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’, in E. François and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte : Eine Auswahl (Bonn, 2005), p. 332.
3 A. Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Bonn, 2007), p. 328. Regarding different types of ‘narratives of German victims’, see Assmann, ‘Deutsche Opfernarrative’, in Der lange Schatten, pp. 194–202.
4 For an analysis of these exhibitions, see A. Assmann’, ‘Nationale Geschichte im europäischen Rahmen: Flucht und Vertreibung’, in A. Assmann, Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung (Munich, 2007), pp. 145–49.
5 The notion of ‘culture of memory’ referred to in this article is based on the ideas of Cornelißen, Klinkhammer and Schwentke: it encompasses the interests of social and political groups, as well as a number of genres of cultures of memory, including historical research, autobiographical testimonies, the media, textbooks, political speeches and religious rituals. C. Cornelißen, L. Klinkhammer and W. Schwentke (eds), Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945 (2nd edn., Frankfurt/Main, 2004), p. 12.
6 Regarding the ‘culture of the homeland’ in Germany among those expelled from eastern, central and south-eastern Europe, see Hahn and Hahn, ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’, p. 337.
7 A. Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (2nd edn., Munich, 2009), p. 336.
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