Memory, resentment and the politization of trauma:
narratives of
World War II (Danube Swabians, Entre Rios, Guarapuava - Paraná) 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 Leticia Pakulski.
Memory,
resentment and the politization of trauma: narratives of World War II (Danube Swabians, Entre Rios, Guarapuava-Paraná). Tempo [online]. 2014,
Volume 20, pp.1-26. Epub Oct 24, 2014. ISSN 1413-7704. |
 | | Marcos Stein | Beatriz Olinto | Méri Frotscher |
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Article Contents
Abstract and Introduction Trauma and use of testimonies Construction of "victims' narratives" "The thick brown crust": resentment and forgetting in survival
Final Considerations
Abstract
This article addresses narratives about the Second World War published in Deutsches
Wort, the supplement in German language of the Jornal
de Entre Rios (Guarapuava, Paraná, Brazil). The article focuses on an interview produced in 1984 with an immigrant of the Entre Rios colony, Guarapuava, deported to Ukraine during the war. This interview was carried out in 1984, although edited and published by this journal only in 1994, when
the 50 years of the expulsion of the "Danube Swabians" from Romania, Hungary and ex-Yugoslavia were remembered. The construction of an overcoming sense and of a collective memory about these events, by editing and standardizing the traumatic memories of the witnesses, was assessed. |
INTRODUCTION We became poor. We were destroying the heritage of humanity, and often we had to pawn it for a hundredth of its value, in exchange for the insignificant coin of the "current".2
In the early years of the 21st century, Tzvetan Todorov tried to distinguish the speech of an historian from the speech of a witness and of a commemorator, indicating the possible complementarities between the first two and the unbending opposition between the first, who has an impersonal and problematic true as a perspective, and the last, who is not subject to the tests of truth imposed on the historian and the witness. For the author, memory, a word understood here as mnemonic traces, would create meanings and an identity for a witness. But the collective memory produced by commemorators would not be a memory, but a discourse that evolves in the public sphere and "reflects the
image that a society or group within the society want to express of themselves."3 The media economy has become the key spot for producing and consuming (co) memorable events. Conservation has replaced modernization and remembering has become an obligation. But remembering what and how? If memory implies oblivion, its constitutive trait, it is also a work of selection.4 In a regime of presentist historicity, as the contemporary, the duty to remember and maintain the collectiveness manages to fill the void of meaning between what is
experienced and what is expected. According to François Hartog, this expanded present proves unable to fill the space between experience and expectation. Then, one seeks the terms that allow the creation of an identity in the memory, in the heritage, and in the celebration.5 The cultural production of the collective memory unites and simplifies the knowledge about the past, which the writing of history splits and discusses. It is with this perspective of analysis that this article seeks to address narratives about the World War II from people of German origin self-denominated Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians), who were expelled from Hungary, Romania and the former Yugoslavia, and immigrated to Entre Rios, in the town of Guarapuava, Paraná, in the early 1950s. Oral sources constituted through interviews in 1984-1985 and 1993-1994 with people who experienced the expulsion were edited and published in 1994 in Deutsches Wort, the German supplement of the newspaper Jornal de Entre Rios, when the 50 years since the flight and expulsion from those territories were being remembered. One of the narratives, from Katharina Hech, is the focus of the
article. Born in 1927, she not only experienced the expulsion but also was deported by the Russians to Ukraine in late 1944. In the end and immediately after the end of World War II, millions of Germans and descendants who lived in the east and southeast of Europe fled or were expelled from their territory by partisans and by Russian troops. Among them, there were also descendants of Germans who had colonized lands located southeast of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and later became known as Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians). Although immigrants from Entre Rios identify themselves that way and associate their history with the emigration to the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, this collective designation was formulated only in 1922 by the geographer Robert Sieger of the University of Graz,
Austria. 6During the World War II, the Danube Swabians supported German troops that occupied the territories where they lived, and many joined the Waffen-SS division "Prinz Eugen", created in 1942 to fight the Communist partisans, led by Josep Broz Tito, who resisted the invasion.7 After the withdrawal of the German army in 1944, most of the Danube Swabians fled westward in large treks, and those who failed or could not run away suffered violent retaliations. In late 1944, Tito' government deprived the Danube Swabians of their civil rights in Yugoslavia.
In the contemporary West, the destitution of civil rights came along with the destitution of human rights, according to Giorgio Agamben. For the author, "in the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of men were stripped of any protection and any real meaning at the moment that was not possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a State". 8 These rights were an acknowledged aspect since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, formulated at the beginning of the French Revolution, which associated citizenship with the human condition itself. This hypothesis was tragically
proved during World War II, from the Nazi policy of denationalization of German Jews and the Holocaust to the expulsion of the Swabians.The 200,000 Danube Swabians who had stayed in Yugoslavia were subjected to massacres, torture followed by death, rape, deportation, and confinement in camps. According to Fritjof Meyer, 9,500 people were killed between the autumn of 1944 and the spring of 1945. In eight transportation trains, 8,000 women and 4,000 men were deported to labor camps in the Soviet Union, with 1 in every 6 dying. The remaining 167,000 were confined in camps, where many died of hunger, cold, and diseases. 9
Between 1951 and 1954, with the help of various international humanitarian organizations10 and, specially, the Swiss Aid to Europe (Schweizer Europahilfe), an agency linked to the Catholic Church, about 2,500 Swabians who had moved to Austria and lived there, part of them in refugee camps, immigrated to Brazil. They established themselves in the town of Guarapuava, where they founded, under the coordination of the Agrarian Cooperative, the colony of Entre Rios. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a significant exodus from that colony, with many people settling in cities such as Curitiba and São Paulo or migrating to Germany. In addition to aspects like bad harvests, this phenomenon can also be explained by the traumas and resentments caused by war. This explanation can be found in the book Suábios no Paraná, published in 1971 on the occasion of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the colony. Its author, Albert Elfes, a German agricultural engineer, divides the Danube Swabians into three groups according to age and "[...] to the effect of the external influences that they have suffered". 11 The
first group, he said, was made up of those who fled their homeland as adults:The younger men had taken part in the war. All of them had fulfilled their fate fully aware of their bitter fortune. For them, Brazil was a hospitable country of asylum - it still is -, offering them protection, a space to live and the basis of economic existence - but never became a second homeland to them. Their ties with their home regions were too strong. They were never able to completely overcome the shock and the consequent nostalgia. And so, despite the final economic successes and the guaranteed material existence, many have failed to take root in the new environment. They remained restless, tending to certain isolation when in a strange environment [...]. 12
The second group consists of people born in Entre Rios. Besides communicating in Portuguese, according to the author, "[...] they truly know the Brazilian conditions, specific of their region, easily overcome any resentments of the group and face the Brazilian future full of confidence if they are old enough for that".13 For Elfes, the third group comprises people of an intermediary age in comparison to the ones previously mentioned. This generation would be:
[...] The most burdened, whose memory is overshadowed by war and its effects. Its members spent part of their childhood and adolescence not within the family, but in refugee camps, and they keep nothing more from the old country than vague imaginings, except through stories and literature. The consequences of the disasters were felt with particular strength in the spirit, though meager in those years, of this group. This situation got even worse because of the fact that they grew up at a time when organized and continuous school functioning was nearly impossible: neither in regions where there was partisan fighting, in southwestern Europe, nor, later, in the refugee camps in Austria, nor in the first years after establishing
themselves in Guarapuava. 14In this passage, two aspects of the diagnosis developed by Elfes attract our attention. First, trauma and resentment would have their origin neither in the individual nor in the group, but in the external field, in the relationship with the other - with the partisan, with the new environment, and so on. Second, those who presented more severe symptoms would be the ones who were unaware of the past of the group. They would be the people who experienced the war and the expulsion, but, because of their age and of not attending the schooling environment, which could give meaning to the past of the group, did not have the opportunity to understand the suffering they went through in childhood.
The 200,000 Danube Swabians who had stayed in Yugoslavia were subjected to massacres, torture followed by death, rape, deportation, and confinement in camps In the book, Elfes suggests that school education is an important mechanism to establish and disseminate knowledge, which would make sense of a collective past and articulate it with a particular vision of the future, as well as stimulate the economic development of the colony. Another author, Walter Gossner, a Swiss, had already analyzed the behavior of the Danube Swabians of Entre Rios in 1952, associating it with the traumatic experiences during World War II and, after that, in the refugee camps in Austria. In a report submitted to the Swiss Aid to Europe, Gossner said that many had "emotional disturbance" (seelische Zerruettung) and "fear of the future" (Angst vor der Zukunft). For the author, these memories should be faced in order to overcome traumas and resentments.15
After knowing these diagnoses about the residents of Entre Rios, one can understand the reason behind some investments made by the Agricultural Cooperative, from the second half of the 1960s onwards. The mentioned cooperative supported vigorously several actions to reduce the exodus, among other objectives.16 One of the measures was aimed at creating a collective memory for those immigrants and encouraging traditions, by supporting groups of typical Swabian dances, creating a local museum, and publishing a paper, Jornal de Entre Rios.17
In
such spaces, narratives were created about the past of the group in Europe and in particular in Brazil, as well as interpretations of the traumatic experiences at the end of World War II. In 1994, by publishing excerpts from interviews with people who had experienced the expulsion, the paper tried to create a collective memory and a sense of overcoming, by editing and standardizing the traumatic memories of witnesses, as we will see next.
 NEXT: Trauma and use of testimonies
Footnotes: 1This article is the result of a research carried out through the project Displacements and (dis)encounters: refugees of World War II and "Brazilians" in Guarapuava - PR, funded by the CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) under the process number 400774/2011-9.
2Walter Benjamin, "Experiência e pobreza", In: ______, O anjo da história. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2012, p. 90. 3Tzvetan Todorov, Memória do mal, tentação do bem: indagações sobre o século XX, São Paulo, ARX, 2002, p. 155. 4 Ibidem, p. 149. 5François Hartog, Evidência da história: o que os historiadores veem, Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2011, p. 139.
6The term "Danube Swabians" is a reference to Swabia, where most of the people who migrated to the Austro-Hungarian Empire supposedly came from, using the Danube river as navigation means. About the origin of the term, see Anton Scherer, "Seit 42 Jahren heißen wir Donauschwaben", Volkskalender 1964: Ein Jahrbuch des Gesamten Donauschwabentums, Ulm, 1964, p. 64-68, and Albert Elfes, Suábios no Paraná, Curitiba, [s.n.], 1971. 7About the National Socialists' war crimes and the Danube Swabians of the Banat region (Romania), see Thomas Casagrande, Die Volksdeutschen SS-Division "Prinz Eugen": die Banater Schwaben und die National-Sozialistischen Kriegsverbrechen, Frankfurt am Main, Campus Verlag, 2003.
8Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: o poder soberano e a vida nua, 2. ed., Belo Horizonte, Editora da UFMG, 2010, p. 123. 9Fritjof Meyer, "Hohn für die Opfer", In: Stefan Aust; Stephan Burgdorff (orgs.), Die Flucht: Über die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten, Bonn, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2005, p. 99-102. 10Besides the Swiss Aid to Europe, also participated in the project the Raphaels-Werk, from Hamburg, Germany, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), the Red Cross, the Internationales Arbeitsamt (BIT), from Genebra, and the Bundesamt für Industrie, Gewerbe und Arbeit (BIGA), from Bern, both in Switzerland (Albert Elfes, Suábios no Paraná, Curitiba [s.n.], 1971, p. 44).
11Albert Elfes, Suábios no Paraná, Curitiba, [s.n.], 1971, p. 93. 12 Ibidem, p. 93-94. 13 Ibidem, p. 94. 14Albert Elfes, Suábios no Paraná, Curitiba, [s.n.], 1971, p. 94.15Walter Gossner, Agraria. Die Siedlung der Donauschwaben im Municip Guarapuava im brasilianischen Staate Paraná. Bericht über die Ergebnisse der im Auftrage der Schweizer Europahilfe durchgeführten Untersuchung, Jundiaí, 1952, mimeo, p. 14-16. Freely translated from the quote of Nestor Stein.
16Marcos Nestor Stein, O oitavo dia: produção de sentidos identitários na colônia Entre Rios - PR (segunda metade do século XX), Guarapuava, Unicentro, 2011. 17About that and the creation of a collective memory among the Swabians of Entre Rios, see Marcos Nestor Stein, O oitavo dia: produção de sentidos identitários na colônia Entre Rios - PR (segunda metade do século XX), Guarapuava, Unicentro, 2011.
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