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Memory, resentment and the politization of trauma: narratives of World War II (Danube Swabians, Entre Rios, Guarapuava - Paraná) by Méri Frotscher, Marcos Nestor and Beatriz Anselmo Olinto, Oct 24, 2014
Trauma and use of testimonies
In 1994, the community of Entre Rios remembered, with several actions, 50 years since the "flight and expulsion". Back in January of that year, when the colony was celebrating 42 years of its foundation, the Jornal de Entre Rios published a cover story to explain to the reader the "tragedy" experienced by the Danube Swabians from late 1944 onwards.18 In the next edition, the newspaper reproduced an excerpt from a book in which the author refers to "mass extinctions", "mass deportations", and "mass murder" caused by "hunger and forced labor in the concentration and labor camps".19 In the same month, the newspaper started publishing a series of "accounts" of "witnesses" (Zeitzeugen) who lived in the colony. As the subtitle of the first and of the other "accounts" reveals, the goal was to make the "settlers of Entre Rios narrate (the history) from their lives".
The first account of an immigrant of the colony is about the flight (Flucht) (Figure 1). The text, published in standard German, has a symbolic illustration - with a wagon representing the flight - and a map of the traveled distance to Austria alongside it.20 In the following issues, the theme was the expulsion (Vertreibung).21
Figure 1 Publication of an account of the flight, written by a resident. Source: Deutsches Wort (Supplement of Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, n. 162, 19.01.1994, D1.
As of February, the paper no longer presented written accounts, but started publishing edited excerpts from the interviews. They all comprise a series entitled "A people fighting for their future. The expulsion of the Danube Swabians. Settlers of Entre Rios report on their lives" (Ein Volk kämpft um seine Zukunft. Die Vertreibung der Donauschwaben. Siedler aus Entre Rios berichten über ihr Leben). The series forms a connection between the history of the people, the Danube Swabians, and individual lives "reported" there. The own sequence of the different witnesses' narratives, along with their photos, reinforces the relationship between the ethnicity and the individual.22 However, these are not exactly life stories told there. They are in fact testimonies about the expulsion. The witness, according to François Hartog, bears an obligation to memory, he "must be a voice and a face, a presence; and he is a victim".23
In the articles of this series, there is a selection of excerpts from interviews that refer to a small part of the lives of the witnesses. Although in the subtitle the verb berichten (report) is used, we do not consider them as mere reports, but as narratives. Understood like that, they are creators of new meanings about the facts described there, according to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. He argues that the actions of individuals in the past are narrated through the mediation of language and its cultural constructions.24
The witness, according to François Hartog, bears an obligation to memory, he "must be a voice and a face, a presence; and he is a victim"
These narratives are published as testimonies. No wonder the interviews were recorded, transcribed, and published in the Swabian dialect spoken on a daily basis. They show tragic details of what was known in the German collective memory as Vertreibung (expulsion). From the fall of 1944 onwards, more than 12 million Germans - especially "ethnic Germans" (Volksdeutsche) - fled from the Red Army troops or were expelled from the east, midwest, and southeast of Europe, with more than two and a half million people dying in the flight. Many people who experienced these events were represented and/or represented themselves as Heimatvertriebene (expelled from the homeland) after the war.
In the German cultural universe, memory policies about these traumatic experiences have transformed the very expression Flucht und Vertreibung (flight and expulsion) in a meaningful "realm of memory".25 This "realm of memory" was the outcome of a very concrete policy, which was developed after the arrival of German refugees and people expelled from the occupied zones, by political speeches, publications, and monuments.26 However, although "narratives of German victims" (deutsche Opfernarrative) have an important role in the memory of many families and have increasingly found resonance in the public sphere, there was not a single place in Germany, according to the authors, for the remembrance of the expulsion that could attach collective senses to the past.27
Regarding what is published, although these "narratives of German victims" have become increasingly frequent from the 1990s onwards, only in 2002, with the publication of the book Im Krebsgang, written by Günter Grass, there is a breach in the memory field.28 The book is about the sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff, full of German refugees, by a Russian submarine in the late January of 1945.
From these questions, we can reflect, further on, upon the meanings of publishing the series of "accounts" of witnesses of Entre Rios. The titles and subtitles of this series associate past, present, and future, not in that order. Let us consider first the title: Ein Volk kämpft um seine Zukunft ("A people fighting for their future"). The verb, used in the present, tells us about a struggle faced at that moment. The subtitle, Die Vertreibung der Donauschwaben ("The expulsion of the Danube Swabians"), refers to the past. In other words, the subtitle, which generally specifies the title, is not about the present or the future, expressed in the title, but about the past of the expulsion, which happened 50 years before. If we pay attention to the interconnection of the elements of the title with the subtitle, we can apprehend the production of a meaning that links present/future to the past. In the narrative construction, therefore, there is not an upward linear notion of time, because the fighting that occurs in the present seeks a future that refers to the past. These are voices of people that experienced a war in the past and remember it for the sake of survival of the group now and in the future. The narrative of suffering emerges as a possibility of linking different temporalities, in a settling of disruptions and differences between them, because it is the knowledge of the past that reconstructs the present/future of the group.
The selection of the interviews, their transcription, editing and layout, the editor's comments, and the relationship between these and other editorial elements are part of the work of recalling due to a series of transformations. One of the goals of the series was to reach the younger generations, considering the four decades since the founding of the colony, drawing examples from the tragic history of the war for the new generations. This is apparent in an editor's comment, included after one of the "accounts": "Illegal expropriation and deprivation of the rights of the Danube Swabians as a result of the World War II did not discourage these people. On the contrary! They rolled up their sleeves and executed again a remarkable pioneering work".29 The "Danube Swabians" are therefore represented as victims of a tragedy, the expulsion, transformed into a referential "realm of memory" for asserting an identity of "pioneer" people, which should be maintained.
Leaders of the colony were concerned not only about the reduced frequency in the cultural activities organized by the Jugendcenter of the colony, a cultural center for young people,
30 but also about their historical conscience of the past.In a comment of the same editor that appears after another passage of a published "account", the goal of reaching new generations with that series is explicit:
The above account confirms that the Danube Swabians - regardless of where they sought a new homeland for themselves - could guarantee a solid life for their offspring through their proverbial diligence. I want to emphasize that clearly to show the current Swabian youth that they can be proud of their parents and their grandparents[emphasis added].31
The discourse of the lost homeland is here compared with the affirmative speech of a vocation to the pioneering spirit, which would have created a new homeland in the colony of Entre Rios. It states an overcoming of the past, at least in the economic sense. But the limited extent of the overcoming of the past can be seen in the publication of a series of narratives about the traumatic experiences of the past and in the manifestations of resentment in the stories of the newspaper.
In addition to these internal generational issues in the colony, one can observe the interference from external events in the analysis of the production conditions of that series of "accounts". It was published during 1994, when the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of Germans living in eastern and southeastern Europe was remembered by various existing Danube Swabians entities around the world to which the cultural leaders of the colony had contact. Numerous reports on meetings of Danube Swabians' entities around in the world, occurring in Germany, USA, Canada, and Argentina, were published by the newspaper. One of the meetings was even held in Entre Rios, in January 1992, when the colony celebrated its 40th anniversary.32 There were, therefore, shared elements of a "culture of memory" about the war built transnationally among these entities.33
The initiative to bring the memories of this traumatic past up, at the local level, was also taken in a time frame, since the beginning of the 1990s, when thousands of deaths, mass flights, and expulsions occurred again in the former Yugoslavia, because of the "ethnic cleansing" wars in Bosnia and Croatia, territories where much of the Swabians who immigrated to Entre Rios were originally from. The coverage of these international events by the international media interfered in the local discourses of memory. Jornal de Entre Rios itself made direct reference to those events in various reports, trying to relate them with the past experienced by the residents of the colony.
During the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Entre Rios, in 1992, for example, the president of the Agrarian Cooperative, Mathias Leh, had spoken this:
When I was a child, I had to watch as our people died. I felt the pressure that weighed on all of us in that murderous war of guerrillas, which is only understood now after other people suffered their turn. Between 1941 and 1948, it was "our turn" (referring to the Swabians).34
According to what Leh said in 1994, the Swabians have also been victims of a "murderous guerrilla war", as the civilian population of the Balkans in the early 1990s.
35 This passage provides evidence about the difficulties to understand the events that took place during World War II and shortly after it for people of the colony who had not been witnesses of it.The series published in the paper two years later and analyzed here addressed this audience. Therefore, the theme expulsion (Vertreibung), in the subtitle of this series, refers not only to the events occurred 50 years earlier but also revives the memory, following the needs of the present and the desires for the future of the colony.
The memories of residents who lived through the tragedy are transferred to another sphere when published in the newspaper. They leave their private scope and enter the public space, not for their uniqueness, but for the possibility of generalizing, with the aim of group cohesion. The point is not to show the traumatic experiences of a single individual. One wants to show each as an example of a collective destiny. The exposure of individual suffering in the public space also seeks to transform the readers into witnesses of this experience. But, in order to do this, first you need to select the narrative, frame it in time, and cut it in passages, with the goal of reaching an ideal collective reader: the "Danube Swabians".
Studying the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after Apartheid, Rebecca Saunders discussed the possibilities of translating human suffering to the language of human rights. For the author, this translation enabled the recognition of the events, the identification of victims, and the accountability for perpetrators, but distorted the experience, summarizing it in a previously established standardized language. Saunders points out that this happened because the set priority was the rehabilitation of the community - in the case that she studied, the national community - rather than of the individual, who feels the meaning of his experience reduced.
36This analysis enriches the understanding of the editing work on the individual narratives that turned them into publishable reports in Entre Rios in 1994. In it, individual memory is pressed and managed by an interest of collective cohesion. This use of the narrative orients the attempt to share the experience. Thus, the account becomes a cogwheel in the production of knowledge and not a dialogue.37 As it is possible to observe, in the analysis of one of the published interviews, the one with Katharina, she starts to talk using expressions such as "what you want to know ...", "I want to register..." several times, which shows her awareness of the importance of her testimonial narrative.
Registering seemed like an urgency, and her narrative was driven by that. Personal experience was used on behalf of a collective interest and, consequently, a political interest.
NEXT: Construction of "victims' narratives"
Footnotes
18"Die Geschichte der Donauschwaben. 50 JahreVertreibung: Eine Erinnerung", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios-Guarapuava,n. 159, 8 de janeiro de 1994, D1.
19"Vertreibung der Donauschwaben. Beginn der Flucht", Deutsches Wort(Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, 15 de janeiro de 1994, D6.
20"Die Flucht. Siedler aus Entre Rios erzählen aus ihrem Leben", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, n. 162, 29 de janeiro de 1994, D1.
21"Zeitzeugen. Berichte über die Vertreibung. Siedler aus Entre Rios erzählen aus ihrem Leben", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, 22 de janeiro de 1994, D6.
22For an analysis of the accounts of the witnesses, see Marcos Nestor Stein, O oitavo dia: produção de sentidos identitários na colônia Entre Rios - PR (segunda metade do século XX), Guarapuava, Unicentro, 2011, p. 234-249.
23François Hartog, Evidência da história: o que os historiadores veem, Belo Horizonte, Autêntica, 2011, p. 209.
24Aldo Nelson Bona, História, verdade e ética: Paul Ricoeur e a epistemologia da História, Guarapuava, Unicentro, 2012, p. 352.
25Pierre Nora, who coined the term, intended to analyze the "realms" - in every sense of the term - in which the memory of the French nation had condensed, bonded, or crystallized.
26Eva Hahn; Hans Henning Hahn, "Flucht und Vertreibung", In: Etienne François; Hagen Schulze (orgs.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte: Eine Auswahl, Bonn, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2005, p. 332.
27 Ibidem. About different typologies of "narratives of German victims", see Aleida Assmann, "Deutsche Opfernarrative", In: ______, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik, Bonn, C.H. Beck, 2007, p. 194-202.
29This and other cited passages that follow were translated by Méri Frotscher in "Ein Volk kämpft um seine Zukunft. Die Vertreibung der Donauschwaben. Siedler aus Entre Rios berichten über ihr Leben", Deutsche Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, 26 de fevereiro de 1994, D2.
30"Jugendcenter tenta atrair frequentadores", Deutsches Wort(Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, n. 83, 15 de abril de 1991, p. 5.
31Oswald Hartmann, "Ein Volk kämpft um seine Zukunft. Die Vertreibung der Donauschwaben", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, n. 167, 12 de março de 1994, D2.
32"Dachverband der Donauschwaben", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios -Guarapuava, n. 100, 27 de dezembro de 1991, p. 1.
33About the different ways of dealing with the past of war in different countries of Europe, see Harald Welzer, Der Krieg der Erinnerung: Holocaust, Kollaboration und Wiederstand im europäischen Gedächtnis, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007, Christoph Cornelißen; Lutz Klinkhammer; Wolfgang Schwentke (orgs.) Erinnerungskulturen: Deutschland, Italien und Japan seit 1945, 2. ed., Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2004.
34Discourse of Mathias Leh, In: Heinrich Sattler, "Wirsindanders", Deutsches Wort (Suplemento do Jornal de Entre Rios), Entre Rios - Guarapuava, n. especial, 8 de junho de 1992, p. 24.
35About the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, see Jaime Brener, Tragédia na Iugoslávia: guerra e nacionalismo no leste europeu, São Paulo, Atual, 1993.
36Rebecca Saunders, "Sobre o intraduzível: sofrimento humano, a linguagem dos direitos humanos, e a Comissão de Verdade e Reconciliação na África do Sul", SUR: Revista Internacional de Direitos Humanos, São Paulo, vol. 5, n. 9, p. 52 -75, dez. 2008.
37Rebecca Saunders, "Sobre o intraduzível: sofrimento humano, a linguagem dos direitos humanos, e a Comissão de Verdade e Reconciliação na África do Sul", SUR: Revista Internacional de Direitos Humanos, São Paulo, vol. 5, n. 9, p. 57, dez. 2008.
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