After Memory

World War II in Contemporary Eastern European Literatures

Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller, Heike Winkel, Matthias Schwartz, Nina Weller, Heike Winkel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110713879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Even seventy-five years after the end of World War II, the commemorative cultures surrounding the War and the Holocaust in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe are anything but fixed. The fierce debates on how to deal with the past among the newly constituted nation states in these regions have already received much attention by scholars in cultural and memory studies. The present volume posits that literature as a medium can help us understand the shifting attitudes towards World War II and the Holocaust in post-Communist Europe in recent years. These shifts point to new commemorative cultures shaping up 'after memory'. Contemporary literary representations of World War II and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe do not merely extend or replace older practices of remembrance and testimony, but reflect on these now defunct or superseded narratives. New narratives of remembrance are conditioned by a fundamentally new social and political context, one that emerged from the devaluation of socialist commemorative rituals and as a response to the loss of private and family memory narratives. The volume offers insights into the diverse literatures of Eastern Europe and their ways of depicting the area's contested heritage.

IV Imaginative Reconfigurations: Average Heroes and Ambivalent Subjectivities

Ghetto, Ivano-Frankivsk

Digging up Skulls, Fighting with Words: On Radka Denemarková’s Novel Money from Hitler

Heike Winkel

In the run-up to the Czech presidential election in 2013, two candidates competed against each other: right wing populist Miloš Zeman of the Party of Civic Rights (SPOZ /Strana Práv Občanů) and Karel Schwarzenberg of the centre-right party TOP 09. The second television debate sparked off a fierce dispute between the opponents on the subject of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Schwarzenberg claimed that expulsion would certainly be considered a war crime today, as would be the decrees that legitimised it at the time. Thus, he effectively called the person responsible, Eduard Beneš, head of the government in exile during World War II, a war criminal, who, by today’s standards, would probably have to answer for his actions in The Hague. Zeman responded by stating, that “he who calls […] one of the presidents of Czechoslovakia a war criminal, speaks as a sudeťák [pejorative for Sudeten German, HW] and not as the president” (Kaczor 2013).

Zeman’s insult was not a spontaneous outburst but symptomatic of a populist campaign in which his political opponent’s ethnic identity and the issue of Sudeten Germans played a central role. Much effort was made to denounce Schwarzenberg, who came from an old aristocratic family and had lived in Austrian exile during the communist rule of 1948–1989, as a fake Czech. In a large-scale press campaign, the population was warned against voting for him, as he allegedly intended to reverse the expropriation of the Germans after the war, which would have meant the restitution of property to descendants of war criminals.

These events point to the fact that, almost 70 years after the end of the war, the issue of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans is still highly topical and extremely controversial in the postsocialist Czech Republic. As such, it was fertile ground for literary representations. Tellingly, two of the most successful novels, both of which were awarded the country’s most important literature prize Magnesia Litera, place a Sudenten German protagonist at the centre of the narrative. In 2010, the prize was awarded to Kateřina Tučková’s novel The Expulsion of Gerta Schnirch (2009, Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch). It tells the life story of Gerta Schnirch, who was forced on the notorious Brno death march, the harsh eviction of the Brno Germans to the Austrian border by Czech police units, which took place on the night of 30 to 31 May 1945. The march, her time in the concentration camp in Pohořelice, her life as a forced labourer near the Austrian border and her life after her return to socialist Brno, where she is compelled to conceal her past and faces social exclusion, are described in a rather conventional realistic style. In contrast to her father, who was a Nazi, Gerta represents the innocence of civilian Sudeten Germans, who became the pawn of political history. Far more interesting from a formal point of view, especially with regard to questions of memory, is Radka Denemarková’s Money from Hitler (2006, Peníze od Hitlera), which received the award in 2007.

In this article, this novel will be contextualised within the literature on the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans and interpreted as an analysis of a society that, for decades, avoided dealing with the contested past and acknowledging its own guilt. In a fictional experiment, the author brings a Jewish Sudeten German and the Czech inhabitants of her former home village together to illustrate the consequences of this suppression. In order to do so, I will first give a short outline of the historical circumstances of this forced resettlement, before sketching out how the topic has been dealt with in the scholarly literature so far. Against this background, I will then analyse Money from Hitler as an investigation of ‘after memory’ in postsocialist Czech society addressing the topic of the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. My main concern is to show how unresolved psychological and social traumata manifest in dysfunctional and violent communication.

1 Historic Outline: Negotiating Expulsions

In order to adequately evaluate the novel’s poetics and impact, it is necessary to contextualise it within the historical events, starting from the closing of the Munich Agreement in September 1938. With this agreement, Great Britain, France, and Italy tried to defuse Hitler’s threats of war by allowing the German Reich to annex the Sudeten German territories of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia had to yield to British and French diplomatic pressure and cede the strategically important territories in the hope of securing the continued existence of the nation. As we know now, of course, such hopes were in vain, the fatal appeasement policy marked the beginning of the complete destruction of Czechoslovakia. After Hungarian-populated territories in Slovakia had also been seceded and Poland had annexed territories in the north, Hitler broke the Munich Agreement and occupied the so-called ‘rest of Czechoslovakia’. With the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist in March 1939 and an occupation period began, which lasted until the end of the war. After the war, there were mass expulsions of Germans from both the eastern territories of the former Reich and areas beyond its borders in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. On the territory of the former protectorate, after the retreat of the German occupation authorities, the liberated western areas of northern Czechoslovakia found themselves in a lawless state. From May until August 1945, about 730.000 Germans who had settled in Northern Bohemia became subject to arbitrary expropriations and expulsions, later referred to as wild expulsions.¹ On 19 of May Edvard Beneš issued the first of a series of decrees, laws, and statutes declaring “persons of German and Magyar nationality” as unreliable and placed their property under forced supervision, thus, de facto advancing his plans to create a homogenous nation state. At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union declared the “transfer of the German population to Germany” to be lawful – in “an orderly and humane manner”, as was emphasised. As a result of these provisions, 2.2 million Germans were transferred from Czechoslovakia in 1946 (Staněk 1994, 182).

In light of the hitherto unthinkable extent of German war crimes, the expulsion of the Germans seemed justified or at least understandable to the Allied powers and their constituencies, and in Czechoslovakia, too, they met with approval in all levels of society. The escalation of the Cold War led to an ideological instrumentalization of the issue on both sides. After the communist party came to power in 1948 in Czechoslovakia, the government, under the leadership of Klement Gottwald, pursued a policy of silencing this issue. In the socialist part of Germany, any discussion of the subject was undesirable and even at risk of being politically sanctioned. In West Germany, in 1949, the Federal Ministry of Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims began coordinating the integration of displaced Sudeten Germans. It adopted a revanchist stance and its activities were overshadowed by the Nazi past of its leading officials. This policy both expressed and promoted a discourse of self-victimisation in West Germany. From the late 1960s onwards, this self-perception of the Germans became increasingly challenged by the 1968 generation. In the following decades, the discourse of self-victimisation competed with the critical discourse about the perpetrators, which emphasised, above all, the guilt of the Germans (Berger 2006, 217). In the 1970s, discussions on the extent to which ordinary Germans held responsibility for the Nazi regime increased in the Federal Republic of Germany against the resistance of large swathes of the society unwilling to come to terms with the past. As a result of the Ostpolitik, put forward by the German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the Treaty of Prague concluded in 1973, the Federal Republic of Germany officially recognised the inviolability of the borders of Czechoslovakia and waived any territorial claims in the future.

In Czechoslovakia, a process of national self-questioning was taking place as well (Douglas 2012, 354). After a brief period of liberalisation during the Prague spring, the political and moral legitimacy of the expulsion was increasingly cemented in political and literary discourse during the long period of ‘normalization’ from 1968 to 1989. In dissident circles, however, and in exile, the topic was discussed quite openly and intensively. Important impulses came from Germany, where many left-wing dissidents had found support in Sudeten German circles. In 1978, a conference was held in Bavaria at which the planning and course of the expulsions were discussed (Houžvička 2015, 369). In the same year, the Paris-based journal Svedectví published the Theses on the Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans (Tézy o vysídlení československých Nemcov), authored by a certain “Danubius”, aka Ján Mlynárik.

In his text, Mlynárik considered the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans together with other forced ethnic resettlements in the twentieth century ordained by the two ‘totalitarian’ systems, Communism and National Socialism, focussing especially on resettlements in the Stalinist Soviet Union. He rejected the idea of the German collective guilt² and stated that, in newly founded Czechoslovakia, the Sudeten Germans had been effectively deprived of their rights. Mlynárik interpreted the atrocious behaviour of the Czechs toward the Sudeten Germans as a psychological over-compensation for their own passive conformism or even collaboration with the National Socialists.

This argumentation was directed against the dominant political narrative within the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic that justified the deportation of the Sudeten Germans in the name of national sovereignty (Glassheim 2001, 209). In contrast, within dissident exile circles, the vision of the newly gained virgin borderland that could serve as an experimental field for the erection of a socialist society was considered a complete failure. Mlynárik suggested that the failure to come to terms with this past was one of the main reasons for the moral corruption of the communist ideal and the decline of political culture during the so-called period of ‘normalisation’. With his polemical thesis, fuelled by strong anti-Soviet and anticommunist resentments, Mlynárik sparked an intense debate that involved both exiled dissidents and dissidents within Czechoslovakia. Even...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• After Memory: Introduction
• Growing in the Cracks: On Ecologies of the Margins
• I Imaginary Adoptions: Family Histories and Personal Legacies
• II Revisionist Appropriations: National Belongings and Collective Identities
• III Fictional Interventions: Alternate Narratives and Subverted Mythologies Ghetto, Lviv
• IV Imaginative Reconfigurations: Average Heroes and Ambivalent Subjectivities Ghetto, Ivano-Frankivsk
• Appendix
• Index