3 - Narrating History and Subjectivity: Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Erica Pedretti's Engste Heimat (1995)

Summary

Instead of giving all those who betrayed this state a proper trial, we drove them out of the country and punished them with the kind of retribution that went beyond the rule of law. That was not punishment. It was revenge.

Moreover, we did not expel these people on the basis of demonstrable individual guilt, but simply because they belonged to a certain nation. And thus, on the assumption that we were clearing the way for historical justice, we hurt many innocent people, most of all women and children.

IN DECEMBER 1996, more than half a century after Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the expulsion of 3.5 million Sudeten Germans in 1945, Czechs and Germans finally agreed on a bilateral pact on wartime abuses. Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Václav Havel endorsed a joint declaration in which Germans apologized for Hitler's invasion and the subsequent crimes Nazis committed in Czechoslovakia; in turn, Czechs expressed regret for the expulsion and expropriation of many innocent Sudeten Germans. But the declaration provided the expelled with no claim to compensation, an omission that the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, headquartered in Bavaria, harshly criticized: “The expulsion as such is not unambiguously condemned as injustice, but regretted in ambiguous formulations. Practical steps for compensation for injustice are not even touched upon.” In turn, Czechs view Hitler's invasion as a cataclysmic tragedy for their country and, as stated in the document, the Nazi violence toward Czechs as causing the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.