Neither Here nor There? Memorialization of the Expulsion of Ethnic Germans

Abstract

In February 2008 German newspapers reported on an agreement reached between the German and the Polish governments on the controversial German plans to erect a ‘Visible Sign against Flight and Expulsion’ (‘Sichtbares Zeichen gegen Flucht und Vertreibung’).¹ The new Polish government under Donald Tusk will not be participating in this venture but did not preclude the involvement of Polish historians. For its part, the German government promised to take the deportation of Polish people into consideration. This agreement ended a controversial debate on how (and where) to commemorate the flight and expulsion of the German population from those parts of Germany which were handed over to Poland and the (former) Soviet Union after 1945 (East Prussia, Silesia, parts of Pomerania, and East Brandenburg), and of ethnic Germans from their areas of settlement in the former Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia.