The Documentation Center for Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation, is opening more than 13 years after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government gave the plan the go-ahead. Housed in a late-1920s building in downtown Berlin, it features some 700 exhibits over 1,500 square meters (16,000 square feet).
“This center was discussed at length and intensively, in Germany but also with our partners in Europe,” Merkel said in an address to the opening ceremony, welcoming the presence of the Polish, Czech and Hungarian ambassadors. “The discussions about this place really were not always easy, but they were important.”
Merkel said the new center, complete with a library, “fills a gap in our coming to terms with history.” Still, making the project reality was long viewed as “an impossible balancing act,” according to the center’s director, Gundula Bavendamm.
Controversies revolved around one central question, Bavendamm told reporters ahead of the opening: “How can the exodus and expulsion of Germans at the end of and after World War II be portrayed without raising the slightest doubt that this country is aware of its lasting responsibility for the German crimes of World War II and the murder of European Jews?”
The project centers on the millions of Germans who fled from advancing Soviet forces or were kicked out of parts of eastern and central Europe as Germany’s borders were moved westward after the war, “in the historical context” of Nazi crimes, said Bavendamm — the project’s third director.
“Without the Nazi policies of expulsion and annihilation, 14 million Germans wouldn’t have lost their homes as a result of flight and expulsion,” she added. “But that doesn’t change the fact that their expulsion by the Allies and the eastern and central European states in the aftermath of World War II was also an injustice.”
In its efforts to provide context, the exhibition explores “forced migration as a phenomenon of modern Europe,” including displacements during World War I, the arrival of Vietnamese “boat people” in West Germany in the 1970s, the fallout from the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1990s and the European migration crisis of recent years.
Exhibits include some 30 passports, including a German Jew’s passport stamped with the letter “J” in the Nazi era, a “Nansen passport” for stateless refugees from 1937 and a modern-day provisional refugee passport. There is the diary of a girl from East Prussia, a territory Germany lost at the end of the war, chronicling sexual violence.
There’s also a bicycle used by a Syrian refugee to cross the Russian-Norwegian border in 2016. And there are audio accounts by people recounting their arrival in Germany.
By GEIR MOULSON
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