“What have we done to ourselves?” – Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in Die Zeit.

The interviewers were Gunter Hofmann and Bernd Ulrich. Published August 28, 2003

Question/Hofmann, Ulrich: Mr. Minister, there are plans to establish a centre against expulsions in Berlin. You yourself grew up in a family of German-Hungarian refugees. What do you think of the idea?
Answer/Fischer: As I see it, the current debate about the Germans as victims - which tends to take as its starting-point the German retreat in the face of the advancing Red Army - is totally skewed. I say that in full awareness of my own family's history. When we talk about expulsion, we cannot simply leave out the whole story of what happened before. Otherwise we end up debating a completely false proposition, namely, that the Germans were victims, too. Such an attempt to relativize this legacy of guilt would, I believe, produce a very dangerous result, a completely distorted view of history that neither bears any relation to reality nor in any way serves our European interests. The real issue - which we have not even begun to debate as yet - is this: What have we done to ourselves? And what have we lost as a result?

Is that something which more than 50 years after the end of the war the Germans have still not debated?
Clearly there has been no real debate as yet on what we have lost as a result of the self-destruction we inflicted on ourselves. I can well understand the pain people feel on account of what has been lost. But we must understand that the cause of this pain is what we have done to ourselves, not what others have done to us.

But is that not also the pain suffered by victims?
The pain over what has been lost, over the destruction of the German-Jewish symbiosis, the pain over the irreversible loss of culture, the pain one feels when visiting, let's say, Galicia or Thessaloniki today, the pain over the loss of the ancient Jewish culture there, irrevocably destroyed by the National Socialists - all of this amounts also to the destruction of our own German culture. And it ended with the destruction of ancient German cities, the loss of homelands and the destruction of the long-established German minority communities in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. However, if this self-destruction is to have its due place in our collective memory, we cannot take 1944 as our starting-point. We have to go back well before that. But that debate has nothing to do with the one Ms Steinbach is involved in. The debate I want to see must also heed the fears and concerns of our neighbors.

Also Erika Steinbach, the President of the League of Expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen), wants a center that would tell the story of the expulsions as from 1933. How does your outlook differ from hers?
The League of Expellees is not the right body to be in charge of a museum. In my view the issue is not expulsion as such but the process of German self-destruction. So in that sense we cannot talk about the Germans as victims.

Do you feel a victim yourself?
No. The collapse of National Socialism brought liberation - also and especially for Germany. When for the first time in 1987 I visited the village in Hungary that my family came from, I walked through its streets accompanied by the last survivors of my parents' generation. I discovered that the lot of those who remained had been more bitter by far. They were expropriated and discriminated against twice over: first as members of the German minority and then - under communism - as members of their class. It was those who left who had the easier lot.

Has your generation paid too little attention to the issue of expulsion, was the subject taboo?
Far from it! All through my childhood and adolescence I heard endless stories of expulsion, occupation, nightly bombing raids and expellee meetings. The media of the time were full of them, too. I came up against quite different taboos in fact, regarding the question of German guilt, for example. Up to the mid-sixties that was an issue which was almost totally ignored. On holiday I read a book entitled "Am Beispiel meines Bruders" (My Brother's Example) by Uwe Timm. Through his family history - his brother joined the Waffen-SS at the age of 19 and died of his wounds in 1943 - the author explores with great skill and sensitivity the whole ambivalence of how Germans remember their past. I fear, though, that by glossing over this ambivalence, the ongoing debate about the centre against expulsions is confusing the issue.

Because in some superficial way the expellees and the victims of Auschwitz are placed on the same footing?
The victims of National Socialism view it that way. Any attempt to focus on the expulsions alone and exclude the rest is bound, I believe, to lead to the wrong conclusions. It is after all not the case that any of the generation that experienced expulsion or any of their descendants - millions of Silesians, Sudeten Germans, and the ethnic Germans from Hungary, Romania or East Prussia - wants to return. As far as the Hungarian Germans are concerned, I think I can rightly say they have become an important link between Germany and Hungary. Nor has the problem to do with any failure to tell the truth about the crimes that were committed against Germans, who were mostly quite innocent, since those who did bear guilt had fled with the German army, well knowing they could expect no mercy. There are detailed accounts of all that - they read as a record of sadism - in the comprehensive documentations published by the Federal Government. So there are no taboos in this area.

Do people on the left like Daniel Cohn-Bendit or Peter Glotz feel a need to seek reconciliation with the expellees?
As a second-generation expellee I cannot seek reconciliation with myself.

Do people on the left have a bad conscience vis-à-vis the expellees?
I have no bad conscience vis-à-vis myself.

You do not otherwise hesitate to speak of the left in the plural.
I am a left-winger and I come from a German minority family.

Today you speak for the Hungarian Germans, but not for the left?
No, I speak only for myself. If we as a nation want to remember the expulsions, it cannot be done by creating a memorial to the expellees, it must be a project that explores the theme of German self-destruction. If the focus is to be "against expulsion", then it has to be placed in a European context, it cannot be a national project. Otherwise there is good reason to suspect that the real intention is ultimately to rewrite history so as to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator.

You want a center in Berlin that takes German self-mutilation as its theme. Do we not have that already with the Holocaust memorial?
That is certainly the central element. But I feel the cultural loss is important, too. When we discuss the German language today in the European Union, I am well aware that the status it once had has been irretrievably lost. And I do not mean simply the fact that the German minorities which were its vehicle now hardly exist but also that the German language was for the elite in many parts of Europe an important frame of reference, centered on the Jewish bourgeoisie both in Germany itself and in much of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Do we fully realize that even up to the present day we have still not been able to compensate for what was lost in terms of learning, intelligence, culture, film-making, literature? Have we Germans ever properly discussed what responsibility Germany bears for the destruction of the culture of our German minorities, rather than pointing the finger at the Czechs and others? Were Ms Steinbach to take that approach, then the discussion would be meaningful, for it would help us, via a process of very critical self-reflection, to find our true bearings. That would perhaps enable us to find anew something of what our country lost under the Nazis.

Would such a discussion require a symbol?
That would be the next question. But at any rate such a symbol would definitely not be a centre for the victims of expulsion.

Should we view the Holocaust Memorial as something whose message, by extension, speaks for us all?
That is an important part of our collective memory. The Holocaust Memorial is clearly focused on the genocide of the German and European Jews for which Germany was responsible.

But your comment about the ambivalence of German history could also reflect a certain unease, a sense that there is nothing more to be learned from the past.
Facing up to the responsibility we bear in the light of our history is the very foundation of our democracy. Today we build - albeit with some controversy - on this strong democratic tradition we now have in the Federal Republic of Germany. Today we build on the normative and institutional reality of one of the most liberal societies in Europe, something that is prized and cherished in all sections of the population. The distrust that for many years was a hallmark of my generation - including myself up to German reunification - has now evaporated. However, - and this I want to emphasize - that does not mean the need for vigilance is over, the need to be on our guard against, for example, all forms of anti-Semitism and discrimination of minorities. To sum up: I am not worried about our country's inner fabric. That I say also, by the way, to all those who believe either that such a revisionist approach to history could actually work or that it would have disastrous consequences. I for my part am no longer worried on that score.

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