“Only if will be the war to end,” says Arno Surminskis narrative of the “chorus of the prisoners”. Surminski – Siegfried Lenz – from East Prussia; his parents in 1945 in the Soviet Union to be deported, may be he as an eleven-year-old to Schleswig-Holstein to escape. His narrative of the war returnees who arrive in 1955/56 in the border transit camp Friedland, eagerly awaited by their relatives. If they came for. Or not.
Four million people have been funneled over the years through the camp””, the war returnees and thereafter, and until today, ethnic German repatriates. The historian Christopher Sparrow has made Surminskis narrative at the beginning of his book about Friedland, “Homeless. Friedland and the long shadow of war and displacement“. In his research Sparrow came across in the city archives of Göttingen – Friedland, located a few kilometres to the South – photographs by the professional photographer Fritz Paul, who worked for decades for the “Göttinger Tageblatt” and about 6000 Negatives from the transit camp Friedland has left.
At the launch of his book in the Berlin Urania Sparrow showed many of these photographs. The photographer, Fritz Paul, himself a refugee from East Prussia, had an eye for the people, for those who are exhausted from Soviet captivity, returned, among them many women and children, as for those of you with a pounding heart expected, in the hope that the Missing may be among those, the day-to-day to the railway station of Friedland the Polish transport trains as they climbed out of and to the bearing increased.
The term “trauma” did not exist yet, the symptoms
there are gaps in The present knowledge of the history of the Nazi Regime, war, captivity and expulsion. The witnesses of the experience of generation will be less, especially you don’t want to talk about the experience. Sparrow refers to in his with Paul’s photographs vividly illustrated book on the resistance, the “request of the camp administration, to voice to the experiences of the post-War”.
It will be stigmatized the most seriously Traumatized, not to provide the memory performance straight out were, probably from the only too justified fear in the German society. In addition, it was not the symptoms, but the concept of “trauma”. Until today, the history in particular of those who had lost their homes in the East and in the West is not welcome – as Andreas Kossert is displaced in his book, “Cold home”.
Friedland, Sparrow pointed out on Monday, “the motley post-war society a sense of Foundation”. The return of the last 10,000 war prisoners at the end of 1955/56, after Adenauer’s trip to Moscow and the establishment of diplomatic relations, was an event of national importance. Photographers crowded in the lot and incoming waiting people, the young and television was there. The policy acted ambivalent, they wanted the claim to the Reich borders of 1937 – the Older the solution, remember, “three divided never!” – not by the demonstrative joy of the returnees are to be deducted.
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Bernhard Schulz
As Adenauer is no longer Chancellor, in 1966, the Foundation stone for the Friedland memorial, it was gone the theme from the Public already. It is Willy Brandt, who urged as a candidate for Chancellor in 1969 was, “the whole Nation, the cultural and spiritual substance of the Eastern territories”; only in this way could be won “on the Inside, what was going on outside, lost”. The history of the camp Friedland as a mirror of the Federal German post-war mentality that remains is to write also to the valuable contribution of the book by Christopher bird. – Christopher Sparrow: Homeless. Friedland and the long shadow of war and displacement. With photographs by Fritz Paul. Ellert & Richter Verlag, Hamburg, 2018. 224 S. m. 88 Abb., 19,95 €.
