Posted on 02/21/2003 11:07:43 AM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Weekender, February 23, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
When I lived in then-West Germany from 1980-1985, my German girlfriend's father, Alois, was a (conservative) Christian Democrat and union man who had originally been a farmer in Bohemia. After centuries as a German province, after The War Bohemia (Boehmen) was awarded to Czechoslovakia, a nation which had itself been slapped together out of parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which the Allies dismantled after World War I. My girlfriend's mother, Ingrid, was a farm girl from Upper Silesia (Oberschlesien), which likewise after the war was awarded, after centuries as a German province, to Poland.
In 1945, Alois and Ingrid's respective families lost everything. The Czechoslovakians and Poles stole their families' spreads, and literally ran them out on a rail. The non-Germans forced the German farmers to pack only what they could fit into rucksacks, carry it on their backs, and board west-bound trains. Thus, did the term of contempt "Rucksackdeutschen" (rucksack Germans) arise, which the West Germans used on their unfortunate Eastern cousins, who for years after The War ended, endured second-class citizenship.
During the early 1980s, a gracious, beautiful, blonde woman of a certain age who maintained ramrod posture, worked at the main library at the University of Tuebingen. The university, where I was a student, was in the southwestern province of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The woman had been born and raised in East Prussia, a German province in the furthest reaches of the Northeast, that was also awarded to the Poles at war's end. Of all German areas, the East Prussians had endured the worst. One third of them (out of a total of 2.6 million) were killed by the advancing Red Army, which raped and murdered all of the German girls and women who had not yet fled. In late January, 1945, families trekked across frozen patches of the bay west to Danzig, to escape the oncoming Russians, with many small children and elderly freezing to death along the way. And the survivors endured abuse in West Germany in the mid and late 1940s and 1950s. The woman remembered it all, as if it had just happened yesterday.
Those survivors who remained in East Prussia under Polish-Soviet domination, endured even worse abuse. One of my German tutors at the University of Tuebingen, Lothar (who was born around 1957), told me once of how, when he was a young boy, his teacher led his classmates in a group hate, screaming "Fascist!" at him.
The West German government softened the economic blows suffered by the refugees, by giving them special mortgage help.
In the early 1980s, Ingrid and Alois would still go to "Sonntagsreden" (Sunday speeches) given by the likes of West German President Karl Carstens. Carstens, an old Nazi, would always look forward to "Wiedervereinigung" (reunification).
Instead of accepting the epithet Rucksackdeutschen, or the traditional, morally neutral term, "Fluechtlinge" (refugees), German refugee groups coined a new term, calling themselves "Heimatvertriebenen" -- literally those driven from their homes. In the 1950 "Charter of the German Heimatvertriebenen," refugee leaders understandably demanded legal and social equality with non-refugee West Germans. However, they also declared that (my translation), "G-d put men in their home. To forcibly separate man from his home, is to spiritually kill him," notwithstanding that many of the Heimatvertriebenen had done just that before and during the war, G-d or no G-d, to German Jews, and to foreign nationals all over Europe. The Heimat mysticism was an expression of the Nazi belief in "Blut, Boden, Rasse" -- blood, earth, race. Note that the Heimatvertriebenen were invoking a godly, eternal bond to land that had only begun seeing German Ansiedler (settlers) in the 12th or 13th century.
It's necessary to distinguish the link rural Germans feel to the land from the Nazism of many Heimatvertriebenen. Perhaps a few million Germans living in small towns whose fathers, grandfathers or even great-grandfathers were full-time farmers still grow vegetables, perhaps plums for brandy that they burn themselves, and raise some livestock, while working at "day" jobs. On a Sunday afternoon, they might drink some schnapps or beer, and eat sausage and peasant bread while shooting the breeze with their lifelong buddies at the local restaurant's "Stammtisch" (regulars' table). A story I read in the early 1980s that I believe took place in the Wuerzburg area, but could have occurred in countless villages, has one regular shutting up another with, "Du bist erst dreissig Jahre hier!" "[Who are you to talk] You've only been here for 30 years!"
In the Charter, the Heimatvertriebenen also made insane demands on the world that no one besides them took seriously, such as that "The world's peoples ought to feel their shared responsibility for the fate of the Heimatvertriebenen, who were hit the hardest by the suffering of this period" (i.e., the war).
Alois didn't seriously think reunification would come to pass; at the time, no one did. (Unfortunately, he passed away about three years before it came about.) And yet, in what seemed like a miracle, it did. And when it did, the 62.7 million West Germans were miserable over it.
In much of East Germany, economically, time had practically stood still since the Nazi period. As German journalist Sebastian Haffner noted in his popular, engagingly written 1978 book, Anmerkungen zu Hitler (The Meaning of Hitler, in the English version), communist rhetoric aside, 30 years after The War ended, East Germany still resembled Nazi Germany in its total regimentation. And even some of the rhetoric was identical. The first time I visited East Berlin, in September 1980, banners celebrated "Der Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat" – the workers' and farmer's state – an old Nazi slogan.
After the war, the Soviets had plundered the East Germans' industrial plant. Building new East German housing and infrastructure (where, for instance, only 10.6% of residents had a telephone), and supporting and integrating the 16.6 million poor East Germans, many of whom adjusted inadequately to a relatively free society, has so far cost over one trillion dollars.
In school in America during the Cold War, we learned that the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism divided the world into those who were free, and those who lived in a virtual prison. But the division meant much more than that. It meant that America had to worry about at most half of the world, and often much less than that.
During the Cold War, the world was forced to choose allegiances: The U.S. or the communists, which usually meant the Soviets. Though it may not have been apparent at the time, that either/or simplified foreign policy. Nations that wanted to avoid communist terror needed to mind their Ps and Qs with us.
(Granted, beginning with Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970; first president of the Fifth Republic, 1959-1969), the French have gone out of their way to insult us. Note that the French owe their freedom to the U.S., who liberated a nation that from 1940-1944, killed its Nazi captors with kindness. Note too that in the early 1950s, Ike subordinated much of American foreign policy to saving French colonialism in Indochina, up to and including underwriting one-third of the costs of the militarily inept French's losing war against Ho Chi Minh, in what would in 1954 become Vietnam. As Americans – outside of academia and the media, that is – have learned the hard way, no sane foreign policy can be based on Frenchmen's self-esteem problems, and their delusion that they are still a world power.)
The countries which had, incredibly, been awarded to Stalin by FDR, in anticipation of the Allied victory in World War II, were also not our problem. A more troublesome matter were those nations which later fell to communism – Red China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, several African states (Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia), and of course, Afghanistan. Most such nations sought to, or were used to spread communist domination or intimidation. In the most dramatic case, on April 30, 1975, two years after the U.S. withdrew its troops, the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), fell to the North Vietnamese.
… to be continued Monday, February 24, 2003.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
Who said anything against Reagan?
Thanks for the ping, mrustow. There's a lot of delusional thinking going around these days. Who informs the people? NEA, Hollywood, AP, BBC, ABC, NY Times, DNC...
I don't think they see it that way. Most Gerries supported Hitler. And then, for at least 15 years, we turned them into a colony, and for almost thirty years after that, we still treated them like a poor relation. They had been the most powerful nation in Europe, and it was just a matter of time before they decided to act like it again. We did protect their freedom, but that was from the Russians. Once the wall came down, they no longer needed our protection.
The East Germans are still infused with the old Communist doctrine of "Hate everything American." Schroeder is a sorry assed punk weasel.
I believe that Schroeder got elected, due to Kohl's corruption scandals. However, even during the early 1980s, the West German left was more nationalistic than most German conservatives. And of course, they also had the "Hate America" thing down pat for the obvious reasons.
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