According to the East Prussian
expellee Hans Graf von Lehndorff, "we are experiencing nothing unusual, nothing different from what millions of people have experienced in the past years." Maria Zatschen, an
expellee from Czechoslovakia, observed that "what a bad comedy all this is: nothing is original, a copy of the Hitler regime, again and again we have to hear: 'just as you have treated the Jews.'" And Czech guards explained to an imprisoned German university professor that their model for handling of Germans was Hitler's concentration camps: "pictures of these camps were displayed at the entrance [to the internment camp].
Parallel to the conclusion of the Geneva Convention in 1951, which was conceived as a shining example of Western humanitarism, the Federal Republic passed the Federal
Expellee and Refugee Law (Bundesvertriebene und Fluechtlingsgesetz).
In the movement of people from East to West, "the refugee camp became emplaced as a standardized, generalizable technology of power in the management of mass displacement." (34) It was not only the organization of people in the camps but also the German bureaucracy and new laws (35) that created the category of the "refugee" and later "
expellee." As Malkki puts it, '"The refugee' as a specific social category and legal problem of global dimensions did not exist in its full modern form before this period." (36) Lehmann similarly observes that the fate of the refugee was seen as homogenous and uniform, when in reality the differences were more than the similarities.
(49) Second, many of the candidates, namely the ethnic German refugees, were waiting to be accepted into the United States by the more attractive German
Expellee Program.
Preppy nerd and buttoned-down bohemian, green guru and globe-trotting jet fuel consumer, a college
expellee who relished honorary degrees, Buckminster Fuller (b.
Unlike colleagues who grew up 'am Bodensee oder in Nurnberg', the author explained in the FAZ interview of 12 August 2006 during which he revealed his membership of the SS, the
expellee Gunter Grass does not have access to his school reports, first scribblings, or diaries, and yet this may work to his benefit: 'Ich bin also in einer benachteiligten Situation gewesen, die sich dann aber doch beim Erzahlen als vorteilhaft erwies.' (18) In contrast, say, with Walser (who was born, of course, 'am Bodensee'), Grass's work is automatically representative, he seems to imply: not a defence of his own past but an engagement with German history more broadly.
There has been an attempt by the
Expellee organizations to construct a subtle parity with Jewish victimization, but this is a different, although related, issue.
At the same time, the Palestinian spokesperson, Hanan Ashrawi, side-stepped previous statements from leading members of the delegation declaring that there would be no return to the table before the return of every last
expellee. Reflecting the PLO's desire to find a way for the Palestinians' return to the peace process, she spoke with the utmost diplomatic caution, hinting that "evolving ideas" had emerged from Mr Christopher's visit.
Well-selected evidence is presented to substantiate the thesis that Germans found a useable past in a mix of old stereotypes about Heimat(s) and new victimization through the POW and
expellee issues.
According to the Polish
expellee, this is the natural order of things and people: whether during peacetime or as postwar refugees, it is either poverty or the front that pushes people forward like dominoes, with one person sleeping in another's bed, or using his pots and pans, or eating his provisions.
AKELITE
expellee Nikos Katsourides, pandering to Junior in the hope he would be the inbetweeners' presidential candidate in 2018 -- the Dikids might want someone that could pass as a grown-up -- wrote in Phil on Wednesday about the need for the public to be properly informed about what was being agreed, because the selective leaking of info was "extremely dangerous" and caused "big confusion".