Thomas Urban. Der Verlust: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert. München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2004. 223 S. EUR 19.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-406-52172-0.
Reviewed by Annika Frieberg (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Published on H-German (October, 2005)
Der Verlust: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert is a history of the expulsions taking place on Polish (and Ukrainian) territory during the twentieth century. A chronicle of expulsions based on recent Polish and German research, Der Verlust wishes to remain neutral in the debates between Germans and Poles about their mutual history. It records the story and its various interpretations on both sides of the border, and does not make use of any specific cultural, political, or social historical method. Nevertheless, by its selection of details, the narrative contributes to the historiographical debates in both countries.
In the book's introduction, Urban introduces his personal connections with these events. He is the correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Warsaw, the son of Germans from Breslau, and married to a Polish woman from the same city. He writes that he is familiar with the therapeutic effects of being able to retell and make sense of one's own story (p. 15). This statement is an important declaration of his agenda. Following recent trends in Holocaust history, Der Verlust features multiple testimonies from eyewitnesses and victims. Overall, the book narrates the history of twentieth-century German and Polish expulsions in all its graphic detail. The testimonies, the language used, and the concise format--the book is less than 200 pages--makes Urban's contribution accessible to readers beyond academic circles as well.
Der Verlust places the Polish-German debates about the German occupation of Poland and the expulsions of Germans in a long-term historical perspective. It begins by describing Bismarck's Kulturkampf and Polish efforts, particularly those of the Endecja, to isolate and repress the German minority during the interwar period. From these beginnings, the author moves on to describe Hitler's occupation of Poland, the consequences of the Potsdam Conference, and the organized and "wild" expulsions of Germans from the border territories. Unusual for a history of Polish-German relations, Urban also looks to the east, describing the Soviet and German occupations of Ukraine and the successful attempts by German occupiers to use Ukrainian antipathies against Poles during the war. Urban states that there are many similarities in the Polish and German histories of expulsions. Yet the Holocaust stands out because of its scale, and because of the German state's unique endorsement of a policy of racial and national extinction (p. 14). By spanning his story broadly and juxtaposing Polish, Ukrainian, and German actions of ethnic cleansing, he complicates the issues concerning national categorizations of victims and perpetrators.
As a journalist, Urban succeeds with an impressive balancing act of describing some of the most controversial events in Polish-German history. One exception from this critical stance is the treatment of the German Catholic Church. In discussing the exchange of letters between the Polish and German hierarchies in 1965 and 1966, for example, the author does not mention Polish disappointment with the noncommittal German answer, which was expressed openly in Cardinal Wyszynski's 1970 letter to Cardinal Doepfner and discussed in the historiography on this subject.[1] A second example is the discussion on Pius XII. In order to fully understand the Pope's stance on the problem of the border dioceses, not only his anti-Communism but also the recent debates on his relationship with Germany, including the Third Reich, could have been mentioned.[2]
For the historian, Der Verlust contributes to debates in media and academia on the expulsions. For the uninitiated, it provides insight into a historical past that continues to cause problems in contemporary Polish-German relations. Thomas Urban leaves his book open-ended, without any formal conclusion. It is up to the reader to draw the consequences from this particularly dark side of modern European history.
Notes
[1]. In Hans-Adolf Jacobsen and Mieczyslaw Tomala, eds., Bonn-Warschau 1945-1990, Die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen. Analyse und Dokumentation (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1992); see also Piotr Madajczyk, Na drodze do pojednania (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1994) or Edith Heller, Macht, Kirche, Politik; Der Briefwechsel zwischen den polnischen und deutschen Bischöfen im Jahre 1965 (Cologne: Treff-punkt-Verlag, 1992).
[2]. See the debate about Pius XII's stance during the Holocaust, which intensified following the publication of John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking Books, 1999). For a more scholarly treatment of the German Catholic Church during and right after the war, see Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); and José M. Sanchez, Pius XII and the Holocaust: Understanding the Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002) for an overview of the debate.
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Citation:
Annika Frieberg. Review of Urban, Thomas, Der Verlust: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11173
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