Demands for reparations are the Greeks an invoice, Poland. Not an issue for black-and-white solutions, says our columnist Norbert Mappes-Niediek.
So wrong, the Polish demands for reparations be back like: With mere instruction, is not done. Germany should pay for the destruction and the mass murders of the Second world war for compensation: The claim comes from Warsaw in irregular intervals ever since the end of the Communist Era. But since in the neighbouring country, the right-wing party law and justice ruled, she comes more and more often.
To stir up the reparations question anti-German feelings?
With always the same arguments, Berlin rejects the request. The reparations question was legally and politically finished, said Frank Walter Steinmeier, when he was foreign Minister. Legally, the question may not be completed; politically, she is definitely the one. This has underlined the recent call of the President of Poland, Andrzej Duda, only once.
In none of the German analysis of the note that the right-wing government, using the reparations question to stir up anitdeutscher feelings, distracting you only fond of the allegation, with their so-called justice reform violates European principles is missing. The Argument is true, but at the core of the problem, it will pass.
The horrors and the crimes of the Second world war, are placed in Germany and in Poland, while equally detested, but in different patterns of thinking. In Germany and among its Western opponents, the purely national interpretation, as it was in the immediate post-war period in the West still common, are long overdue for a political point of view, scissors. No one refers more to a German national character, if the Nazis and the Holocaust is spoken, and few are looking for the root of the Evil still in Prussian history or the German idealism.
Six million dead, Poland
In Poland, the situation was reversed. Of “the Germans” as the perpetrators of the speech was not to the Communist time, with regard to the socialist brother state of the GDR. Debt is the “most aggressive parts of the monopoly capital were instead”. A sinister interpretation, which, however, can be used anywhere in the world and no nationality knew. The German occupation regime, therefore, came just in Poland in the stressed national garb. The Poland, “Slavic sub-humans” in the diction of the Nazis should be burned to the feeling of inferiority, they should be to a nation of slaves, without Dignity, without its own Elite, with only an elementary education because they were Polish. Six of the 35 million people were killed, a higher percentage than in any other country in Europe.
Memories of the occupation in Poland – A past that does not pass
Against this emotional Background, it should not be surprised if the terrible years in Poland today, almost entirely in national categories. Every criticism, every accusation, every rebuke from Germany smells in Poland, a little Nazi. And, more recently, to the perpetrator-victim-reversal: In today’s Germany, so you can feel it, be straight associated with the authoritarian tendencies and the virulent nationalism in Hungary and Poland with the Nazi period. Crass formulated, it was from the German point of view, the anti-Semites who have murdered Jews. From the Polish point of view, it was the Germans. Who lets the historical facts speak, will have to give the Poland law.
The nearest conclusion, however, Berlin is in the right: In the European Union, the call for reparations does not fit in. The community was already in its beginnings a conscious ahistori’s Alliance of winners and losers of the Second world war, Victims and perpetrators. National accounts would have destroyed the fragile Structure immediately.
The French gave their generous decision in favour of reconciliation with the German Aggressor law: the end of the ideas of hereditary enmity has paid off with political stability and economic prosperity. The poles of this experience; you have experienced that you had as a moral Victor of the war, but to suffer still decades later, the consequences of which affect much more than the Germans, the moral loser.
The EU’s eastward enlargement, has an order
The demand for reparations, as much as you like, you understand, astray. For Germany, it is not enough yet, the request is simply rejected – and not only on the sound of it. There is a valid claim: Takes you to the objectives and results of the Franco-German reconciliation, to scale, of the order associated with Easter, the different living conditions in the new member countries, the average of the old suit.
The alignment has been stagnating for years. You will not be promoted to be decided, can be the extension to a debacle. The utopian demand for a war indemnity in the amount of 690 billion euros, as the responsible Rapporteur in the Sejm, it has collected, nourishes the suspicion that they might not be meant to be taken literally. That is exactly why they require a politically and morally clean answer. Poland’s success is of concern to a Community: That must be the message. To punish ideas like Poland and other Eastern European States for non-performance of community decisions with the withdrawal of the Funds or in any other way financially to make things worse.
Norbert Mappes-Niediek lives in Graz, Austria and Southeast Europe correspondent for many German-language Newspapers.