Leseprobe

132 The erstwhile farmer finds his new life in the British zone difficult to bear, housed as he is among strangers. Friedrich learns a short time later that he will not be able to return to his Masurian home. He dies within the year, age 73, killed by homesickness. 4 Some of those who are exiled never truly arrive anywhere; they become emigrants in their souls, mourning their lost homes. Older people in particular, such as Friedrich Biella, lack the strength to start anew after 1945. Many of them are unable to bear their loss. They begin to crack, both in mind and in body. Christa Wolf writes of homesickness as a cause of death: “For the old—for those who had babbled about death for years, just to hear the young contradict them—the time had come to keep silent; because what was going on now was their death, and they knew it. They aged years in weeks, and then died, not neatly one after the other, for a variety of reasons, but all at once, for one and the same reason, be it called typhoid, or hunger, or simply homesickness, which is a perfectly plausible pretext for dying.” 5 Epitaphs announce this longing in cemeteries throughout Germany. Chiselled in stone are the place names of homes that were lost—Stettin, Schwerin an der Warthe, Reichenberg, Königsberg, Breslau. Thus the dead lament their worldly exile. In 1945, Europe sees its largest wave of refugees since time out of mind. An entire continent lies in ruin, thanks to the war started by Hitler who elevated barbarism to a raison d’état . The crimes against humanity carried out by Hitler and the Nazis shake Europe to its very core. Persecution and displacement have been commonplace since the war began. As early as 1939, Poles and Jews are driven out of regions occupied by Germany. Arbitrary resettlements of unde- sired ethnic groups are a daily occurrence. Emigration and exile have been facts of life for political dissidents and racially persecuted people since 1933. Conventional wars used to be either local affairs or far-flung conflicts that could be viewed from a safe distance. By 1945, the latest world war has rendered this old verity obsolete. Admittedly, the forcible displacement of undesired ethnic or religious groups has long been a tool for achieving political ends; it did not begin with the Second World War. The twentieth century marked the pinnacle of forced resettlement, as states tried to bring political boundaries into line with demographic ones. In this sense, the First World War served as a dress rehearsal for the population displacements that would follow. After 1918, democratic govern- ments likewise sought ways to avoid conflict by reducing ethnic com- plexity. The “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey that followed the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne brought a huge influx of refu- gees to Greece, swelling the country’s population by over a fourth and pushing it to the limits of its carrying capacity. The Soviet Union perfected its own idiosyncratic method of ethnic cleansing. Stalin would simply deport entire groups—including Poles, Germans, Finns, Balts and Koreans—as a form of collective punishment. Friedrich Biella