Honor the Uprooted Germans? Poles Are Uneasy asserts the headline. As the article notes, over 10 million Germans were expelled from the nations of central Europe after World War II. Of course the Germans in places like Sudetenland were no patriots in the nations created from the break-up of Austria-Hungary. Then again, after the creation of the new nation-states in the 1920s a cabal of authoritarian nationalist regimes came to the fore which marginalized ethnic minorities. Before that the Germans had dominated the Poles, Czechs and other peoples politically and culturally. Ad infinitum….
Here is an interesting snippet from the article:
But once history has happened, it has happened forever, and as long as people wish to forge their identity on the basis of collective memory there can be no annulment of its consequences.
Individualism to my eyes is the escape from the imagined slights of the past. But then, can individualism survive its own freedoms?
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