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Donauschwaben
Issues Archive
DONAUSCHWABEN
ISSUES ARTICLE
SEPTEMBER
2009
Delivered
to the Victors
An
exhibition about the fate of the Danube Swabians
illustrates
incredible events in Serbia
Frankfurter
Allgemeine – Zeitung für Deutschland
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Michael
Martens
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Michael
Martens
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Translation
from German into English – E. Gruenwald / Edited by – Susanne
Paulus
NOVI
SAD, May 17th, 2009
For Herbert Rech, it was an encounter with the homeland of his
ancestors. The Interior Minister of Baden-Württemberg, who also
serves as his state's representative for expellees, refugees and
emigrants, is a descendant of a family with Danube Swabian roots,
though he was born after the war. Therefore, his statement at the
opening of the exhibition "Daheim an der Donau - Zusammenleben
von Deutschen und Serben in der Vojvodina" ("At home on the
Danube - living together of Germans and Serbs in the Vojvodina), that
the trip to Novi Sad was a deeply personal matter for him, sounded in
no way like just a polite phrase addressed to the host - particularly
as Mr. Rech is also chairman of the Foundation Advisory Board of the
"Donauschwäbisches Zentralmuseum" (Danube Swabian Central
Museum) in Ulm, Germany. It was there that the exhibition opened over
the weekend was prepared, in collaboration with the Museum of the
Vojvodina in Novi Sad. Until middle of August it will be shown there,
in the capital of the Vojvodina, one of the two formerly autonomous
provinces of Serbia (the other being Kosovo).
This exhibition is something special and new for the Serbs, as well.
It is the first time for their general public to see how the lives of
the Germans in the Vojvodina ended in 1944/1945: with escape,
dispossession, expulsion and mass murder. Their demise was not
explained in Serbia until now. It could not be talked about in Tito's
Yugoslavia, and it was hardly different after the European change in
1989. The crimes of Tito and his partisans were discussed in public
for the first time under Milosevic; however, it presented an
incomplete and distorted picture. In addition, the "Yugoslavian
Disintegration Wars" caused so many new taboos, that the
pronouncement attributed to Churchill, that "the Balkans produced
more history than they could digest", was still valid.
So the exhibition in Novi Sad is more than a collection of soup
plates, cups, and costumes: it sheds light on a blind spot in the
Serbian awareness of history. A spot, though, that is little known in
Germany as well. Although the exhibition is not restricted to this
bloody end only, that end represents its core. The renowned Serbian
historian, Dr.Zoran Janjetovic, writes in the exhibition
catalog,"The part of the German population that stayed in the
Vojvodina after the invasion of the Red Army and the Partisan Units
was in the first weeks subjected to mass shootings, arrests,
mistreatmenst, looting, rapes, and forced labor. Partisan fighters and
a part of the civilian population resorted to mass looting,
mistreatment, and killing. There was no system to this violence,
except that any atrocities were allowed."
The Germans in the Vojvodina were indiscriminately (and in an entirely
organized way) hit by the victors’ revenge. The exhibition does not
conceal, however, that many had earlier been "exploited, or
allowed themselves to be exploited, by National Socialism", as
pointed out by the German historian Holm Sundhaussen. Of course there
had been enthusiasm for Hitler, and voluntary military enlistment, as
well as forced conscription to the SS. The catalog states,” whether
such evidence helps to legitimize the expulsion and dispossession of
hundreds of thousands of people - the reader may decide."
In any case, it was above all these mass crimes that brought together
the Danube Swabians like giant pincers. After all, the designation of
these Germans as "Danube Swabians" was coined only in the
twenties and had not been in use just a hundred years before. So also
the Vojvodina, as a part of Serbia, came into existence only as a
consequence of World War I, made up of three historical regions: East
Syrmia (which the Serbs call Srem), the Batschka, and the West Banat.
The eastern part of the Banat was annexed by Romania after 1918. Just
a little corner remained with Hungary. A small part also of the
Batschka remained with Budapest; the larger one was allocated to the
later Yugoslavia (with Serbia included). Syrmia was divided again
after World War II: the larger eastern part was annexed by Serbia, the
smaller one, with Vukovar as its capital, by Croatia. Altogether, in
and after World War II, more than 50,000 Germans lost their lives
violently in the Vojvodina, which today has about two million
inhabitants, about as large as Hessen.. Up to 12,000 were deported to
the Soviet Union. Under direction of the new regime, death camps were
erected in many places in the Vojvodina. In order to get rid of the
remaining Germans, from 1947 onwards Belgrade encouraged escape by
relocating the camps closer to the Yugoslavia-Hungarian border. The
remaining Germans left the country in the fifties and sixties. Though
in 1921 more than 330,000 inhabitants considered German their native
tongue, today only about 3,000 do so. The descendants of the others
who had left come back from time to time to the home towns of their
parents or of their childhood as organized group travelers. On the
other hand, Zoran Janjetovic and other Serbian historians concerned
about objectivity oppose the assertion that the suffering of the
Germans in the Vojvodina was genocide. It was rather "just"
a crime, they claim, for which a half-century later (and not far away
from the Vojvodina) the term "Ethnic Cleansing “was coined.
Such definitions are open to argument. Though the fact that this
subject is now being discussed in Serbia is progress in itself. From
September 2009 until January 2010 the exhibition "At home on the
Danube" will be shown in the Danube Swabian Central Museum in Ulm,
Germany, and afterwards at the consulate of Baden-Württemberg in
Brussels, Belgium.
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