For this reason as well, the Poland correspondent for Die Welt, Gerhard Gnauck, responded with a similarly vehement charge: "Where the façade frayed off into the absurd, arguments such as this were uttered: The neighbors in the West are making an effort to shift the blame from "the Germans" to "the Nazis", that is, from a collective that continues to exist to a clique that can no longer be held responsible. The Germans want so much to achieve a different, higher status-that of a people not accused of starting two World Wars and a bloodbath in which it drowned Europe." With this interpretation Gawin does not represent the majority of Poles, but rather the conservative and patriotic circles that traditionally view Germany with mistrust. Gawin did not mince her words: "Today's Germany is in fact pluralistic, peaceful, and is working through its own past with respect to anti-Semitism, militarism, nationalism, and other sins of the past-but preferably those of others.
The Germans even tend to portray themselves in the role of victims, she said, and to put the blame on other peoples. She said the film was part of a broad-based policy regarding German history, which aims to exonerate the German nation from its historical responsibility for the Second World War. The Polish journalist Magda Gawin viewed the ZDF production as the expression of a "new German identity". Indeed, the EU could not have been born without its founding fathers making the bold decision to end centuries of war and enmity.Simultaneously in late June 2013, two major conservative newspapers, the German Die Welt and Polish Rzeczpospolita, published attempts to summarize the most recent German-Polish neighborly dispute over the three-part feature miniseries Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (Generation War) shown on ZDF German television ( Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) last spring. It is a reminder too about how the EU and the post-Communist reunification of Europe have been a source of rapprochement between countries, despite the bitter experiences of war. But the Polish reaction is a timely reminder about how the past makes it difficult for Europe to speak and act with one voice.
UNSERE MÜTTER UNSERE VÄTER EPISODE 2 SERIES
No doubt, Poland’s anger with the series will subside. The case of Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter shows that despite the close personal ties that Chancellor Merkel has forged with her Polish counterpart Donald Tusk-leading to vastly improved relations between the two countries-the past can still easily puncture any relationship. But there were also numerous cases of Poles protecting and hiding Jews from the German occupiers. In July 1946, 40 Jews who had survived the Holocaust and returned to their home city of Kielce were killed in a Polish pogrom. Anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland even after 1945. In Poland alone, nearly 6 million people were killed during German occupation, including 3 million Polish Jews. His intention was to encourage a debate among generations “to speak for the first time about the experience” of the war. The drama, he argued, was based on historically vetted material. Nico Hofmann, the producer of the series, said he had been scrupulous with his research. “I am shocked.” Other Polish diplomats, among them Poland’s ambassador the United States, Ryszard Schnepf, have also spoken out against the program.
“The image of Poland and the Polish resistance against the German occupiers as conveyed by this series is perceived by most Poles as extremely unjust and offensive,” he wrote. The Polish ambassador to Germany, Jerzy Margański, has complained bitterly in a letter to ZDF about this depiction of Poles. In another scene, a Pole belonging to the Home Army, the dominant Polish resistance movement during the war, says that Jews should be drowned like rats. When he seeks refuge among resistance fighters in Poland, he hides his Jewish past after he hears their anti-Semitic remarks. One scene in the series shows Viktor, the young Jew, escaping from a train on the way to a concentration camp.
The headline read “Falsification of History: How the Germans are Turning Themselves Into Victims of the Second World War.”īesides the belief that the ZDF series was rewriting history by portraying the Germans as victims, what particularly rankled the Poles was the assumption that they were all anti-Semites. Indeed, so great is the Poles’ anger over the series that the conservative weekly news magazine Uważam Rze recently published a cover with a mock-up of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a concentration camp prisoner. To this day, Germany’s Nazi past continues to influence the country’s relations, especially with its Eastern neighbors.īesides dealing with the human side of the war, ZDF reopened old and deep wounds between Germany and Poland, exposing the fragility of the rapprochement between the two countries, which began in the early 1970s. Yet the passage of time has not diminished the burden of guilt and responsibility.
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