Whilst on my travels from Alsace, through the Sudetenland and Silesia, I witnessed many utterly depressing sights; not least the endless run-down, collapsing fabric of a once great architectural heritage. Once I left Upper Silesia along Route 94 and crossed into Lower Silesia, I found myself taking pictures of one ruined residence or dilapidated barn after another. The historic towns of Ohlau (Olawa) and Brieg (Brzeg) were particularly sad sights. Brieg is twinned with Goslar (a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Germany), and although you could just about imagine that Brieg once aspired to this status, this is clearly no longer the case. The sight of a painted house is a rarity. One of the most problematic issues is the question of the right of return, which leads to property disputes. Naturally many of those who were kicked out of their homes over seventy years ago are now dead, or have grown up and put down roots in Germany west of the Oder-Neisse; few could or would want to return. The majority who lost their homes and property were, in any case, tenants. Then, as now, the overwhelming majority of Germans rented their property with only around 25 per cent of the population being land or property owners. Nevertheless, for the few that do wish to return, even with Poland and the Czech Republic now members of the European Union, the former German inhabitants of these annexed regions, and their children, are treated differently from other Europeans; they have no right to return, or the right to any compensation or restitution, and if they are prepared to try and buy back their properties, they still have to seek a special dispensation from the local authorities. Due to the depressed state of many of the regions, these are not always all that difficult to obtain, but even those who have been offered their properties through back-room deals are often not in a position to afford the costs of renovating their crumbling houses or estates.
In the greater scheme of things, those likely to return, and the number of potential property or land disputes, are a drop in the ocean compared with what was taken. I was told that in one town in Upper Silesia there are currently twenty-four outstanding property claims, but that as long as the governments stay out of these disputes, they can usually be resolved by the individuals concerned. Perhaps that is the best way. I was also told an amusing story about a Frenchman, married to a Czech girl, who asked for an appointment to see the Czech mayor of one of the former German Sudeten towns. When they met, he asked him for a list of the properties that were not owned by Germans before the end of the war. The mayor said he did not have such a list and, in any case, why should he want such a thing? When the Frenchman said he was sure the Germans would one day return and demand their old properties back, and that he didn’t want to buy something that someone could later dispute the ownership of, the mayor was totally taken aback.
These types of issues exist not just for Germans, but also for all those in Eastern Europe who owned property and lost it under the rule of the Communists. The same issues will no doubt arise in Cuba, when the Castro brothers die and the Florida Cubans come back to claim what they lost. There are certainly Poles who left Poland in the 1970s and 1980s who either had to sign over their property to the state, or had it taken from them, who have now made claims to get it back. Why not then those of the German minority who left during the same period?
The whole issue is a can of worms. The annexations and expropriations were illegal, and repeated statutes by The Hague and the UN have restated such acts as illegalities, but to undo them three generations after they occurred is beyond complex. A much overlooked truth is that German governments did the world a lasting service by integrating 15 million German refugees who arrived from the East, impoverished and destitute, at the end of the war and who kept on coming until the 1990s. These refugees were given new homes, a fresh start, and a decent standard of living; they were not left to rot in refugee camps, in poverty and destitution, as second-class citizens allowing their grievances to fester for extremists to play on. Imagine what a nightmare it would have been for the future of European peace and stability had such an enormous community not been fully integrated into what remained of Germany after the war. Nevertheless, the fact that the West German government was able to help the refugees get back on their feet financially in no way compensated for their losses, or their feeling of alienation and enforced rootlessness.
There are still far too many signs that the old communist revisionism and the myth of the ‘regained territories’ syndrome is alive and well, in Poland, the Czech Republic and beyond. The modern tourist guides have by and large painted the Germans out of their history and the great ‘exodus’ is barely mentioned. But there are thankfully members of the third generation of young Poles and Czechs who I met, who are keen to know more about the history of the places where they have grown up, and seem ready for a more honest appraisal of their past.cccxvi
EURO REGIONS: THE POSSIBILITIES
This section case studies one region of former German Europe and examines what is happening on the ground today, before going on to list some possibilities for other regions which could benefit enormously from, and be revitalised by, conjoined cross-border, cultural, historical and tourism cooperation. Finally, there will be an examination of places where this has already begun to happen successfully, and where German communities have fared better.
In an Empty Sudetenland
The Czechs have always regarded themselves as the most efficient, if not the most ‘Germanic’, of the Slavic peoples. Their ethnic cleansing of German Sudeten Bohemians and Moravians was by far the most thorough of all the states of Central and Eastern Europe. However, unlike Poland, which suffered her own population expulsions from the territories she lost to the Soviet Union, there were no ethnic Czechs, who were expelled from their eastern territories lost to the Soviet Union, to help compensate for the shortfall in population when the Czechs expelled their Germans from the Sudetenland.
I visited the Egerland (the westernmost outcrop of the Bohemian Sudetenland) in May 2008, to see for myself how this region looked today. As soon as I crossed the German border into the Czech Republic, my ‘European’ satellite navigation system registered ‘terra incognita’, a telltale sign that I was heading into no-man’s-land. Before long, the Czech police pulled me over in my British car and told me, in German, that I had broken a serious law by not driving with my headlights on full beam, despite the fact that it was a sunny morning and there were no signs to state this Czech regulation. They tried to tell me how many thousand Czech crowns my fine would be, but as I failed to understand their ramblings in broken German, and kept replying in English, they eventually gave up and waved me on. The majority of the cars on the roads had German number plates. Clearly the police roadblocks were there to fleece the Western capitalist tourists. This was not the best welcome to the Czech Republic, and reminded me of the old Vopos (East German Police) who used to hide behind bushes and leap out in front of foreign cars and then demand fines be paid in hard currency.
Driving through the border region from Bayreuth on the German side, to Eger (Cheb) on the Czech side, there is no sign of the much-vaunted impenetrable natural fortress that supposedly makes up the ‘ancient frontiers’ of the nation, just a beautiful rolling landscape of meadows and forests.cccxvii My first port of call was Eger (Cheb), an old imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, given its city charter by Emperor Barbarossa. The outskirts of the town had been ruined by careless modern architects, but the old town square had been given a lick of paint and a few plaques to commemorate the ‘great and the good’ (all Czechs!) who had lived there, even one for a Premysild princess who had only spent the night there.
Eger is first recorded as existing in 1061, during the rule of Emperor Heinrich IV. The town seal dates back to 1242 and is based on the Latinised name ‘Egra’, as the town sits astride the Eger river. One of the most famous former inhabitants of Eger was General Wallenstein, a military commander of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Catholic armies during the Thirty Years War, who not only resided in Eger, but was also murdered there. Virtually every building in the town was built by
Austro-Germans. The town never had a significant Czech population, not even in 1930 after the land reforms/land grabs which redistributed nearly 30 per cent of the land in the region to Czechs; even then the town’s Czech population was only 10 per cent, yet everything in the town guides alludes to the ‘Slavic origins’ of the town’s history and describes the expulsion of the Germans as ‘just revenge’.
If this town was historically Czech, then I’m a Chinaman. This was the beginning of an utterly depressing reminder of the worst that Communist revisionist history and post-war propaganda had to offer. The Cold War was alive and well and living in the Egerland. The Communists who had flocked to claim the empty properties the Germans were forced to leave behind were still there, and obviously nervous that the never-ending stream of German cars meant they were slowing creeping back. The fiction of the righteous eviction of the hated ‘colonists’ had to be maintained; better still written up anew and published in shiny new tourist brochures.
Next I visited Marienbad (Marianske Lazne), which once claimed to be England’s King Edward VII’s favourite spa resort on earth (when it was still part of Austria). One can only imagine that, on seeing the place today, the King would shake the dust and rubble falling off the buildings from his coat and drive at full tilt to Karlsbad. Marienbad is a wreck. Other than enjoying the waters and meeting fellow heads of state, Edward VII had ulterior motives for enjoying Marienbad: a certain young lady by the name of Mizzi Pistl who he would meet in what is now the ‘Churchill Pub’. Goethe wrote of the place as being ‘a hearty quarter, friendly waiters, good company, pretty girls, great for music lovers, pleasant evening conversations, exquisite food, made important new acquaintances, rediscovered old ones, it has an easy going atmosphere.’(1) In 2008, a third of the buildings were empty and/or falling to pieces; service was awful, not least from the Chinese shop assistants; food was bland; and conversation was abrupt. Those passing through Marienbad today are definitely looking for a ‘budget spa resort’, a bit of shopping and a cheap bite to eat, though nothing fancy. The town’s best days are definitely in the past. The official town histories allude to the town’s Czech origins in the twelfth century, which is somewhat unnecessary as Marienbad did not exist then; it is in fact a nineteenth-century Austrian spa town. But in the true über-nationalist spirit that is required of all writers of Czech tourist information guides, they give the Czech equivalents for all German names of people and places, giving the illusion to the uninformed that the historic residents of these towns were Czechs when in fact they were Austro-Germans.
I walked up the hill to the Wahrzeichen (symbol) of old Marienbad, the Kolonada, a long colonnade containing fountains, that once housed lavish coffee shops with enormous cakes but now sadly only houses tourist trinket junk shops. There was a Czech military band thumping out good old Austrian ‘oom-pah’ music, and some waltzers. They stopped after each piece and droned on in Czech for longer than they had played; no doubt about how oom-pah music and the Waltz were inspired by Czechs; just like Pilsner beer and Becherovka! It was beginning to get sickening. There was no respect for a common cultural Central European or multiethnic history of a once great European empire. In the morning I took the back roads to Karlsbad, along narrow gorges, mountain streams and pine forests, clinging to steep cliff sides. The scenery was beautiful, but nowhere can you escape the ghosts of the past. I found it quite eerie passing abandoned and derelict houses and barns, sometimes with the German lettering of forgotten family businesses still visible. Sometimes the Czech wording that had been painted over walls was crumbling away to reveal a German text beneath. As I passed these ruins, I wondered what happened to their former owners, whether they still lay buried in shallow graves in the woods near their old houses, whether anyone witnessed and recorded their fate.cccxviii
Shortly before I reached Karlsbad, I came upon a number of ruined grand houses below an imposing cliff fortress in the town of Petschau (Bečov nad Teplou). The international tourists who whisk past in their luxury tour buses on their way to Karlsbad, and who have been handed the official tourist propaganda leaflets, will no doubt be left believing the general level of decrepitude is merely the legacy of Communism.
I had heard much about Karlsbad’s (Karlovy Vary) revival as a tourist destination; my wife even found a Brazilian travel magazine in which it was featured, but as I drove through the outskirts of the town I was confronted with the same crumbling buildings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s best travelled and most famous writer and poet, visited Karlsbad countless times and wrote that it was one of his favourite places on earth, saying that ‘Weimar, Rome and Karlsbad’, were places he recommended every man visit at least once in his lifetime. Karlsbad was the setting of the 2006 James Bond film, Casino Royale, but for some unknown reason was described as ‘Montenegro’ in the film. The casino scenes were filmed at the best address in town: the old Grandhotel Pupp, which — perhaps as a tribute to the success of the film — I found out was booked up months in advance with the minimum stay required being two weeks! Outside the hotel, a band was strumming Beatles tunes, singing them in Czech. In stark contrast to Marienbad, Karlsbad had been given a makeover. The place was full to the brim with designer shops and estate agents, and jam-packed with tourists from anywhere and everywhere, most of whom were being marshalled in groups led by dour old ladies waving flags. Groups of young Russians were in no short supply, who appeared to me to be revelling at the conquest of this bastion of German civilisation in the most western province of their once mighty European empire, or perhaps I was reading too much into their rather smug-looking expressions.
The official town tourist guide mentions that it was the Celts and Germans who were the first inhabitants of the region, which is refreshing, but then it only names the ‘Czech’ kings who visited the resort, such as Charles IV (that he had been Holy Roman Emperor was clearly irrelevant). Apparently from the eighteenth century, the healing waters attracted visitors from as far afield as Austria; the fact that it was part of Austria makes that somewhat of a contradiction. The town loves to list the great and famous who came to visit, including Frederick the Great, Prince Metternich, Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, Carl Maria von Weber, Richard Wagner, Leibnitz, Empress Maria Theresa, not mentioning what they all have in common: namely being German or German Austrians.
Elbogen (Loket), another one of Goethe’s favourite places, is a medieval town perched like the Loreley, high above a meandering river. This place was also used as a setting for the open-air café scene in the Bond movie, Casino Royale, although apparently they were still in ‘Montenegro’! The town has a very impressive modern self-cleaning toilet built into the ancient walls, just past the tourist information centre. Nearly all the signs of communist gloom have been painted out with only a few derelict abandoned buildings remaining to remind the visitor that the former inhabitants had been chased away. While the English version of the town guide does mention that the fortunes of the town took a downturn when its German inhabitants were ‘expelled’, it also names one of the former owners of the castle as the Slik family, which makes you think they were Czech; in fact their name was the very German ‘Schlick’.
What every one of these guides fails to mention was not only the fact that these towns had been ethnically cleansed of their German populations after the war, but also the utterly bestial fashion in which these population ‘transfers’ occurred. I wondered if in another sixty years, tour groups visiting Mostar and Srebrenica or Kosovo would also find that all the evil atrocities perpetrated there have been so casually airbrushed out of the official histories.
The next day I made an excursion to Kloster Tepl (Teplá), once the heart of Roman Catholicism in the region. I could not believe they had the nerve to charge an entrance fee to this ruin. This place should be closed to the public, lest falling masonry kills someone. The only parts of the premises that had been refurbished were the shop and the restaurant.
I drove on through a region that was still clearly depop
ulated from the exodus; the roads were near-empty and the only crops growing in most of the fields were dandelions and weeds. In village after village, derelict houses and barns displayed ‘For Sale’ signs, mostly in English. I carried on through the ruins of the old towns of Tachau (Tachov) and Haid (Bor), the latter having a sign outside the Burg stating that EU funds were paying to restore it. Finally I came to Bischofteinitz (Horšovský Týn). In German the name of this town has a meaning reflecting its origins, which was as a seat of bishops and archbishops of the region. The town was a bastion of Catholicism during the Hussite rebellions, and its history is also closely connected to two old noble families: the Trauttendorfer and Lobkowitzer. The crumbling enormous walls that bounded their vast estates still ring the town. A very friendly young lady at the tourist information office handed me the standard Czech propaganda leaflet, which informed me the town had once stood astride the main trade route from Regensburg to Prague. Now it was not even the major transit route for migrating birds. By now I had driven through so many run-down, shabby-looking towns and past so many crumbling empty buildings, I was desperate to head back to somewhere that didn’t remind me of the depressing decrepitude of expropriation and communism.(2) I headed back to the border as quickly as I could; the navigation system beeped back into life as I crossed back into today’s Germany, where I immediately came upon the beautiful Bavarian town of Furth im Wald, which was lovingly painted and cared for. I got out and had a beer at a bar in the square; what a contrast. As I saw in northern Bohemia on a subsequent visit in August 2013 and visits to Lower Silesia, it is not just a question of money, it’s the fact that those who took over the territories the Germans were forced out of had no connection to, or affinity for them, over and above the ultra-nationalistic impulse to claim more than they could eat. My trip to the Sudetenland had depressed me to the point that I rang up the Sudeten German Expellees Association to ask what their view was of this total whitewash of the expulsions and the continued rewriting of history, especially now that the Czech Republic was in the European Union. I was told there were in fact many new and positive developments between themselves and a great number of Czech organisations and that I should come, at the invitation of the Minster President of Bavaria, to a prizegiving ceremony of the Sudeten Germans on 9th May 2008 in Nuremberg. So I went.cccxix
Death of a Nation Page 81
