Xxth Century European Refugees

Public compensation and private perpetual loss: the memory of Nineteenth century European refugees. Patrizia Audenino Historical Studies Department, University of Milan (Milan, Italy) 1. Flight and Expulsion: post War Europe and decolonized North Africa The mass expulsion and flights which followed the second world war in Europe and the decolonization process have attracted attention by the historical research only late, usually after the conclusion of the cold war, and mostly after 2000 (Gatrell, 2013; Lowe, 2012; Ferrara and Pianciola, 2012, pp.325 ssgg; Reinisch and White, 2011; Salvatici, 2008; Ther and Siljak, 2001; Marrus, 1985). The timing and the reasons of flight or expulsion and of the previous persecutions have been the main subjects of research in this field. Less attention has been paid to the social organizations and political initiatives promoted by the refugees in order to keep the memory of their tragedy and past life, and even less to their feelings. This is a comparative research, focused on three groups of refugees, better named as repatriated. They experienced exile after a similar past of colonization and exposure to a pervasive nationalistic propaganda by their cultural or institutional homeland. The first two groups are the Germans refugees from Banat, and the Italians who left Istria and Dalmatia. They share an historical basis of ancient colonization, dating from the XVI to the XVIII centuries, a long heritage in the Austro-Hungaric Empire, and the ultimate inclusion of their ancestral territories in Tito‟s Yugoslavia. Their fate was the result of the defeat of Italy and Germany during the II world war, and of the flow of forced migrations that took place in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the war. The third group of refugees is a result of the decolonisation process (Miege and Dubois, 1994). They are the French Pieds-Noir, who populated Algeria from 1830 as part of the only European colonization project of the Nineteenth century based on mass migration of rural people; they were promptly expelled after the Evian treaty in the summer of 1962 (Baussant, 2002; Verdès-Leroux, 2001; Hureau, 2001; Stora, 2004). The three groups were granted return to the homeland for the citizenship rules whereby they could claim right to repatriation. Refugees of Italian heritage from Istria and Dalmatia and the refugees of French descent from Algeria, were considered Italian and French citizens; the German refugees from eastern Europe could claim the right to citizenship in Germany on the basis of the national constitution (Brubaker, 1992; Fahrmeir, 2007). Nevertheless, the legal right to return to homelands was not accompanied by a welcome from their fellow-citizens. Annoyance and discrimination emerged soon after the rescue. As the refugees knew they would never go back, a feeling of abandon by the motherland and of loneliness was common to all these populations. 1 Their stories raise common questions. How did governments manage with the uncomfortable memory of the expulsion and the flight of their citizens from the former homeland and how the refugees did triy to achieve public recognition of their sufferance? On the private side, which mental tools were enforced to nourish memory and provide relief for the perpetual loss of the homeland? 2. A past of colonization and nationalistic propaganda Refugees of German and of Italian descent can be compared in territorial origin and past. Three features are shared. First, both had settled for centuries in different areas of the Habsburg Empire. Germans emigrated following a program of colonization started after the siege of Wien of 1683. To secure the southern border of the kingdom against a new invasion by the Ottomans, in the first half of the Eighteenth century new colonies were established on the Danubian shores, in the provinces of Batschka, Baranja, Syrmien, Slavonien and Banat. The Italians had populated the peninsula of Istria and the main towns of the Dalmatian coast during the domination of Venice of the Adriatic since XVI century and their territories were incorporated in the Habsburg empire after the capitulation of Venice in 1799. With the fall of the Habsburg Empire both groups were partly incorporated in the new Yugoslavian and Italian kingdoms. The territories of the Germans were divided between Hungary, Serbia and Romania. Western part of the Banat was included in the Serbian Vojvodina, the eastern portion was assigned to Rumania. Italians had their territories included in the Kingdom of Italy, following the Paris Conference of 1919, the Rapallo treaty of 1920 and of the Roma treaty on the town of Fiume/Rjeka, in 1924. Second, before and during the second world war, Italians and Germans underwent an heavy nationalistic propaganda, respectively by Fascist Italy and by Nazi Germany. In the coastal towns of Fiume/Rjeka, Zara/Zadar and Pola/Pula, Italians, protected by the Italian government, controlled much of the properties and of the wealth, while Slovenians and Croatians were subject to discrimination. In Banat, the aggressive propaganda promoted by Hitler‟s Third Reich, led most of the youngsters to believe in the future advocated by Nazism of a new European order and of racial superiority. Third, like the Donauschwaben of Serbian Banat who left with no chance of return (Dragan, 2010; Documentation Project Commettee, 2003), Italians left their homeland forever, forced by mass violence and killings during the war or by discriminations or persecutions. Both groups were aware of the definitive character of their departure, and developed therefore a final image of their ancestral territory as a land lost forever. The Donauschwaben arriving from the Danubian province of Banat, currently the Serbian 2 Vojvodina, were a small minority in the flow of over 12 millions Germans expelled from eastern Europe. Five hundreds thousand Germans were in the region the eve of the second world war (Sevic, 2000, pp.143-163; Sretenovic and Prauser, 2004, p.46). About 300.000 left the country from october 1944 at the arrival of the Red Army (Sretenovic and Prauser, 2004, p.56). Those who did not leave, almost 200.000, experienced genocide, deportation to the Soviet Union and concentration in camps, with a death toll amounting to 64.000 (Documentation Project Committee, 2006, p.5;). While experiencing the difficult conditions of the German civil population at the end of the war at arrival in Germany, they were often regarded with suspicion, discriminated, and hardly recognized as truly Germans (Schulze, 2001; Id., 1997). The population of Italian heritage expelled from Istria and Dalmatia had a similar experience: they accounted for the same number, around 280.000 (Mileta Mattiuz, 2012) and shared the same original sin of a national group supported by an aggressive fascist regime. At variance with most of German populations, the departure was not the result of overt expulsion procedures, but the recent historical research has demonstrated that persecutions, menace to national identity and pressure to leave were so strong to persuade many to abandon (Cattaruzza, 2007, 2003, 2000; Pupo, 2006; Oliva, 2005; Cattaruzza, Dogo, Pupo, 2000). Also these refugees were not welcomed in the new Italy, pervaded by antifascist feelings: as they were considered fascist, their integration therefore was frequently marked by humiliation. The population of foreign ancestry forced to rapidly leave Algeria in the summer 1962 were about one million. It was of composite origin, from a long story of arrivals from France, Italy, Spain and Malta and it had been exposed to an intense nationalistic propaganda (Verdès-Leroux, 2001, pp.190-194 ; Stora, 2004, p.27). The French institutions like the school, the army and administrative apparatus had applied a pervasive program of national building, aimed to assimilate immigrants from different parts of southern Europe; in fact, Algeria was not seen as a colony, but as an oversea department of France. The choice to leave or die, offered at the end of the war by the nationalists of the newly independent Algeria, cancelled suddenly their heritage. The arrival in Marseille was discouraging: the public opinion did not welcome the refugees, instead, they were blamed as responsible for the long war, with the accuse of racism and fascism (Verdès-Leroux, 2001, pp.13- 15). The feeling of isolation and discrimination was widespread among the repatriated, who were in majority much poorer of the fellow citizens living in France. 3. Public memories: the long way to recall The experience of the three groups can be compared in several aspects such as the construction of public memories and their political exploitation, the assessment of the character and finalities of their associations, the public actions for preserving the memories of the lost past and the mourning 3 of the suffering. How it was the image built in Federal Germany of the Donauschwaben as a distinct group, different from other much more numerous groups, like the three million of expellees from Silesian? In contrast to the Silesians refugees, the Donauschwaben came from a territory separate from the late German Reich (Demshuk, 2012), but within the Austro-Hungary empire, which was inhabited also by other populations: the Serbs, the Rumanians, the Hungarians and the Italians. The name Donauschwaben came in use only after the end of the first world war, to better identify the Germans from the other national groups, after their common homeland was partitioned between Serbia, Rumania and Hungary (Dragan, 2010 p.918; Magris, 1986, pp.345-362) There was a need for a new collective memory after the second world war. The sufferings of German minorities from all over Europe were described in a research project, published in several volumes starting 1953; the last volume, edited in 1961, was dedicated to the Germans of Yugoslavia (Schieder, 1961). The wish to recover from the anguish of the expulsion, to find a political sponsorship and the desire to collect memories to maintain identity, prompted many initiatives by the millions of refugees from ex German areas and exiles from Yugoslavia.

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