“I like Angela Merkel, but I don’t much like the company she keeps -her Bayern friends!” many people in Berlin and in the rest of Germany are often fond of saying – a direct reference to her CDU party based in Munich. One perfect example is the 66 yr old fellow Christian Democrat, Erika Steinbach who finds herself at the centre of a controversy whether or not she should be granted a seat on the board of a museum dedicated to the plight of Germans forced to flee westwards from present day Poland at the end of WWII.
While most observers would laud Berlin’s efforts to heal the wounds left by the last war – most notably with Poland - Steinbach has maintained her lobbying for those who were expelled and their families. This has created a great deal of understandable irritation on the Polish side and she has been vilified as a Nazi apologist making the Germans out as the victims in a war that the Germans themselves started.
She even attempted at one time to tie Polish EU membership conditional on paying compensation to them. She has since become a bit of a hate figure in Poland as being seen to want to mitigate Hitler’s responsibility for the war.
The FDP party, Merkel’s new coalition partners have said they will block Steinbach’s appointment to the museum, thus pressuring Merkel to support the FDP or otherwise risk angering Poland. The leader of the FDP, Federal Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, wisely chose to make his first official visit outside Germany to Warsaw.
Steinbach, by all accounts a divisive personality, has won the support of the Christian Social Union, a Bavarian-based sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, and even more right-wing and reactionary than the CDU itself is.
Tags: angela merkel, erika steinbach
An interesting article about the Germans reclaiming land in Poland was published in an english speaking Polish newspaper, “the New Poland Express”.
Two families are facing eviction from
their home after a court ruled it
should be returned to its German
owner.
The house in the village of Narty in
northeast Poland, was occupied for over 30
years by the Moskalik and Glowacki families.
But in 2005, German citizen Agnes
Trawny became the first German to win a
property restitution case in the Polish courts
when it was ruled that she could get back
forty-seven hectares of land and the house
which originally belonged to her mother.
The court then told the two Polish
families who had been living there ever
since Trawny and her mother left for
Germany in the 70s, that they had until
December 2008 to move out.
The two families, each consisting of six
members, contested the court’s decision
claiming that since Trawny abandoned the
house and the land she clearly wasn’t interested
in keeping either. The families meanwhile say
they have invested large amounts of money
in both. They are also blaming Poland’s
communist government for putting them in a
house without securing the rights to it.
But this week the court in Szczytno
ruled that the families will have to move
out by 2010 and added that the State is not
required to provide alternative housing.
This is being appealed by the lawyer for
the two families, Andrzej Jamelita: “I hope
that the state will provide the families with
alternative premises and will not enforce
their ruling,” he told TVN24.
Property restitution is a controversial
issue in Poland. With border changes and
large numbers of people being moved at
the end of WWII, many land disputes
remain unresolved.
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