Documentation Centre Displacement, Expulsion, Reconciliation
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A new (opened June 2021) major crown jewel in Berlin’s already massive dark-tourism portfolio. In the German original it is called “Dokumentationszentrum Flucht, Vertreibung, Versöhnung”.Having started as a rather controversial idea, the end result is doubly stunning. The immensely rich exhibitions (there are two distinct parts) cover not only the displacements of Germans at the end of WWII (although that is one clear focus), but also the whole topic of displacement and migration right up to the present day, and it is full of intriguing artefacts too.
More background info: Migration and displacement of people have been around since the dawn of civilization. But over the past century or so this has more often than not been the result of violent conflicts, ranging from the Armenian genocide during WW1 to the Germans fleeing west as the Red Army advanced into Germany at the end of WWII, from the Indian partition shortly afterwards to the Vietnamese “boat people” of the 1970s–90s, right up to the 2015, and ongoing, refugee crisis in the wake of the wars in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In Germany it was the mass exodus of as many as 14 million people from the East during the final phases of WWII that has made the biggest impact. Accommodating all those millions of refugees put quite a strain on West Germany (and the emerging GDR too). The flight itself was accompanied by hardships, violence (including widespread and systematic rape of German women by Red Army soldiers) and tragedies like the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff" refugee ship in which some 9000 civilians drowned (making it the largest loss of life in any maritime disaster in history). In total, about 600,000 of those who fled did not make it and perished.
In the decades after the war, the refugees set up organizations such as the “Bund der Vertriebenen” (BdV), literally ‘Federation of Expellees’, which aimed at representing the interests of those Germans who had lost their homes in the East. This has long been controversial, not least because some of the founding members had a Nazi past and the nostalgia for the lost “Heimat” (literally ‘home’, though the German term carries a much heavier load of connotations that are difficult to capture in English) often came with a whiff of revisionism.
Indeed when the German government under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s proceeded with its “Ostpolitik” (‘new eastern policy’), aimed at easing tensions with the GDR and the Warsaw Pact states in general, which also included recognizing Poland in its current borders, the BdV opposed this.
That’s because much of western Poland and East Prussia used to be German territories and many “Heimatvertriebene” (‘homeland expellees’) initially held out the hope of maybe one day regaining those lands and returning “home”. Poland had effectively been moved westwards as a result of WWII, especially the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Potsdam Conference. Germans still living in those new territories were expelled and Poles from the east encouraged to move west. The territorial shift also came with many changes of place names: e.g. Breslau became Wrocław, Danzig became Gdańsk, and Stettin became Szczecin. At the same time the Soviets retained territory taken in 1939 from eastern Poland after WWII, as well as the East Prussian exclave of former Königsberg, which became Kaliningrad. That the territorial shift west meant losses of land to the Soviet Union was seen by many Poles as a betrayal on the part of their Western Allies. But for the communist regimes any challenging of the new borders was a red flag.
As part of the 1990 “Two Plus Four Agreement”, officially ‘Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany’, that formally brought about German Reunification, the current borders in the east were finally officially recognized by all sides. So all potential territorial claims regarding Poland or the Soviet/Russian Kaliningrad Oblast were legally excluded. This also changed the BdV’s outlook, of course. Yet there were still allegations of a far-right-wing influence on the organization or a lack of distancing from such movements on the part of the BdV.
So when the idea of a museum in Berlin on the subject of the expulsion of Germans at the end of WWII was brought up, this was seen by many as highly controversial. The fear was a revisionist narrative or glorification of the old “Heimat”. However justified those initial fears may have been, the end result now can in no way be accused of anything like that, quite on the contrary.
The new exhibition is very balanced, and while it does cover the plight of German civilians being displaced and expelled due to WWII, it also covers ‘reconciliation’ (even explicitly in the documentation centre’s name) and half the focus is on other cases of displacement and migration. The approach is very inclusive indeed, not just politically-historically but also in terms of being one of the most disabled-friendly exhibitions I’ve ever encountered and it’s also reflected in the consistently gender-neutral wordings of all the written texts in German. To explain for those unfamiliar with German: “Gendern” (to be linguistically gender-neutral) is a big thing in current German society – not everybody is fond of it, some find it a nuisance, but it has by now become firmly entrenched, also in much of the media. It means that female forms of all nouns referring to people have to be represented in some form in writing (and now also in official spoken German) so that the generic terms, which are mostly in the masculine gender, cannot be left to stand for women too, as had used to be the case until recent decades.
I should perhaps point out that I have my own personal connections with the topic of the displacement of Germans from the East. Both my parents had to flee in the spring of 1945. My mother, together with my maternal grandmother, just about managed by the skin of their teeth to get on the last train out of Elbing (now Elblag, east of Gdańsk) and found refuge with relatives in the west. So my mother’s displacement was comparatively privileged. My father’s journey, in contrast, was much rougher, though he, unlike my mother, hardly ever spoke about it. But it was clear that he must have witnessed terrible things. Once he arrived in the west with his mother and younger brother they had it harder as well, being allocated accommodation with farmers in the north of Germany near the border with Denmark, where they were anything but welcome (refugees from the East were frequently reviled as “Polacks”).
Neither of my parents were ever revisionist or had any leanings towards the BdV or similar ideologies (although I think my grandmother on my father’s side did). But the story of their displacement was at times a palpable shadow hanging over my family.
This became clearer when the Cold War had ended and the former Eastern Bloc opened up to western visitors. My mother’s brother did eventually travel to Poland and even visited the family’s former house in Elblag, now inhabited by a Polish family, who apparently were very welcoming. But my mother could never bring herself to revisit Elblag to see the places of her childhood again.
Anyway, as this has such close personal connections to myself and my family, I was more than keen to visit the new documentation centre after it opened in late June 2021. So I made sure I built a stopover in Berlin into my travel itinerary that summer. My experience of the centre is described in detail below.
A few more words about the location: the building housing today’s documentation centre has a link to its topic too. Originally constructed in the late 1920s, badly damaged in WWII and rebuilt in a somewhat different form in 1959–61, it became the “Haus der ostdeutschen Heimat” (‘house of the east German home’) and served as a gathering space for displaced Germans from those territories. The building was later renamed simply “Deutschlandhaus”. It was chosen by the German government as the future seat of the documentation centre in 2008.
The whole structure underwent a substantial restoration and rebuilding programme between 2013 and 2020. Basically only the outer façade of the original building remained, while behind this façade an entirely new construction was realized with much raw concrete in evidence and wide airy staircases. When I visited the place in mid-August 2021 just six weeks after its opening, it still felt like the concrete had just settled and the paint just dried. In fact, it wasn’t quite finished yet; the restaurant and shop had not yet arrived. Only a few flyers were available from the reception desk.
But now to the exhibition itself:
What there is to see: A lot … and when I say “a lot” I really mean A LOT! Do come prepared and with plenty of time!
Before going in it’s worth taking note of the architecture – 1920s modernism, not spectacularly modernist, but not without style. But if you come here you probably won’t do so for the architecture but for what’s inside.
When I went in August 2021, I had to book a time slot online in advance – for crowd control during the pandemic – but the ticket was still free of charge. Once my ticket and my vaccination certificate had been checked, I was free to enter.
The foyer is rather bare, just a long reception desk and a rack with a few flyers, but no proper museum shop and no restaurant, both noted on the flyer, were to be seen yet when I was there. The bookshop has meanwhile opened, though, and the restaurant is planned to finally open in 2022. The space for temporary exhibitions was also still empty when I was there. The first exhibition here is pencilled in for spring 2022.
There’s also another desk where you can pick up your audio-guide. This is also free of charge and available in German or English. (Whether yet more languages are or will be available I don’t know and the centre’s website does not specify this.) I’m not normally a big fan of audio-guides so I asked how important it was and was advised to absolutely take one as it would provide a wealth of significant extra information. And it indeed proved to do so, perhaps too much so. In particular there are numerous personal stories and eyewitness reports, but after a while, certainly from the beginning of the second part of the exhibition I found myself skipping more and more audio-guide chapters. I just found their number somewhat overwhelming, so I used it in an increasingly selective manner.
In a corner by the lift shaft onto the outside of which is attached an original stained-glass window from the old building (see above), is a small exhibition section about the history of the building as such, with an interactive screen and audio station.
The only other visitable thing on the ground floor was hence the “Raum der Stille” (which the flyer translates as ‘Room of Stillness’), a sculptural space where you can stand and contemplate in silence. The outer walls feature slats with parts of a photo printed on them so that when you stand at the correct angle you get to see a whole large composite image – namely of a rural scene with a single lonely house. (A similar technique as employed at the new exhibition at Sobibór that I had visited just a few days before, so it was a striking similarity.) Yet it might make more sense to come here after having gone through the main exhibition.
This begins upstairs on the first floor. The space here is largely open-plan, and parts of the floor space are left empty except for a number of stools – here educational programmes, workshops and discussions can take place. (There is also a proper seminar room and a special events hall, both on the ground floor.) There’s also a section called “forum” where visitors can leave notes on a number of prompts such as “What I wouldn’t leave behind” or “For me home means ...”. Another interactive element is a vote with regard to what visitors think the opening of this institution means to them, e.g. “became aware of a new topic”, or “I hope it will contribute to reconciliation” or “I’m sceptical”. At the time of my visit the point “it’s important because forced migration is today more relevant than ever” was the clear winner, while the hope for reconciliation was lagging far behind.
The exhibition proper starts with a look at the development of nations and nationalism, illustrated with numerous countries’ image of nation and the nationalist myths involved (e.g. in Spain, Britain, Italy, Germany, Poland).
The style of the exhibition becomes clear quite quickly. All texts are in German and English, and the translation quality is high. In addition there are numerous interactive elements such as touch screens and video monitors and at various points visitors are invited to open drawers and little doors to access additional exhibits. (The latter is an increasingly frequently encountered element in museums of eliciting active participation from visitors. Though the fact that this means having to touch a lot of objects seemed to me a bit incongruous with the pandemic …).
The exhibition also goes to great lengths to be “inclusive”, meaning there are offerings for visually impaired people – stations where things can be encountered by touch, and the intro videos at the beginning of each section come accompanied with German sign language and various captions come in Braille. Intro videos also are in “simplified” language (and an audio-guide in simple language is also available from the reception desk). The whole exhibition is also wheelchair-accessible. At various points there are stations with foldable stools you can sit on while taking in videos or audio material … and after a while this becomes a valuable option even for those without disabilities but who develop “museum legs” after hours of standing in front of exhibits and lengthy text panels.
The first half of the permanent exhibition is about the wider context and about displacement, migration and expulsion in general through history beginning in the early 20th century and extending up to the present day. It is subdivided into six thematic subsections. In addition to ‘nation and nationalism’, these are: ‘war and violence’, ‘rights and responsibilities’, ‘loss and new beginnings’, ‘routes and camps’ and ‘memory and controversy’. A panel at the beginning explicitly states that there is no pre-given order in which you should go through these thematic subsections but are free to choose your own sequence.
The exhibition is so detailed and in-depth and the artefacts and text panels and so on so numerous that it is impossible to give a comprehensive overview here. Instead I will pick out especially noteworthy objects and subsections with short descriptions.
The ‘war and violence’ section covers a wide range of conflicts and the impact they have had on fleeing civilians from the early 20th century, for example the Balkan Wars and WW1, to the present day (e.g. Syria). The genocides of the century are also included, from the Armenian genocide of 1915 to the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides and the genocidal atrocities in Bosnia (see Srebrenica). Notable artefacts in this section include shackles from Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, a damaged machete from Rwanda, and a replica of a fragment of a grenade that hit a market in Sarajevo (killing 60 people) during that city’s four-year-long siege by Serbian troops. There’s also a harrowing extra section on the topic of sexual violence in the context of war and displacement.
A particularly remarkable artefact on display in the section ‘memory and controversy’ is a porthole from the wreck of the sunken refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff (see above), which was obtained illegally in 1988 by two British divers. A sub-subsection here is also the issue of ‘memory and images’. A case illustrated at great length is that of photographer Margaret Bourke-White who covered the mass migration of people in the wake of the partition of India in 1947. Her photos strongly shaped the world’s visual memory of these events. Similarly there are photos taken during the exodus from the East of Germans at the end of WWII that have become quite iconic, even if they cannot not specifically be connected to the events they supposedly illustrate.
The section ‘routes and camps’ is largely about the refugees of recent years especially from Afghanistan and Syria, in particular from 2015 onwards, which had a big impact on German politics and society. So this is an especially current section and indeed reaches up to almost the present day (2020). On display are, for example, a child’s drawing of scenes from the flight from Syria, across the Mediterranean and onwards to Germany – next to a life jacket. I found that quite touching.
Also in this section are displayed some mobile phones – and it is pointed out how important smartphones are for today’s refugees, serving as a means of communication, as a compass and a map, for planing the next stage of the route, as well as for preserving images. In 2015 it was often said by critics of the ‘refugees welcome’ attitude that if refugees have expensive smartphones they can’t be so impoverished. That misconception is vehemently rebuked in this exhibition.
The coverage of refugee camps is especially depressing too, naturally. Images of vast camps in Lebanon are augmented with items such as left-behind personal belongings and a kitchen set as distributed by the UN in refugee camps.
The section ‘loss and new beginnings’ has a particularly interesting video installation. Here nine former refugees who found a new home in Germany, having fled e.g. from Vietnam or Bosnia, tell their story in brief video presentations on almost life-size screens.
Important and interesting, but by nature a bit duller, is the section ‘rights and responsibilities’ that is about the legal side of the topic of refugees, the causes of migration/displacement and the organization of integration in the new homelands. Also covered here are the various international regulations, from the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Trials, the Charter of the United Nations, to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in the Netherlands.
So much for the first half of the permanent exhibition. Also on this floor is the Library and Testimony Archive as well as a few workstations for independent research and a table for group discussions.
And in the centre of the open space at the top of the stairs from the ground floor another staircase, this time a spiral one, leads upstairs to the second floor. Alternatively there is of course also the lift, but that takes you not to the beginning but to the final section of the second half of the exhibition! So if you use that you first have to make your way backwards through the exhibition to get to the first part.
Unlike the first half on level 1, the second part of the permanent exhibition on level 2 has a clear pre-given circuit. It’s topic is the German history of displacement, expulsion and reconciliation from the Third Reich to the present day. It is subdivided into three broader blocks: A ‘German expansionist policy and World War II’, B ‘expulsions and the new post-war order’, and C ‘expellees and refugees in Germany after 1945’.
The scene is set by coverage of the aggressive expansionist policies of the Third Reich, with the annexation of the Sudentenland and Austria and then of course the invasion of Poland and other countries during WWII. One striking exhibit is a map depicting the future “Großdeutsches Reich” with the eastern “Lebensraum” primarily serving as the breadbasket and for exploitation of resources for the benefit of the Germans in the old Reich. Fortunately the creation of such an über-Reich of the Nazis failed.
The plans of the Allies for redrawing central Europe’s map after Germany’s defeat are also pointed out in detail, including the planned forced relocation of ethnic Germans from Poland and other Eastern European countries after the war, as expressed by the Polish government in exile as well as by the British War Cabinet (and especially Winston Churchill himself), and was consented to by US president Roosevelt.
The WWII sections also feature some remarkable artefacts, such as a bent and flattened old French horn found in the ground of the levelled Czech village of Lidice that was destroyed (and its inhabitants executed or imprisoned) by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. Another poignant object on display here is a wooden sledge from the Siege of Leningrad.
The Holocaust with its mass shootings, deportations to ghettos and concentration camps is covered as well. A poignant exhibit in this context is a reproduction of the list of the numbers of Jewish inhabitants per European country used in the Wannsee Conference. All this is augmented by folders with individual personal stories illustrating a wide range of different fates.
Another important aspect covered is the “Heim ins Reich” campaign of the Nazis, meaning the encouragement of ethnic Germans in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to move to the Third Reich, or rather to the newly occupied territories in Poland. There they were allocated farms and houses whose former occupants had been evicted (or murdered in the Holocaust).
We then come to the core of the second half of the exhibition, the displacement of Germans from the East as civilians fled in their millions from the advancing Red Army that marched into East Prussia in January 1945. Officially, fleeing was declared illegal by the Nazi leadership that still held on to the notion of the “Endsieg” (‘final victory’). Nevertheless, faced with the prospect of falling into the hands of marauding and raping Soviet troops, most people set off hastily in long treks, including over the frozen Vistula Lagoon of the Baltic Sea where many a wagon broke through the ice. The refugees were also strafed from the air by Soviet fighter planes. Hundreds of thousands did not survive the treks. Again many photos and personal stories illustrate this dark chapter of history in the exhibition.
A key artefact on display here is a wooden horse-drawn wagon as would have been used in these refugee treks. Another telling exhibit is the display of house keys taken with him by the house’s owner when he fled Königsberg in January 1945. He kept the keys in the hope of one day possibly being able to return home. But this never happened, of course.
Then after the end of WWII, the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Poland in its new borders as well as from Hungary and Czechoslovakia began as the “new order” of Europe was being implemented (as planned by the Allies – see above!). Again several personal stories are told in this context in the exhibition. Amongst the artefacts on display are a handcart in which one family dragged away what personal belongings fitted into the cart on their enforced route from Poland to Germany. Another poignant exhibit is that of an armband marked “N” (for “Němec”, meaning ‘German’ in Czech). Just like the yellow star had identified Jews in the Third Reich, these “N” armbands now identified ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, which frequently caused abuse and humiliation until the person who had worn this armband was finally expelled in 1946.
Amongst the two most touching exhibits are a couple of teddy bears. The first one, a very small one, was found by another refugee in a trench, where some previous refugee child must have lost or discarded it; the other is a larger one made from old field blankets and cloth fragments and given to a refugee from Königsberg. Other objects on display here are a net curtain made out of a fishing net and a children’s bed frame from the Swedish Red Cross that was donated to a German refugee family.
This already takes us into the final section of the exhibition about expellees and refugees in Germany after 1945. The Allies ran transitional refugee camps and allocated individuals and families to their occupation zones, as evenly as possible, but still in some places there were suddenly more refugees than original inhabitants. Unsurprisingly this caused tensions and frictions. On the other hand, the refugees also contributed significantly to the rebuilding effort of post-war Germany. In the Soviet Zone and later the GDR this “Aufbau” (‘rebuilding’) was a part of a socialist mission but commemoration of the trauma of displacement or expulsion was suppressed under communism. In the West, on the other hand, where there were more liberties, a proper commemoration culture developed, often accompanied by romantic and nostalgic glorification of the notion of “Heimat” (‘homeland’).
It is in this section, then, that displays include all manner of kitschy “Heimat”-related artefacts, from traditional costumes to grandfather clocks, crockery with images of the lost homeland, and whatnot. The displacement was also officially memorialized, e.g. by means of commemorative stamps. And apparently there are now also over 1,500 memorial monuments in Germany commemorating the displacement, as one interactive touch screen explains in great detail.
But mostly this fostering of memory of the lost “Heimat” was done in private or by private organizations (such as the Bund der Vertriebenen – see above).
One curious aspect of the commemoration of displacement was the so-called postage stamp war. This refers to the practice of the GDR regime having mail featuring those commemorative stamps issued by the West German postage service intercepted and returned to the senders – with the stamps in question painted over … because these stamps were regarded as a “provocation”.
What I found most interesting here, however, were the personal stories and instances of the next generation (secretly) tape-recording the former refugees recounting their experiences and plight.
An intriguing exhibit was also a smell station where allegedly you can sniff typical smells of “Heimat”. Maybe my sense of smell is not too good, but I found this bit rather unconvincing.
Also covered in this section are the much later relocations of ethnic Germans who had remained in the Eastern Bloc, especially in Russia and other ex-Soviet countries, and who after the end of the Cold War and German reunification came to Germany as so-called “Aussiedler” (‘resettlers’). One trunk lid on display lists its long route: from Dushanbe in Tajikistan via Brest in Belarus to the German reception camp of Friedland.
The reconciliation aspect that is part of the three-part name of this exhibition is eventually included too. As travel to the former “Heimat” in the East became possible towards and especially after the end of communism, many western ex-refugees took up the opportunity and went to see their former homes and meet the new inhabitants, and apparently personal friendships and official town partnerships developed out of this.
Covered as well is the sudden surge in commemoration of the displacement in the early 2000s, with a TV series, feature films, magazines’ special editions and in literature.
Finally, a series of panels looks beyond Germany and covers the changes and upheavals in Eastern Europe as one after the other of the communist regimes were toppled and new forms of states developed. In the former Yugoslavia this led to war returning to Europe for the first time since WWII, but elsewhere the peaceful revolutions led to new partnerships and eventually the eastwards enlargement of the EU.
The finishing panels cover the mass arrival of refugees in 2015 and the still ongoing refugee crisis with people from especially Syria, Afghanistan or Africa continuing to try and cross the Mediterranean in boats and often ending up in overcrowded refugee camps. In a way this final section takes us back to the beginning in the first half of the exhibition, then, that had already covered this contemporary aspect.
All in all, I must say that I was mightily impressed by this exhibition. It certainly far exceeded any expectations I may have had previously. If there’s anything to criticize, I would say it is, if anything, too good for its own good. By that I mean it’s too rich in detailed information and thus puts a strain on visitors’ attention span and concentration after a few hours. Towards the end I was getting a little overwhelmed and started skipping parts of the audio-guide recordings and photographing text panels for later rather than reading them in full there and then. For me that is a useful strategy for later putting together these chapters, as I can, as it were, revisit the exhibition remotely at home through my photos. But for “ordinary” visitors who don’t want to follow such a documentary approach the exhibition might be somewhat demanding. Most will probably be OK with skimming through and just picking out highlights that strike them as especially interesting. But if you are planing a proper in-depth visit trying to capture everything the exhibition has to offer, then that can hardly be done in a single visit. So I recommend to such visitors that they split their visit over two days (or more).
Location: in the centre of Berlin next to Anhalter Bahnhof; address: Stresemannstraße 90, 10963 Berlin.
Google Maps locator: [52.5049, 13.3823]
Access and costs: easy to get to, free
Details: The site is quite easy to get to, both by bus and by S-Bahn. The stop Anhalter Bahnhof (S 1, S 2, S 25, S 26) is right opposite the entrance, as is the bus stop (line M29) of the same name. From the city centre east of Potsdamer Platz or from the intersection Gleisdreieck it’s easily walkable. When I visited in August 2021 I had to pre-book a time slot online in advance, due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions; but that may no longer be the case soon. It’s best to check ahead, though.
Opening times: Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., closed Mondays (as well as when there are VIP visitors, such as Chancellor Angela Merkel on 7 July and Danish Queen Margrethe II on 11 November 2021).
Admission free.
Time required: a lot! Do not underestimate this vast exhibition. I spent four and a half hours in there, and I skipped quite a few bits, especially on the audio-guide as I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number and length of the tracks. You could probably spend an entire day there easily if you want to take in everything. But I’d now rather recommend splitting your visit over two days. Do the general part on the first floor one day, and the rest on the second floor the other day. Since admission is free, it doesn’t add any costs.
Combinations with other dark destinations: a few major other dark attractions of Berlin are just a stone’s throw away, including the Berlin Story Bunker just down Schöneberger Straße to the south-west, or the Togopraphy of Terror round the corner to the north on Niederkirchnerstraße. Also within easy walking distance are the German Spy Museum or Checkpoint Charlie.
For more see under Berlin in general.
Combinations with non-dark destinations: See under Berlin in general.
Some of the key mainstream attractions of Berlin are nearby, such as Potsdamer Platz just up the road at the northern end of Stresemannstraße, from where it is also not far to the iconic Brandenburg Gate and the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden.
