Memory and Politics

AT ITS NATIONAL CONVENTION IN FEBRUARY 2006, the VdH—once one of the largest German veterans’ associations—decided to dissolve itself. The atmosphere in the Maritim Hotel in Bonn was emotional, yet the measure taken was necessary given the immense financial problems the association faced because of a significant decline in membership numbers. The delegates agreed that the association had not managed to fulfill one major task: to secure compensation payments by the German government for its East German members. At that time MP Klaus Brähmig (CDU), who was the leader of the Parlamentarischer Beirat (parliamentary advisory board) of the association, had little hope that the German government would ever grant the East German returnees a compensation payment, particularly since the main driving force for this compensation, the VdH, had now been dissolved. Yet the happy end of a long and contested history of debate about compensation payments for German returnees was still to come: on July 1, 2008, a law was enacted that granted East German returnees compensation payments for the time they had spent and the work they had done in war captivity. This was the endpoint of a long political process and intensive debates that had lasted for several decades.

This chapter explores how debates about financial compensation for returnees since the early 1950s constituted a narrative framework for the formation of memory. It argues that in this communicative arena, defined by the rules of political debate and shaped by the interests of political agents, interpretations of the past were used as arguments to pursue sociopolitical aims. In the first section of this chapter I examine the discussions about the introduction and amendment of the Kriegsgefangenen entschädigungs gesetz (KgfEG; POW Compensation Law) in the FRG. My focal point is the political discourse in the FRG, though my analysis will include comparisons and contrasts with the situation in the GDR. The results of the analysis demonstrate that there was a crucial asymmetry in the political memory discourse between East and West Germany throughout the decades of Germany's division. In the second section of this chapter I analyze debates and initiatives that developed after German reunification and after the abolishment of the KgfEG in 1992.