The Instrumentalisation of the Right to Reparation and Dealing with the Past between Germany and Poland
Abstrakt
Dealing with the past is an essential part of transitional justice. It combines the four main pillars: the right to know, the right to justice, the right to reparation, and the guarantee of non-recurrence. Dealing with the past indicates that a significant amount of time has passed since the crime and injustice. Therefore, the problem of forgetting and modifying history deliberately or unconsciously forms the core of the instrumentalisation of dealing with the past. On the one hand, unconscious forgetting or modifying is usually the result of a non-responsible educational system (youth and adult education); on the other hand, deliberate modification of the past is driven by the desire to reach an aim which morally cannot be supported by its measures. One can observe governmental desire to modify and therefore instrumentalise history to secure the government’s power, divert attention from domestic issues and thus shape national pride/patriotism which is built on a selective historical memory. This article highlights the development of German and Polish relationships in the context of reparations for World War II and a selective history spread by the German movement called ‘Prussian Claims Society’ that fights, using selective Nazi analogies, to reclaim former German property from Poland represented by the Polish government. The movement also wants to create a selective history to divert attention from the national separation of the population. The aim of the article is to show how Germans and Poles handle the topic of reparations for World War II.
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University of Łódź Polska
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4702-2349
The author is Simon Andre Klein who studied Germanistik at the University of Trier and Lodz (Bachelor - 2018) and International and Political Studies at the University of Łódź (Master - 2021). While the Bachelor Thesis was a comparative and historical work about the literature of industrial Wuppertal and industrial Łódź at the beginning of the 20. Century, the Master Thesis dealt with the topic of Transitional Justice by the example of Germany after the I. and II. World War.
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