In western Germany the memory of flight and expulsion and the German East was and still is kept alive in official public statements. In the countries of the former Eastern bloc, including the GDR (German Democratic Republic), by contrast, attempts were made to suppress this remembrance completely, and it was not just "German East Prussia" which was a taboo subject, and was sometimes even denied.
But even if the family roots of about a third of the citizens of the Federal Republic go back to the former German eastern territories and other countries in eastern and central Europe, society in the Federal Republic was for a long time deeply divided as from the 1960s with respect to the remembrance of the German East. This remained in the wake of the political conflicts between east and west during the Cold War. As a result, many people today hesitate to use old German place names and they go on holiday to Poland as a matter of course but not to East Prussia or Silesia. By contrast, interest in German history and its inhabitants is constantly growing among our Eastern Central European neighbours, even if history is often given a different interpretation. It was not until the fall of the Iron Curtain that the public, both in Germany and in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, came to the conclusion that Germans in the Second World War were not only perpetrators but also victims.
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Illustration:
The members of a study trip organised by the East Prussian State Museum in front of the reconstructed Kant monument by Christian Daniel Rauch in Kaliningrad (former Königsberg), 2012.
The journalist and native East Prussian Marion Gräfin Dönhoff (1909-2002) was the main initiator of the reassembly of the monument destroyed in the war. She was an early and intensive advocate of reaching an understanding with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and received many awards for her work. This includes the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade as well as honorary doctorates of the universities in Toruń, Kaliningrad and Columbia university in New York. "The only thing I regard as an essential deed in my life is the restoration of the Kant Memorial for Königsberg," wrote Marion Dönhoff in retrospect.