Selfless Saviours or Diehard Fanatics? West and East German Memories of the Kriegsmarine and the Baltic Evacuation

摘要

The flight and seaborne evacuation of over two million German refugees from East Prussia and the Baltic states during the final months of the Second World War has become an increasingly popular theme in Germany, with dozens of memoirs, novels, popular histories and monographs on the subject crowding the shelves of German bookstores. In 2006 German author Walter Kempowski situated his most recent novel, All for Nothing, in East Prussia during the winter of 1944/45, taking the reader from the homey, apple-scented comforts of a Junker farmhouse to the freezing, shoving mass of refugees awaiting rescue on the shores of the wind-whipped Baltic Sea. Four years earlier Guenther Grass, an icon of the German intellectual left, surprised many of his readers when he selected the January 1945 sinking of the refugee-laden converted KdF liner Wilhelm Gustloff as a plot device for his novel Crabwalk. And, in the interval between the Grass and Kempowski novels, new editions of refugee accounts from the 1950s reappeared, not to mention dozens of new novels, memoirs, histories and videos on the topic.