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Erika Steinbach

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Erika Steinbach, Member of Parliament

Erika Steinbach (born July 25, 1943 as Erika Hermann) is a German conservative politician who has been representing the CDU and the state of Hesse as a member of the Parliament of Germany, the Bundestag, since 1990. She has also been president of the Federation of Expellees since 1998 (succeeding Fritz Wittmann), and besides that is a member of the board of the Goethe-Institut, the national broadcasting company ZDF, and the Landsmannschaft Westpreußen, as well as the national board of her party (since 2000). She also is chairwoman of the committee for human rights in the conservative parliamentary faction. Erika Steinbach has studied music and been a member of concert orchestras before becoming a fulltime politician.

Because of the widely discussed plan to build a centre and monument against forced migration which her organisation is promoting, she has been especially well-known in some East European countries with a record of expulsions.

Biography

According to the website of the German parliament, she was born in Rahmel in West Prussia (now Rumia, Poland). Her father, Wilhelm Karl Hermann, was a Luftwaffe NCO (Feldwebel) from Hanau in Hesse (western Germany), whose family was orginally from Silesia , who served as a technician at the local airport during the war. He was sent to Rahmel in 1941 while her mother Erika Grote lived in Berlin but visited Rahmel occasionaly. In January 1944 her father was sent to the Eastern Front and in January 1945, Steinbach's mother decided to flee with her children (Steinbach's sister was born in October) to Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. In 1950, after five years in a refugee camp, they managed to move to Hanau. As she was the daughter of a German soldier only stationed in Rahmel during the war, and escaped during an evacuation performed by German rather than Polish or Soviet authorities, Steinbach's status as an expellee, and allegedly hence her suitability to head the Federation of Expellees, has been questioned by Poles. However, according to the Federal Expellee Law, she is legally an expellee.

The Centre Against Expulsions in Berlin

One of her main aims is to build a controversial monumental Centre Against Expulsions (Template:Lang-de) in Berlin, devoted to the victims of forced population migrations or ethnic cleansing in Europe, particularly to the Germans victims of expulsion after World War II. She is the chairwoman (jointly with Peter Glotz) of the recently created foundation of the Centre. The initiative, supported by the CDU/CSU faction in German Parliament, has caused controversy. Opponents of the proposed form of Centre object to emphasizing only German suffering; others see it as an inappropriate counter-balance to the Holocaust memorial. In the petition "For a critical and enlightened debate about the past" historians expressed concerns the centre would establish and popularize a one-sided image of the past, without historical context. Many well-known European intellectuals and politicians, including Germans Günter Grass and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in 2003 expressed support for a centre devoted to all expelled during the 20th century, located in some place connected with expulsions, e.g. Wrocław (Breslau).

However, while Steinbach claims the Centre will represent the suffering of other nations as well, she believes that it is an internal German affair and rejects the proposal of creating the Centre under international control. "All victims of genocide and expulsion need a place in our hearts and in the historical memory. Human rights are indivisible," the Centre points out on its official home page. The Centre Against Expulsions have been supported by many human rights activists, historians, political scientists and politicians, including first UN High Commissioner for Human Rights José Ayala-Lasso , Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, Joachim Gauck, former Austrian crown prince Otto von Habsburg, Guido Knopp, György Konrád, Alfred M. de Zayas and others. The Bavarian Prime Minister and leader of CSU Edmund Stoiber argued that "the place for a museum showing the dreadful fate of expelled Germans is in the German capital". The CDU/CSU have decided to build the center and Chancellor Angela Merkel has explicitly declared her support.

German Foreign minister Joschka Fischer commented on Steinbach, and her initiative for a Centre Against Expulsions to ...have caused serious damage to German-Polish relations. Not amongst extremist nationalist forces that do exist in Poland, but amongst old friends and major agents for reconciliation between our two countries.

Among the German and Polish public, dispute has sometimes been fierce. Remainders of past mass murder of Poles by Germans have surfaced. For instance, the Polish newspaper Wprost published a cover photo-montage of Erika Steinbach in an SS uniform (photo). However, the then Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller condemned this and apologized to the German Chancellor. As part of the same controversy, the Federation of Expellees and Erika Steinbach sued the German journalist Gabriele Lesser for defamation related to an article published on September 19, 2003, in the daily Kieler Nachrichten. The Federation largely won the case against Lesser.

Steinbach was re-elected as president of the Bund der Vertriebenen by an overwhelming majority on May 8, 2004.

Erika Steinbach is a Protestant. She is married to a musical conductor, Helmut Steinbach since 1972.

Exhibition on expulsions in 2006

Steinbach's organisation will hold an exhibition on expulsions in the Berlin Kronprinzenpalais for 3 months during the fall of 2006. The exhibition will show expulsions from the genocide on the Armenians until the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It will deal with the expulsion of Germans (a major exhibition on this was also held in 2005 in Bonn), and, for the first time in Germany, also on the expulsion of Poles from what is now Ukraine and Belarus after 1945.

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