German tactlessness to blame for low in ties with Poland

By Edith Heller

WARSAW (DPA): The Germans have short memories. It was not just Poland's Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek who returned home with that impression earlier this week, after opening a Berlin exhibition called Solidarity to German Unification.

Other observers, too, had noticed that one man was missing from the line-up of international statesmen at the ceremony in the German Bundestag on Nov. 9 marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a man without whom the events of that time would scarcely have been conceivable.

That man was, of course, former Polish president Lech Walesa. The oversight was symptomatic of the level of awareness shown by the present German government, and of the present state of German-Polish relations.

Ten years after Helmut Kohl signaled the start of mutual rapprochement by attending a reconciliation mass in Poland, having accepted the invitation to do so despite the historic events going on in Germany at the time, the relationship between the two countries has reached a new low.

At first sight, a great deal of progress was made in German- Polish relations in the decade that followed the pulling back of the Iron Curtain. Germany finally recognized the Polish border, a treaty of friendship was signed, there was talk of a German- Polish community of interests.

Historical anniversaries became occasions to talk solemnly of reconciliation.

Town twinning, youth and cultural exchanges all helped mutual understanding. Journalists started to write about "the start of normality," and even Poland's Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek said only a year ago that German-Polish relations were "astonishingly good" considering the weight of historical baggage between the two countries.

Now, it would be hard to find anyone in Poland who would make such a claim. On the contrary: public utterances of annoyance with Germany, if not outright anti-German feeling, are mounting from month to month, from week to week.

A tone is creeping back into even the serious media which just a year or two ago seemed to have disappeared, or was evident at most in the publications of nationalist splinter groups. But the respected newspaper Rzeczpospolita recently summarized its comments on German policy towards Poland in the headline Eastern Europe -- a Race of Sub-Humans.

Adam Michnik's left-liberal Gazeta Wyborcza followed suit with the accusation that Germany was being selective about slaves, a reference to the latest wrangling over compensation payments to World War II slave laborers. And the conservative Zycie commented on Germany's opposition to immediately opening its borders to Polish workers after Poland joins the European Union -- as current single market law requires -- by saying that Germany evidently only wanted Poles as slave labor.

Bitter words that seem to have dropped out of the clear blue sky of what were unanimously praised German-Polish relationships. On closer inspection, however, there were a few clouds, such as the frustrating negotiations over the return of German works of art from Poland or calls by ethnic Germans expelled from Poland at the end of the war for the return of their land and property, which have given rise to anxieties in Poland.

Significantly, all these problems are inherited from World War II, and among other things the current extreme low in bilateral relations shows that neither side has by any means come to terms with the burden of the past.

People in Germany may ask why the wrangling over compensation for slave laborers can arouse such strong emotions. But those who have followed how Poland was shoved to the periphery of negotiations will not be surprised.

Some sources even say that Polish negotiators were asked to leave the room where U.S. lawyers and German representatives were haggling, and that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was unavailable to the Polish prime minister on the telephone.

After the failure of attempts to completely exclude Poland with its half a million victims, or to gear compensation payments to the victim's country of origin, the German government negotiator Otto Graf Lambsdorff began trivializing the suffering of the largest group of Polish victims, those who were forced into agricultural labor for the Nazis.

Eastern European workers in German agriculture were a "natural historical phenomenon" he said, using the argument that Polish workers come over to harvest the German asparagus crop today as a reason to refuse any compensation at all to people who were forced to work on the land.

Against the background of an overall negotiating style that has relegated German-Polish relations to a peripheral function of the interests of German industry in the United States, the German negotiator's comments -- which have not been denied -- were no slip. They simply epitomize the historical ignorance of the new powers-that-be in Germany.

Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, relations with Germany's neighbor to the east, which is already a member of NATO and with all probability will be join the EU before too long, have reached a nadir.

Digging deeper into one's pockets with an irritated sigh will not be enough to mend the broken china. More important than that would be a helping of tact and a good rethinking of the values on which the German government wishes to base its foreign policy.