Zeitzeugengespräch mit Heinrich Melzer aus dem Sudetenland

With the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the collapse of the GDR, a multifaceted process of coming to terms with the past began, one that continues to this day. The history and society of the second German state moved into the focus of academic and documentary interest. Initially, the criminal aspects of the GDR regime and the consequences for the people affected were paramount. However, the everyday lives of GDR citizens also came into focus, revealing those who could find happiness and contentment in social niches, within their families and circles of friends, while simultaneously having to adapt to the system and the state in various ways, both professionally and personally. An important social group in the GDR, which until 1989 was not allowed to operate as a unified group, were the German expellees who, at the end of the Second World War, fled or were expelled from their homes and ended up in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). They came from the eastern German provinces beyond the Oder-Neisse Line, from Pomerania, East Prussia, Silesia, and eastern Brandenburg, as well as from other German settlement areas in West Prussia, Danzig, the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Russia. Approximately 4.3 million expellees arrived in what later became East Germany (GDR), in the territory of the present-day five federal states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, and Thuringia, as well as in East Berlin. The highest percentage of expellees found a new home in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony-Anhalt. In some of the districts there, the newcomers even constituted a majority of the population, exceeding 50 percent. In terms of the total population of the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR, expellees comprised about 25 percent. This interview with a contemporary witness is part of the sixth exhibition of the Center Against Expulsions Foundation, "Silenced – The Expellees in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR from 1945 onwards." In the interview, Heinrich Melzer, born in 1940 in Brunnersdorf in the Sudetenland, talks about his homeland, his flight and expulsion, and his life in the GDR. The interview was recorded in 2023.