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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 is one of two direct candidates elected from Frankfurt. She has also been president of the Federation of Expellees since 1998 (succeeding Fritz Wittmann), and besides that is a member of the national board of her party, the CDU-Bundesvorstand (since 2000), the board of the Goethe-Institut, the board of the national broadcasting company ZDF, and the board of the Landsmannschaft Westpreußen. She also is chairwoman of the Centre Against Expulsions.

Since 2005, she is a member of the parliamentary committee for human rights and humanitarian aid and spokesperson for human rights and humanitarian aid of the CDU/CSU 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 her Bundestag biography, she was born in Rahmel in West Prussia (now Rumia, Poland) in 1943. Her birthplace had been Polish and German at various times in history, and had recently been reannexed to Germany. Poland did not recognize the annexation. Her father, Wilhelm Karl Hermann, was a Luftwaffe Feldwebel (Non-commissioned officer in the German air force) from Hanau in Hesse, western-central Germany, whose family was originally from Silesia. He was sent to Rahmel in 1941 and served as a technician at the local airport during the war, while her mother Erika (née Grote) lived in Berlin but visited Rahmel occasionally. In January 1944 her father was sent to the Eastern Front. In January 1945, as the Soviet army was advancing westwards, Steinbach's mother decided to escape and went to Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany together with their children. After several years of wandering through various parts of Germany living in refugee camps, in 1948 the family moved to Berlin, where Steinbach's grandfather had become a mayor of one of the districts. The following year Wilhelm Karl Hermann returned from Soviet captivity and the family moved to his homeland in Hanau. There Steinbach finished her education and started studying violin play. In 1967 she had to abandon her music career due to serious bone illness. In 1972, after nine years of going out, she married Helmut Steinbach, the conductor of a local youth symphonic orchestra. She then graduated from a school of civil administration and moved to Frankfurt, where she started working for a Communal Evaluation Office. In 1974 she became the head of a sub-unit of that organization responsible for computerization of all public libraries in Hesse. The same year she joined the Frankfurt branch of the CDU party. In 1977 she was elected a chairman of the city council and held that post until 1990, when she was elected a member of the Bundestag. She became noted by the national press for the first time when she was among the strongest opponents of German ratification of the border treaty with Poland in 1990. In 1994 she joined the Federation of Expellees and in May of 1998 became the president of that organization.

As Steinbach's father had been merely deployed to Rahmel and left her birthplace together with the withdrawing German forces, her legitimation to speak on behalf of the German expellees has been questioned by Polish journalists. However, according to the 1953 German Federal Expellee Law, she has official expellee status .

The Centre Against Expulsions in Berlin

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Centre Against Expulsions. (Discuss)

One of her main aims is to build a 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 German 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. 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.

Former 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.

Exhibition on expulsions in 2006

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Centre Against Expulsions. (Discuss)

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.

External links

• Bundestag biography (in German)
• Federation of Expellees (in German)
• Centre Against Expulsions
• The Warsaw Voice newspaper article, "Border Dispute", 2003
• Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article about Centre Against Expulsions, 2003

References

See more references in the previous version of this article

1. "Steinbach Erika". Bundestag biography. 2006-02-17.
2. "Erika Steinbach bestreitet Sinneswandel". Die Welt. 2005-11-03.
3. Template:De icon Bundestag (1953). "Gesetz über die Angelegenheiten der Vertriebenen und Flüchtlinge". Juris.de. German Ministry of Justice. Retrieved February 28. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)
4. Template:De icon"BdV-Präsidentin Erika Steinbach mit überwältigender Mehrheit wiedergewählt". Bund der Vertriebenen website. BdV. May 8. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help); Unknown parameter |publishyear= ignored (help)

• 1943 births
• German politicians
• Members of the German Bundestag
• Living people