Why is there coolness from Berlin?
Marian Miszalski
One cannot help but get the impression that the German politics actually aims at exacerbating the Polish-German relationships, which can be testified by the film about the displaced people that was recently broadcasted in Germany and had several million audience and which as if serves to erase and push into the background the key question: why does the German government not want to assume the material responsibility related to those displacements if it regards the claims for the restitution of property as groundless? Why is Poland to justify their 'groundlessness'?... Hence comes our deep mistrust of the sincerity of the German intentions.
The Polish-German relationships are not symmetrical. In Poland there are no textbooks with maps of the borders before 1939. But one can find such books in Germany. Recently another such a textbook has been found. The Polish-German relationships are not symmetrical because of the status of the national minorities: the Polish minority in Germany does not enjoy such privileges (actually it is not even de jure regarded as a minority) like the German minority in Poland. Does the German politics, which insists on this status quo and introduces no changes in its law, want us to deprive the German minority of its status and thus levelling this disproportion? This is possible to do within the framework of both the international law and the national Polish law.
The position of the German government concerning the placement of the elements of the American defense shield shows how unclear the German political intentions are. They seem to be agreed on with the Russian politics that is definitely hostile to such a placement. Why is the German government unwilling to accept such strengthening of Poland's security if it does not harm Germany's security? Why do the Russian 'arguments' seem to appeal more to the German government than the Polish arguments? In Poland this policy has brought up, and will always bring up, very bad associations and fears; we do remember 'the period of Rapallo' and its recent consequences. Therefore, we are astonished at the German initiative to put this Polish-American initiative to strengthen security in Europe 'within the NATO framework', the pact that has undergone visible erosion favoured by the German support of 'the European forces'. One does not need remarkable perceptiveness to see that these 'Euro-forces' would free the Bundeswehr from the present American supervision...
Therefore, our observation that it is the German politics that exacerbates the Polish-German relationships is not groundless (and has been confirmed by some considerable part of the German press in its impudent and arrogant statements about the Polish government; by the way such statements do not only appear in German press). Perhaps these are the movements to 'soften' the Polish government facing the so-called Berlin Declaration, which the Germans are preparing, but it does not seem that 'the Berlin Declaration' could obscure the view of real problems, which accumulate on the axis Berlin-Warsaw and Poland is not to be blamed for that.
"Niedziela" 12/2007