Gundula Bavendamm got around scientifically in the 20th century.
She was extensively “on the road” with her dissertation and then as a research assistant at the German Historical Museum during the First World War, and later devoted herself to the post-war period and the time of divided Germany as director of the Allied Museum in Berlin.
For the past five years she has been responsible for documenting and illuminating the history of the German displaced persons and their causes, but also the stories of flight, displacement and forced migration in Europe as a whole.
Johannes Leithäuser
Political correspondent in Berlin.
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Since 2016 she has been director of the Federal Foundation for Flight, Displacement, Reconciliation, whose documentation center will be ceremoniously opened this Monday and will be open to the public from Wednesday.
She took over the project when it was in crisis.
The idea of a center devoted to the fate of the German expellees was propagated 20 years ago by the then President of the Association of Expellees, Erika Steinbach;
the red-green federal government opposed the proposal of a European center for flight and displacement.
Both strands of memory were combined in the Federal Foundation.
Even so, there was no consensus about their goals.
The swing of suspicion stopped
Suspicions of revanchism and relativization were directed against the representatives of the expellees, and suspicions were raised against the responsible politicians and scientists in committees and advisory boards that, in view of the German responsibility for National Socialism, they did not want to grant the expellees the right to personal memory. Bavendamm managed to stop this swing of suspicion. The location of the new documentation center had long since been found when she took up her post at the foundation; construction work was in full swing, but the content was still vague. With her experience as a curator, she designed an exhibition concept that can take all interests into account. It made the other tasks of the foundation more visible, which is also a place of historical research,to convey knowledge and to be an archive of fates.
Bavendamm, born in 1965, comes from Reinbek near Hamburg. In her childhood and youth, the word “refugee” was mostly used for those who had to give up their homeland after the Second World War. Her father fled from Dresden to the west. When she took office, the director said she would not see herself as a “service provider for the displaced”. Your exhibition puts the horror of Hitler's war on the loss of millions of homes. Nevertheless, it has made her a lawyer for the displaced.