Mending Ties?
October 30, 2006
A dispute over a planned center on expellees. Outrage over a Russo-German Baltic Sea gas pipeline project. Irreverent remarks about the Polish president in a German newspaper. A row over a German cruise ship that fled Polish customs officials.
As the list of disputes between Poland and Germany seems to keep growing, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier tried to calm tempers ahead of Polish Prime Minsiter Jaroslav Kaczynski's visit to Berlin on Monday.
"Some of the statements and moves made by the Polish government in past few months have caused irritation," he said last week during a speech at Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder), which sits right on the border between Poland and Germany.
"Fears and mistrust"
"I know that fears and mistrust of Germany are responsible," Steinmeier added, according to Reuters news service. "Some people in Poland obviously fear that Berlin, with the help of the EU, wants to take on a dominant role in Europe once again. These fears are groundless."
But Germany's 50-year-old top diplomat added that he understood Poland's concerns regarding its western neighbor.
"We are currently experiencing what a dark shadow is still being cast by the terrible chapter of past relations between Germany and Poland," he said. "Germany was successively and actively involved in the long history of Poland's suffering."
Reversed roses
Unlike Poland's right-wing government, a majority of the country's population seems optimistic about neighborly relations. According to a survey quoted in German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, four out of five people questioned said that reconciliation between the two countries was still possible.
"I don't have any problems with Germans," one young woman recently told German public broadcaster RBB in Warsaw. "In my opinion, one should worry less about recounting history and live more in the future and work towards better German-Polish relations."
A young man who was also interviewed said that Polish newspapers in the mid-1990s had described relations as "roses above, thorns below."
"Today it's exactly the other way around: The roses are below and the thorns are up top," he said. "The politicians fight while a solid structure of contacts and friendships between the nations has developed."