Argyris Sfountouris

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Argyris N. Sfountouris ( Greek Αργύρης Σφουντούρης , born September 6, 1940 in Distomo , Greece ) is a Greek-Swiss physicist, teacher, poet, translator and development worker . The survivor of the Distomo massacre became known for his decades-long struggle for recognition of war crimes by the German state and for compensation for the victims ( atonement and reconciliation ).

Career and achievements

Distomo village and surroundings (2009)

Argyris Sfountouris was the first son and youngest of four siblings. Traditionally, he was given his grandfather's first name. In the penultimate year of the Second World War , on June 10, 1944, his parents and 30 other family members were murdered in the Distomo massacre, as were around 200 residents of the town in an act of revenge by an SS special division for German soldiers who died in fighting with partisans. Sfountouris, his sisters and his grandparents survived this war crime. For the next two years he lived with his grandparents, but developed a probably psychological stomach problem that prevented him from eating normally. The six-year-old boy was then taken to a boys' orphanage in Piraeus by his grandfather and initially lived there like more than a thousand other war orphans, later he was sent to a children's home in Athens . Although in Piraeus his health had been classified as almost hopeless, he survived this time. In 1949, at the age of eight and a half, he and other Greek orphans came to the Pestalozzi Children's Village in Trogen , Switzerland , which was run by the primary school teacher and later founder of the Swiss Disaster Relief Corps , Arthur Bill . Here the health of Sfountouris improved again. The boy's intelligence quickly became apparent, and he attended the Trogen Cantonal School from 1955 to 1959 . He then studied mathematics , nuclear physics and astrophysics at the ETH Zurich . After graduating with a doctorate, he became a physics teacher.

As a young teacher at high schools in Zurich, Sfountouris began to write poems and essays. For this he used the German language, which had become his mother tongue. He also started translating Greek authors into German, including Nikos Kazantzakis , Nikiforos Vrettakos , Konstantinos Kavafis , Giorgos Seferis , Giannis Ritsos and Mikis Theodorakis . His articles, such as book reviews or obituaries, were often published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , the Journal du or the Tages-Anzeiger . After the military coup in Greece in 1967 and the subsequent dictatorship of the colonels , Sfountouris campaigned against the dictatorship from Switzerland. Just a month after the coup he was one of the organizers of the rally against the dictatorship in Greece . In the cultural journal Propyläa - Zeitschrift für Greece , which he published in Zurich, works that were forbidden in Greece were published. In 1970 he was given an honorary gift from the Zurich Government Council for his commitment. After being warned by a cousin, he canceled a planned trip to Athens at short notice, otherwise Sfountouris would have fallen victim to a clean-up in Greece, where he was now on a blacklist . His passport was also no longer renewed at the Greek consulate in Zurich. He then applied for naturalization in Switzerland, which was granted after a waiting period of 52 months.

After the naturalization there was another break in Sfountouris' life. He started a postgraduate course in development and collaboration (NADEL). From 1980 he then worked for several years as a development worker on a project to set up technical colleges in Somalia , Nepal and Indonesia as well as with the Swiss Disaster Relief Corps. In the course of the upheavals in 1989 and 1990, which culminated in the reunification of Germany , Sfountouris saw for the first time in almost 50 years the chance of compensation for the victims of the massacre in his birthplace, Distomo. On the 50th anniversary of the massacre, he and the Distomo community organized the international conference for peace in the European Cultural Center in Delfi , with the motto of Remembrance - Mourning - Hope . Official representatives of Germany did not take part in the conference despite multiple inquiries. When asked to the German embassy about a claim for compensation for consequential damage caused by the war, Sfountouris received the reply in 1995 that the massacre was a measure in the context of warfare , which means that there is no claim to compensation. To this day, Sfountouris considers the statement to be the "lie of Distomo". He and his sisters then filed a lawsuit in Germany, while a class action lawsuit by 290 survivors and descendants of the victims took place in Greece. German courts dismissed the complaint in various instances for various reasons, and in March 2006 a constitutional complaint was rejected. In Germany there was widespread fear that otherwise the dam would break in claims for compensation in connection with the Second World War. In June 2006, the last legal remedy was a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg , where the complaint was also dismissed.

With the lawsuits, Sfountouris brought the Distomo massacre into the consciousness of a broader German and European public. In 2006 Stefan Haupt shot the award-winning documentary Ein Lied for Argyris . He is often interview partner for German-language media, especially on the subject of coming to terms with the Greek-German past , but also on topics of the euro crisis , which Greece is particularly affected by. As a person, Sfountouris became known to the general public in Germany primarily through his appearance in the satirical program Die Anstalt in March 2015, where he made a short contribution to a complete break in the tone of the program. In Switzerland he is also seen as a mediator between Greek and German-speaking culture. In 2002 he was honored with an exhibition and readings in Zurich. Sfountouris has lived in Athens and Zurich since the early 1990s. He visits Distomo frequently.

In 2017 he took part in documenta 14 in Kassel .

Fonts

  • Literature and resistance. Greece 1967–1974. An attempt (=  Propyläa , Volume 15). Juris, Zurich 1974, ISBN 3-260-03719-5 .
  • Comets, meteors, meteorites. History and research. Müller Rüschlikon, Rüschlikon - Stuttgart - Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-275-00877-3 .
  • The Pestalozzi Children's Village in Trogen and its Greek poet. Pictures from the first 25 years. 16 poems by Nikifóros Vrettákos. Haupt, Bern / Stuttgart / Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-258-05384-7 .
  • Mourning for Germany. Speeches and essays by a survivor. Edited by Gerhard Oberlin . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8260-5821-9 .

literature

  • Arthur Bill : Death in Distomo. In: Same: Helpers on the go. Stories of a country schoolmaster, children's village director and disaster relief worker. Stämpfli, Bern 2002, ISBN 3-7272-1323-X , pp. 57-63.
  • Arthur Bill: Nikiforos Vrettakos, the Greek poet. In: Same: Helpers on the go. Stories of a country schoolmaster, children's village director and disaster relief worker. Stämpfli, Bern 2002, ISBN 3-7272-1323-X , pp. 192-197.
  • Patric Seibel: I'll always be the four-year-old boy from back then. The Distomo SS massacre and a survivor's struggle for justice. Westend Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 3-86489-144-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ During his exile from 1967 to 1970, Vrettakos often stayed for several months as a guest in the Greek children's home Kypseli in the Pestalozzi Children's Village in Trogen
  2. ↑ Jan Friday: The institution: And suddenly the fun is over. Greece, reparations payments and tears of emotion , In: Neues Deutschland , March 30, 2015
  3. ↑ Argyris Sfountouris, whose parents were murdered in Distomo, pushed the process forward despite a bad chance of success
personal data
SURNAME Sfountouris, Argyris
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sfountouris, Argyris N .; Αργύρης Σφουντούρης (Greek spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek-Swiss physics teacher, poet, translator and development worker
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Distomo