14
The Berlin Republic

The ‘Berlin Republic’ was initially formed by the incorporation, in October 1990, of the five new Länder into an enlarged Federal Republic of Germany, whose capital at first remained in Bonn. But it was clear that at least some gesture had to be made, both to symbolize the start of a new era, and to shift the centre of German affairs eastwards, in the process forcing Germans in the ‘old’ western Länder to take more notice of conditions in the ‘new Länder’ than they might otherwise have done. Following heated discussion, in June 1991 the decision was taken to move the political capital of the newly united Federal Republic of Germany back to the former capital city, Berlin, marking a decisive move away from the provincial, ‘provisional’ capital in the very west of Germany, in the small Rhineland town of Bonn, so associated with the FRG’s first Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. This decision ultimately took full practical effect in 1999, breathing entirely new life into Berlin, a city which had been at the front line of the Cold War and which remained in many ways divided, bearing the legacies of forty years of division.

Although the Federal Republic appeared to have ‘won’ in the historical competition between the two German states which had succeeded the Third Reich, and although the institutions of the West were, as some saw it, largely imposed on the East, the Berlin Republic which emerged following unification was of a rather different character not only from the GDR, but also from the Bonn Republic which had preceded it. As the government physically moved from Bonn to Berlin, so too the contours of the political landscape, the key issues and collective political actors shifted; the economic and social face of eastern Germany was transformed, with massive investment and restructuring programmes, in the process also affecting the comfortable affluence that had come to be accepted in the west; and the entire European and global context was dramatically reconfigured, with the collapse of the Cold War, the break-up of the Soviet Union, new forms of instability in the Middle East, the challenges of global terrorism and a changed international economic environment. The now defunct East German dictatorship was metaphorically reconfigured in new forms of political and cultural ‘confrontation with the past’, which at first seemed to vindicate the West German democratic success story and its own earlier break with dictatorship; it nevertheless rapidly became clear that, even with the passing of generations who had lived through it, the Nazi past would not so easily ‘pass into history’. The deep divisions of the turbulent twentieth century reverberated in heated debates over historical representations, commemorations and contested memories well into the twenty-first.

Social and Political Transformations

Early changes in the political sphere after unification were accompanied by remarkable transformations in the physical and social landscape, particularly in the area of the former GDR. Roads were rapidly resurfaced, railways upgraded, telephone lines laid, buildings renovated and repainted; the drab and dusty grey of deserted townscapes replaced by the brash and bright consumerism of the West. In some areas of eastern Germany, such as Leipzig or Weimar, the contrasts even by the end of the twentieth century remained surprising: renovated buildings and tourist attractions alongside crumbling slums and even deserted houses falling into a state of ruin; pockets of depopulation as some easterners continued their flight in search of a better life in the West, while city centres filled with Westerners driven by curiosity or commercial interest, and with diverse migrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In the early years after unification, while many younger people were able to take advantage of the new educational and occupational opportunities offered to them, many in middle age or of an older generation looked on with a degree of disorientation and distress. This was particularly the case for those who had lost their jobs through ‘restructuring’ and associated rising unemployment, and were deemed to be too old or too compromised to be re-employed in another role; and for those women who had relied on a network of child-care and welfare facilities which collapsed with the paternalistic dictatorship. Many young adults too, faced with rising unemployment, felt particularly vulnerable.

For the vast majority of both east and west Germans, the initial euphoria at the fall of the Wall wore off rather quickly.1 Divisions between Germans in the eastern and western Länder remained relatively deep, persisting for some years after political unification, largely as a result of the considerable economic and social divide which still separated the more affluent areas from those with far higher levels of unemployment, outmigration, and social distress. West Germans obviously were less directly affected by the radical restructuring in just about every aspect of life, from employment and housing, education and welfare services, which faced easterners making the leap from communism to capitalism. Nevertheless west Germans were also affected in less obviously visible ways: from constant tax rises to fund the rebuilding of the east, where the ‘blossoming landscapes’ predicted by unification Chancellor Helmut Kohl signally failed to blossom (or even bud) as quickly as promised – to competition for jobs and housing in a context of dramatically increased immigration with the opening of European borders to the east.

In these circumstances, there were at first some not entirely ill-founded fears for the future stability of German democracy. There was, for example, an alarming rise in racist extremism, particularly virulent in the early 1990s. A combination of organized right-wing party activism and spontaneous expressions of hostility to foreigners led in 1992 to a number of well-publicized incidents of racial violence in both eastern and western Germany: particularly in Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in the east, and Mölln and Solingen in the west. In some of these incidents, notably in Rostock, the apparent approval or at least supportive apathy of onlookers, and the tardy responses of the police authorities, were perceived to be almost as alarming as the racist attacks themselves. There was much talk of the resurgence of a German nationalism which had allegedly lain dormant, frozen under the ice of national division, for forty years. But on closer inspection these incidents of racial violence appeared to have more to do with social dislocation in the new circumstances of the 1990s, accompanied by a general rise in violent crime in the east.² Although the increased membership of organized right-wing parties, and the escalation of racist extremism, were worrying, and although both policing and political responses appeared on occasions to be unduly clumsy and delayed, there was no question of any return to an earlier state-ordained German nationalism. Arguably of greater significance was a less immediately visible or headline-grabbing phenomenon: the question of the acceptance, or otherwise, of what was in fact an ethnically diverse modern society. The large Turkish population of Germany, for example, remained marginalized in social and political life. In some areas of Berlin (particularly Kreuzberg and Neukölln), social tensions and housing issues led to citizens’ protests and rent strikes, as well as evictions. German politicians were not able to find an easy language of multiculturalism and acceptance of diversity, while policies on integration were patchy at best.

Even so, the democratic political system proved robust, even if some political developments were, given the new circumstances, surprising. The incorporation of the five new Länder radically altered the party political balance of the Federal Republic, largely because of the roles played by smaller parties. This only became clear in the course of the 1990s, as the different issues and voter profiles in eastern and western areas of Germany began to have an electoral impact. Having effectively held the balance of power in West German politics from the 1950s to unification, the FDP found it infinitely harder to leap over the 5 per cent hurdle, effectively relegated as it was, after the end of an initial protective period of ‘separate voting pots’ in eastern and western areas, to the status of a primarily regional or western party. Meanwhile, in eastern Germany the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), the successor party to the discredited and divided former SED, was able to sustain a remarkable afterlife as a regional party of disaffected East Germans, polling extraordinarily high results in some areas as an expression of protest against the unacceptable social consequences of the rapid introduction of a market economy. The electoral result was the toppling of Helmut Kohl’s CDU coalition government in 1998 and its replacement by a previously untried – and in the event rather wobbly – coalition of the SPD and the Green Party, under the Chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder. Similarly the landscape of regional politics in the newly created Länder of eastern Germany was in some upheaval. Following an initial wave of colonization by West German politicians – with the notable exception of Land Brandenburg, whose paternalistic premier or Landesvater was the avuncular Manfred Stolpe, embodying in his own past a host of characteristic dissonances as former Protestant Church official and Stasi informer – the federal states in eastern Germany started to develop their own variations and experiments in post-dictatorial coalition formation.

c14-fig-0003 — **Plate 9** Demonstration against rising rents and gentrification, Kreuzberg, Berlin, June 2013.

Source: ©David von Blohn/Demotix/Corbis.

Perhaps the most symbolic embodiment of the extraordinary shifts in the political sphere came, however, at the very end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl became increasingly discredited, scarred by scandals over shady party finances, secret donations and the whiff of fraudulent deals in the background; events in both his public and personal life may have precipitated the suicide of his wife, Hannelore (a suicide officially attributed to depression related to a light-sensitive skin disease). Extraordinarily, Kohl was replaced by Angela Merkel, a scientist from eastern Germany, as national leader of the CDU. As a woman, an East German, and a politician eschewing the established habits and presentational gimmicks of West German politics, Merkel served to exemplify in her own person the magnitude of the political earthquake which had taken place. Although she failed at first also to secure nomination as the CDU’s candidate for the Chancellorship, having to cede to the CSU’s Edmund Stoiber, Merkel remarkably gained this position for the elections of 2005. The SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who led the SPD–Green coalition government from 1998 to 2005, came out only narrowly behind Merkel’s CDU in the 2005 elections; it took three weeks of post-election wrangling before he conceded a measure of defeat, and Angela Merkel took over as Chancellor of a new Grand Coalition of CDU and SPD.

Despite her own Protestant roots and oppositional background within the GDR, Merkel espoused markedly conservative economic and social policies at home, supported the USA’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was a critic of Turkey’s request for membership of an enlarged European Union. Although it was thought that coalition with the SPD might moderate some of the CDU’s more hard-line policies, in practice under the Merkel-dominated Grand Coalition a continuity with earlier SPD-led reforms – particularly the so-called Hartz IV reforms which served to restrict and reduce unemployment and social security benefits – had a particularly severe effect on people in eastern Germany, where unemployment was disproportionately high, further disappointing many of those who might have been expected to support Angela Merkel as a symbol of a new Germany. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the electoral landscape of united Germany began to change, as political alignments shifted and new parties emerged. Left-wingers in particular were bitterly disappointed by the SPD’s acquiescence in socially conservative policies, and some broke away to form a new party, ‘The Left’ (Die Linke or the Linkspartei), in conjunction with former members of the post-communist PDS. The environmentalist Greens continued to enjoy support, while a new party, the ‘Pirates’, was founded in 2006. Devoting itself to matters concerning the digital revolution, personal freedom and the rise of an internet society, the Pirates Party enjoyed some successes at regional level between 2006 and 2013. In this ever more colourful and participatory political landscape, effective opposition to the CDU/CSU was effectively splintered.

Despite initial scepticism in some quarters about Merkel’s relatively low-key style and potential capacity for leadership, in the event she proved remarkably successful. An intelligent, committed and focused politician, she steered Germany through some extremely difficult years. The global economic recession of 2008 and beyond proved particularly challenging, as did the subsequent turbulence in the Eurozone. Merkel’s firm stance on conditions for aiding the recovery of the weaker economies of southern Europe, particularly Greece, was not universally acclaimed – and occasioned some mutterings about Germany’s moral responsibility in view of its treatment of Greece during the Second World War. At the same time, the economic balance in the world was shifting, with the startlingly rapid rise of China as a global economic player, while Germany’s incorporation of its new eastern region was still putting a strain on the economy. But staggeringly, over the following two national elections Merkel sustained her success at the polls, as a significant proportion of the German electorate rewarded her for the stability she seemed able to deliver while other voters divided their allegiances across a range of parties. The electoral landscape of united Germany was shifting in highly unpredictable ways, compared to the near stagnation of electoral politics in the old West Germany.

In the election of 2009, the SPD lost huge ground electorally, losing one in three of its voters and falling from its previous 34 per cent to a mere 23 per cent share of the overall vote. The CDU/CSU by contrast retained the support of one third of the electorate, polling nearly 34 per cent of the national vote and putting clear water between the conservative parties and the SPD. With a corresponding rise in support for the liberal FDP, with just under 15 per cent of the vote, Merkel was able to abandon the Grand Coalition with the SPD in favour of the conservatives’ long-term preference for a coalition with the far smaller liberal partner. Following the election of 2013, this option was no longer available, although through no fault of Merkel’s. While support for the CDU/CSU soared, relatively speaking, to 42 per cent – the best result for the conservatives since Kohl’s immediate post-unification election victory – the FDP failed to clear the 5 per cent hurdle and thus vanished from the national parliament. The traditional coalition of conservatives and liberals was no longer available. Following intensive discussion among party ranks within the SPD, which had barely improved on its previous disappointing performance by scoring a quarter of the vote (just under 26 per cent), the SPD agreed to enter into a Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU. With three election victories in a row, and acting as pivot in discussions over European matters, Merkel had clearly become one of the most powerful individuals in Europe, and one of the most powerful women in the world. For an East German, and a woman, the stature attained by someone often informally dubbed ‘Mutti Merkel’ (‘Mummy Merkel’), the achievement was considerable.

United Germany in broader context

At the time of the collapse of the GDR, and discussions over possible German unification, the question of a European identity had been high on the political agenda, not least as an antidote against any potential resurgent German nationalism, as feared by other European leaders (notably the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). In the event, European integration, including significant geographical expansion and the incorporation of many Eastern European states in areas formerly under Soviet domination, developed very significantly during the period following the collapse of Communism. The European Economic Community, first founded in 1957 and enlarged and strengthened in the following decades as an area of economic co-operation between participating Western European states, became more of a functioning political entity with the formal establishment of the European Union (EU) in 1993. The so-called Schengen agreement (based on agreements in 1985 and 1990, coming into full effect in 1995 and extended in the following years) abolished land border controls between participating continental member states, and facilitated police and judicial co-operation even among those states, such as the UK and Ireland, which were not party to the land border controls agreement. No longer were the most significant borders those between the sovereign states of the ‘old’ Europe of nations; nation-state boundaries within the EU were largely downplayed, the more important border now being that surrounding the enlarged European Union, within which the mobility of goods and of the approximately 500 million citizens was to be further facilitated. A new common European currency, the Euro, came into full effect in many EU member states in 2002 and massively facilitated financial transactions and personal mobility between participants. Quite remarkably, Germans demonstrated their commitment as good Europeans by abandoning the Deutschmark, which had been such a symbol and mainstay of both West German postwar material success and democratic stability, and of East German longing to join the West, in marked contrast to the British, who clung to the pound sterling as a last symbol of offshore island sovereignty, despite the fact that the British economy was so closely tied to and affected by developments in the Euro area. Germany also participated – as did Britain and other EU states – in the consequences of enhanced mobility of labour across a greater number of states, including the new member states that had formerly been behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in Eastern Europe. Internal migration across the EU was no longer rooted only in economic forces, but was also actively fostered and enabled through, for example, the realignment and increasing compatibility of education, research and training programmes.

Citizenship benefits were thus now increasingly related to state membership of the EU. But individual entitlement to EU citizenship was still through citizenship within a respective member state, and was thus a matter of diverse regulations, rooted in distinctive national traditions. Even here, there were significant changes in united Germany. Despite continuing deep divisions over questions of immigration and citizenship entitlement, in the course of the 1990s the Federal Republic altered its citizenship laws in order to deal more adequately with both the (by now often third generation) German-born ‘foreigner’ or ‘guest worker’ population from Mediterranean countries such as Turkey, and with the greatly increased numbers of would-be immigrants, primarily from Eastern Europe, in the larger EU context.3 With effect from 1 January 2000, the central status of the ‘right of blood’ (jus sanguinis), a long-term heritage of the 1913 Reich Citizenship Law, was augmented, as place of birth was finally recognized as also giving some claim to citizenship entitlement. Although ‘blood right’ remained in principle predominant, from 2000 children born in Germany to non-German parents were entitled to German citizenship if at least one of their parents had held a permanent residence permit for at least three years and had resided in Germany for at least eight years; however, such citizenship would automatically lapse unless actively reconfirmed at the age of 23, and would not generally be compatible with holding any other citizenship. Notions of a ‘hyphenated identity’, so common in the self-proclaimed ‘melting pot’ of the twentieth-century USA, were less well received by many Germans, whose officially fostered sense (at least in the West) of ‘responsibility for Auschwitz’ also, ironically, carried with it a continuing strong sense of homogeneous ethnic identity. ‘Acculturation’ in the sense of familiarity with German language, history and culture, as well as long-term residence, remained central to acquisition of citizenship as an adult; and debates continued over whether Germany should make it easier for citizens to hold dual nationality, which even after the revision of citizenship regulations remained only possible in a limited number of special cases. Despite the substantial proportion of long-term resident ‘foreign workers’, and the increasing global mobility of labour, multiculturalism remained a concept which was only uneasily at home in united Germany.

Similar ambivalence, rooted in attempts to adjust to a new international situation in the light of an uneasy past, was evident in debates over united Germany’s new role on the international stage, including the Balkan conflicts of the early 1990s. The ‘first’ Gulf War of 1991 (actually rooted in conflicts in the area in preceding years) erupted within months of German unification; bearing in mind their militaristic past, and the constitutionally enshrined limitations on any active involvement of German troops for more than purely defensive purposes, Germany offered financial and material aid to the United Nations coalition led by the then US President George Bush senior, rather than active military participation. The Iraq War in 2003, more than a decade later, this time spearheaded by a smaller USA-led coalition under President George Bush junior – who appeared to many observers to be unnecessarily eager to complete the ‘unfinished business’ left by his father’s administration – revealed similar issues for Germans, many of whom were highly vocal in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Following the discovery of a terrorist base in Hamburg related to the aeroplane attacks on key targets in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 (widely known, in terms of the American date system, as ‘9/11’), however, the German government provided substantial assistance to NATO troops combating terrorism and seeking to provide security in Afghanistan; nevertheless here Germany came in for criticism for keeping its own forces out of the more dangerous front-line areas in the southern regions of the country. The attempt to juggle the heritage of violence and guilt with the responsibilities of international standing and material strength was not always an easy one, particularly when other states felt they were having to bear undue emotional and personal burdens in terms of human casualties while Germany reaped the benefits of sitting on the moral high ground at a safe distance from real violence.

The Unexpected Afterlife of the GDR

German unification initially facilitated the expression of some form of previously discredited national pride – not only among the conservative Right, where such sentiments might be expected, but also among many left-liberal exponents of the concept of ‘constitutional patriotism’, who now felt that the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany had been vindicated. This fed into the political and juridical processes of putting the East German communist state and its most prominent representatives ‘on trial’, both literally, in the case of certain individuals (such as former SED leaders Honecker and Krenz), and metaphorically, in the case of the parliamentary inquiries (Bundesenquêtekommissionen) into the character and consequences of the SED dictatorship. In both East and West, however, there remained a variety of dissenting voices. Moreover, it rapidly became clear that euphoria over the fall of the Wall did not necessarily entail any easier relations with the complex German past.

Somewhat ironically, a new sense of ‘GDR identity’ started to emerge, now that the worst aspects of the old system – the Wall, the dictatorship of the SED, the Stasi – had disappeared. Many east Germans, suffering from the loss of old securities, began to hanker after aspects of the old GDR society, feeling that there was a sense of social solidarity, or ‘togetherness’, which they had now lost in the new, competitive, ‘elbow society’ of capitalism.⁴ This was particularly marked in areas such as the former socialist new town of Eisenhüttenstadt, initially founded in the 1950s as the model town of Stalinstadt close up against the Polish border, with its quality architect-designed housing for the workers in the major steel production plant, spacious public facilities, safe neighbourhood play spaces for children, kindergartens and schools, guaranteed training places and secure employment for young people – all of which had, it appeared to older residents, since unification been replaced by loss of employment prospects, loss of subsided leisure and cultural facilities, and the migration of younger generations to Western areas where employment prospects were better. Such patterns of rose-tinted memory were also found in other areas of eastern Germany where people felt that the basic conditions of everyday life had been better before 1989, despite political restrictions on freedom of movement, association and expression. As many saw it, freedom in principle to travel was now even more severely restricted in practice by lack of the material means to fund holidays in far-flung places; and the democratic right and freedom to complain about, for example, the harsh consequences of the Hartz IV reforms concerning unemployment and social security benefits, or the loss of a free and accessible health service, was not accompanied by any real influence, let alone power to transform the political decisions taken by elected elites in a representative democracy.

‘Ostalgie’, or a nostalgic yearning for the social world of the former East Germany, was further facilitated by the commercialization of many artefacts and objects of everyday life from the GDR, with sales of tourist trinkets incorporating, for example, the ‘Ampelmännchen’ symbols of red and green men for pedestrian traffic lights – the East German variant being distinctly more ‘cuddly’ (with more childish, plump limbs, a nice walking-hat redolent of summer hikes, decisively wide arms for red and a determined stride on green) than the duller West German traffic light bureaucratic stick men. The ‘rendering harmless’ of the GDR through the commodification of GDR products was evident, if somewhat more ambivalently, in a number of films in which the repressive GDR returned as comedy: Thomas Brussig’s and Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenallee, and Wolfgang Becker’s rather more complex Goodbye Lenin! (which served particularly to give pickled cucumbers, or Spreegurken, a remarkably profitable afterlife), both depicting life behind the Wall with a degree of irony, were major box-office successes. There were also less well-known variants on the theme, such as the rather lighter comedy Kleinruppin forever, highlighting through a well-worn theme of a mix-up between identical twins, who had at an early age been separated between East and West, some of the supposedly more attractive aspects of East German society in contrast to Western individualistic egoism. More seriously, even works of autobiography on the part of those who knew very well the darker sides of surveillance by the Stasi, such as Claudia Rusch’s Meine freie deutsche Jugend (the title playing on the name of the FDJ), made the point that it was possible to have a happy childhood in the GDR, even when growing up in dissident circles.

Such nostalgic representations, and even the more nuanced retrospectives seeking to present a differentiated picture of life in the GDR, did not go unchallenged. Works by Westerners such as Anna Funder’s journalistic collection of tales about former Stasi victims and informers, Stasiland, or Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s lavishly produced and emotive film The Lives of Others, highlighted and arguably exaggerated the significance of the Stasi in East German society. For audiences less well acquainted with the historical realities, it was quite easy to believe that the professionally produced depictions of these truly awful individual cases might be representative of the experiences of the East German population as a whole – even though in the case of The Lives of Others in particular, the plot itself was for knowledgeable viewers highly problematic, centring as it did around a sympathetic Stasi protagonist whose role was historically implausible.

This kind of emphasis on the repressive apparatus of the GDR was echoed, also, in many of the historical landmarks and exhibitions ‘commemorating’ the defunct dictatorship. Key physical landmarks and potential sites of memory were torn down, such as the former home to the GDR parliament (Volkskammer), the so-called Palast der Republik (‘Palace of the Republic’, informally known as the ‘Ballast of the Republic’), while others were quietly reappropriated for other uses (such as the former Politburo headquarters a block or two away), thus destroying or camouflaging some of the more prominent remnants of the East German dictatorship – although the legacies in housing estates remained scattered liberally across the five new Länder, often looking considerably brighter with repainting, but somewhat forlorn given the surrounding social transformations. Yet the landmarks of repression generally were highlighted, at least in select locations. Although few authentic remnants of the Berlin Wall were left in place, as Berlin itself became part of a massive building boom, a section was retained at Bernauerstrasse, along with a new museum; and the old Cold War escape stories and spy-related exhibits displayed at the former crossing point from the US sector into the Soviet sector at Checkpoint Charlie remained an increasingly tacky tourist attraction. The former Stasi headquarters in East Berlin’s Normannenstrasse, and the former Stasi remand and investigation prison in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen also became sites of historical exhibitions and guided tours emphasizing the repressive apparatus of the GDR. Even the dedicated GDR Museum on the banks of the Spree in the centre of Berlin, which purported to represent a more differentiated picture of everyday life, and the sections devoted to the GDR in the German Historical Museum just around the corner on Unter den Linden, found it hard to avoid a slightly condescending tone with respect to the ways in which East Germans had apparently been duped into believing the ideological propaganda, or had to sought to escape into the alleged ‘niches’ of private life, beyond the formal organizations and structures of power. Few ‘historical tourists’ would be likely to venture beyond Berlin to explore other remnants and representations of the GDR in more outlying areas of eastern Germany.

The academic historical profession found it little easier to develop a widely accepted approach to analyses of GDR politics and society. Through the 1990s, there were major controversies over whether or not the GDR could be understood in terms of the concept of ‘totalitarianism’, with the emphasis on fear and repression; or whether it would be better to think in terms of some notion of a ‘society drenched through with authority’ (durchherrschte Gesellschaft), emphasizing modes of accommodation and spaces for protecting one’s ‘own interests’ or expressing one’s ‘own meanings’ (Eigen-Sinn). Works outlining the formal structures of power, and exploring the degree of complicity of, for example, the Church with the Stasi and the SED, or the ways in which individual lives had been damaged and distorted by malign manipulation, were increasingly both challenged and complemented by works of social history exploring degrees of leeway and the ways in which East Germans sought to make their own lives, as agents rather than as largely passive objects of domination. For much of the 1990s, such debates were highly politicized, running parallel to the Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry into the character and consequences of the SED dictatorship, and accompanying practical measures for turnover of personnel that also implied historical interpretations of responsibility and guilt. Virulent ad hominem attacks often accompanied debates over the recent past, with the question of ‘who should be allowed’ to do recent history becoming at times almost as important as the question of how that history should be approached. Even splits among entirely disinterested academic historians tended to be seen as running down political lines or having directly political implications with respect to exculpation or accusation, whether or not historical arguments were actually rooted in sustained archival research and substantial empirical evidence. Tempers gradually became less heated over the years, as personal biographies appeared less implicated in historical representations (or people shifted to other issues); yet even well into the twenty-first century, approaches which suggested that there was more to life in the GDR than repression and material misery, or which sought to complement such a picture by exploring also questions such as consumerism, citizen complaints or private satisfactions, were readily accused of politically motivated distortions.

The Past that Still Refuses to Pass Away?

If widespread concern with ‘overcoming the second German dictatorship’ at first looked as if it might displace any continuing confrontation with the Third Reich, massive debates soon proved that that more distant past was by no means ready to pass away either. In particular, two controversies over the history of the Third Reich in the mid-1990s aroused widespread interest across the whole of Germany, and not just in the ‘new Länder’ and among specialists, as was largely the case with the history of the GDR.

A travelling exhibition on the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’, organized and privately financed by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, demonstrated the active involvement in, and widespread facilitation and knowledge of, atrocities committed against civilians, including very large numbers of Jews, on the part of members of the German Army during the Second World War.⁵ Many of the photos in the exhibition, often taken by ordinary soldiers and found on their persons when they were taken prisoner or killed, showed appalling scenes of grinning German soldiers standing over Jews being publicly humiliated or about to be shot, or of German soldiers posing in front of mass graves, or scenes of several bodies hanging in a row from makeshift gallows or tree branches. The convenient lie which had persisted through the postwar decades, that ‘we knew nothing about it!’, and the useful exculpatory myth of the ‘honourable Wehrmacht’ which had valiantly sought to defend the German fatherland but allegedly knew nothing of the horrors perpetrated by the SS, were thus devastatingly punctured. The exhibition was particularly striking because many of the older male visitors, now in their seventies and even eighties, were the ‘ordinary soldiers’ of the time; and the images brought back to them memories and emotions which they had repressed for decades, often precipitating emotional outbursts and tears. Other visitors sometimes recognized a family member – a husband, brother, father, uncle or grandfather, perhaps by now long hence dead – grinning out at them from some grisly scene where they would never have imagined their loved ones could have been. The exhibition effectively broke a taboo, an unspoken pact between generations, that had allowed Germans to love and relate to the millions of men who, in their roles as soldiers, had actively participated in or at least personally witnessed the most traumatic acts of ideologically driven violence, without having to put the two seemingly incompatible images of love and criminality together.

But the acclamation with which this exhibition was initially greeted was to prove short-lived. Doubts were cast on the authenticity of some of the photographs, after a few errors in attribution and misidentification of perpetrators were spotted. A full investigation by a team of independent experts revealed that such mistakes affected only a tiny handful of the more than 1,400 photographs; but in the radically overhauled and sanitized new version of the exhibition, not merely this set of a dozen or so photos but around half of the vivid visual exhibit were removed, leaving as dominant images the posed, fully attributable studio portraits of generals where attribution of provenance and identity was certain, in place of the telling, revealing photos by and of the anonymous ordinary infantrymen who had served Hitler’s racist regime at such close quarters.

The sensitivities and raw nerves touched by the Wehrmacht exhibition were oddly echoed, almost in contrary fashion, by the extraordinary success enjoyed by the German translation of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book by Harvard-trained political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. This work, which depicted the brutality and sadism of Nazi perpetrators in highly emotive terms, posited a deep-seated ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ which had allegedly characterized German collective mentality for centuries (even when ‘latent’), and which had been officially unleashed by Hitler’s reign. The insistently culturalist explanation of the Holocaust – Germans killed because they wanted to kill, because they were and had always been rabidly anti-Semitic – suddenly gave way, in an inexplicable shift, to a structuralist approach by the end of the book: after 1945, so it seemed, the transformation of political structures in the democratic Federal Republic of Germany had apparently dealt a final blow to the otherwise persistent trait of anti-Semitism among ‘the Germans’ (sharply differentiated from ‘the Jews’, in a manner somewhat echoing that of Nazi racism). This book not only enjoyed sales figures almost unprecedented for historical texts in Germany; its author appeared on numerous television and discussion programmes, appearing to defeat in argument the old war horses of the German historical guild, such as Hans Mommsen, with their far drier, ‘objective’ attempts to explain the Holocaust in the relatively impersonal terms of ‘cumulative radicalization’ and the like.

It seemed, then, even as the generation of carriers of the Third Reich were entering old age or passing away, that large numbers of Germans still felt a need to engage with notions of collective guilt – and of postwar absolution after the ‘hour zero’. Even into the twenty-first century, new projects constantly sprang up that were designed to express a sense of identification with ‘the victims’ and to seek atonement for a past for which no adults of working age were responsible. The largest of these projects, and certainly one of the most controversial, was that of the Holocaust Memorial right in the centre of the new capital of Berlin, built on the former no-man’s land of the Wall between Hitler’s former bunker at the back of the Reich Chancellery and the Brandenburg Gate. The campaign for this memorial was spearheaded by the journalist Lea Rosh, who changed her name from the ‘terribly German’ name of Edith to indicate her identification with the (Jewish) victims of Nazism rather than the perpetrators of her own parents’ generation. In the event, the vast sea of coffin-like monuments covering the site, divided by rising and falling gulleys and pathways conveying a sense of desolation and disorientation, arguably form a fitting symbol of a massive collective graveyard. The underground exhibition focuses on the victims, personalizing their stories, and remains strangely silent about the perpetrators. This echoes the tone set by Konrad Adenauer over half a century earlier – the Germans officially profess regret, shame and collective responsibility, but seem far more hesitant in acknowledging any real or appropriately differentiated sense of guilt. On a far tinier scale, literally, are phenomena such as the ubiquitous ‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘stumbling stones’ set into pavements, bearing the names of former residents who were deported from their homes to their deaths; and the numerous plaques and memorial signs bearing the names of longer lists of deportees. The Nazi past appears to be increasingly present, as at least some of the millions who were murdered are given a ghostly afterlife through the commemoration of their names.

There are of course many more pedagogic attempts to represent the Nazi past in united Germany. Sites of Nazi terror, such as former concentration camps and locations of power, have often been turned into fruitful historical exhibits. Places formerly situated in the GDR, such as Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, were redesigned with new exhibitions displaying the ways in which such camps were also used, after 1945, for Soviet purposes of incarceration of political opponents and perceived enemies of the new regime; and then for the new ideological purposes of GDR celebration as the self-proclaimed ‘anti-fascist state’. But the competition for funding for historical exhibits, educational work and sites of memory has led to complex political debates over priorities, leaving a very curious landscape of collective memory and national identity in united Germany.

c14-fig-0001 — **Plate 11** ‘Stolpersteine’ – pavement ‘cobblestones to stumble over’, commemorating former Jewish inhabitants who were deported and murdered by the Nazis.

Source: akg-images/Thomas Bartilla.

Meanwhile, commemoration of the very real victims of Nazi persecution has been accompanied by a vocal resurgence of the never entirely submerged strain of competition for victim status among Germans who were, at the time of the Third Reich, part of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.6 With their entry into pensionable age, self-identifying groups such as members of the ‘war-children generation’, the victims of aerial bombardment, or former refugees and expellees, were finding – or were being given by the media – their ‘voice’. With every new anniversary, numerous voices were raised claiming to break taboos and tell yet more stories of their own former suffering, as though there were some retrospective form of moral equivalence to be found. Books proliferated with autobiographical tales of flight from the Red Army, bombing raids, or tales of distant Nazi relatives, and novelists took up themes of the era again and again – including, in the case of Günter Grass, former conscience of the nation, the revelation that he too had, as a youngster, been a member of an SS troop. Meanwhile, the audiences for television documentaries and films on Third Reich themes – including a lavish representation of the last days of Hitler, in The Downfall – appeared to be insatiable.

The shadows of shame remained strong, even among younger generations of Germans who had personally never experienced the Third Reich – but perhaps more markedly so among western Germans than among the former citizens of the GDR, who had never had to live with an officially imposed burden of guilt. There were still strong personal connections, either through direct experiences of the wartime era as a young person, or through exploring the lives of older relatives and others with whom there were emotional ties. But attempts were now being made to transcend the proclaimed ‘zero hour’, and to make connections across the historical watershed of 1945, in ways that immediately after the war had been perhaps less socially and politically acceptable; or personally less convenient, certainly in public, for those seeking to start a new life and bury the traces of the past. Historical distance allowed new forms of expression, confrontation and interpretation; but, far from passing into history, the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War that it had unleashed remained alive in collective memories, even among the affluent Germans of the early twenty-first century.

Even so, the Germany of the twenty-first century was changing; and, situated in a quite different international environment, its role and wider reputation were changing too. Germans appeared, at least in the public sphere, to be concerning themselves ever more with memorialization. Yet with the passage of generations and increasing international mobility the past was arguably becoming ever less of an issue for the vast majority of the population. Some concluding and necessarily brief reflections on the long sweep of the last century of German history will serve to register the character and significance of the extraordinary course of German history since the First World War.