Of Laughter and Forgetting:
A Faculty-Student Conflict of Generations
On a warm October afternoon in Leipzig, a hunched-over figure sits in the shadow of the monumental plastic sculpture “Aufbruch" (“Beginning”), a legacy of socialist realism that depicts a group of people struggling to move forward, as if awakening to political consciousness. Heike is tense; she gazes fixedly down at the ground, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. She is brooding on her quarter-century in the SED as a student and then professor here at Karl-Marx Universitat—now, in 1991, again called Leipzig University.
“Nie wieder,” repeats Heike. “Never again.”
Never would she join the reconstituted SED, now called the PDS. Never again would she join any party or movement, of whatever political stripe. She is not quoting the campaign slogan used by the CDU in March 1990—already a bygone era—but is simply expressing a personal statement. Politics holds no interest for her. Her experience in the SED has disillusioned her toward—or, as she says, “inoculated” her against—party and ideological appeals. Permanently.
“I have learned my lesson,” Heike says.
Looking up, she follows my gaze to the grotesque socialist realist sculpture, remarking that, since the Wende in 1989, she has been looking at it with a new eye. Across the courtyard stands a much older sculpture: a towering statue of Leibniz. Heike turns to it, deliberately, as if appealing to the wise old Leipzig professor—indeed to the classical spirit of the Enlightenment itself—for guidance and support. I’m still thinking about the marches that brought down the SED regime and East Germany itself, only two Octobers ago. Just a few yards beyond Leibniz is the sacred spot where the already historic marches arose and the “We are The People” chants against the Honecker regime began.
Heike, 46, a wissenschaftliche Assistentin (lecturer) in Slavic literature at the University, speaks in soft German—entirely free of Americanisms, unlike the speech of most West Germans—about her decades in the Party. Pale yet animated, her face is vital with expression, if lined with years; like many eastern German women, she wears no makeup.
“You had to have courage, and I didn’t,” she says simply. “You had to be a hero, and I wasn’t.”
As Heike spoke of the silent, daily, near-invisible compromises that she had made for reasons of career and family, I could not help but wonder whether I would have acted any differently in her place. I look again at the Aufbruch sculpture, then at the hundreds of students scurrying between buildings to catch their next classes. The scene resembles any urban American campus. How different were Heike’s small, incremental concessions from my own? Her careerism? Her rationalizations? For me, an American literary historian and critic of European socialism, meeting Heike has meant an uncomfortable, provocative brush with erlebte Geschichte (lived history). And something more. Heike’s soul-searching reminds me of Irving Howe’s old joke: Marxism has died, only to be reborn in U.S. English departments. Do our literary Marxists know people like Heike? I’m none too sure. I suspect that Heike knows something that they—that I myself—ought not to forget. Hers is another story of the communist academic functionary in postwar Eastern Europe.
During the 1930s and ’40s, Nazi Germany jailed in concentration camps, drove into exile, or murdered thousands of communists. Heike’s paternal grandfather, a Viennese Social Democrat, spent four years in a Nazi concentration camp, and died there in 1943; his son became an impassioned communist, determined to live out his father’s unlived political vocation. Leftists of her father’s and grandfather’s generations, Heike says, were fervently anti-fascist, and warned repeatedly and vainly about the slippery slope down which even tacit support for the Nazis would lead: Support for Hitler meant support for a European war, and support for a European war meant the ultimate destruction of Germany. Heike’s row of dominoes reminds me of the 1932 KPD election poster, reproduced in all DDR history textbooks: “Who votes for Hindenburg—votes for Hitler! Who votes for Hitler—votes for war!” Oversimplified as the logic was, it must have seemed in hindsight prescient—and persuasive. As if History had spoken—and foolishly been shown the door.
“My father believed in communism, he believed in its ideals,” Heike continues. To her father, she says, communism meant hope, communism meant enlightenment and progress, communism meant justice and equality for all. Even after World War II, her father regarded Eastern Europe as a fragile socialist seedling at the edge of a vast fascist desert. To him “capitalist” West Germany was virtually a fascist country—and indeed, because Entnazifizierung was never carried out there thoroughly, many former Nazis were leading comfortable lives in the West.
“My father believed that people like Ulbricht and Pieck had been right all along,” Heike says. She does not mention one acute historical embarrassment to most orthodox leftists: the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which suddenly put German communists in the awkward position of being in alliance with the Nazis, until Germany broke the treaty with its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
But I let it pass. Heike concludes: “My father even believed in the Wall—‘an den antifaschistischen Schutzwall.’ ”
After the war, Heike’s father had finished his studies in Vienna and become a professor of economics at the University of Graz, where he was one of just a few radical economists who took Marxism-Leninism seriously. He was an outspoken opponent of Austrian-born Joseph Schumpeter, the celebrated American defender of western free enterprise as a superior economic (if not moral) system (whose Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy exerted strong influence on Marshall Plan policymakers), and in later years, he was also a critic of the conservative, free-market school of Austrian economics championed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
Heike speaks with pride of her idealistic father. “When he spoke of ‘building socialism’ his face would light up,” Heike says. She shakes her head and sighs. “It was a different age,” she says of the early postwar period. “Then, it was still possible to believe.” In late 1953, when the infant DDR called him to help “build socialism”—in the form of an offer to teach at the newly-refounded University of Rostock—Heike’s father did not hesitate. Indeed an emigrant cousin of his, a bricklayer, was already touted by Party comrades as a local Adolf Hennecke, having received one of the highest honors accorded to model DDR workers, the Hero of Labor Star. It was a family obligation to join the socialist community, said Heike’s father. Even as thousands of DDR citizens were rushing westward in the wake of June 17, he packed up the family and left Austria for Rostock.
At the time, Heike and her two older sisters were in their early years of grammar school. “We weren’t going ‘behind the Iron Curtain,’ ” she recalls of her father’s explanation. “We were going to live in the great socialist experiment. . . . The DDR was a place where people were still trying to achieve a dream of decency and fairness for everyone.”
Heike’s early childhood in postwar capitalist Austria made her inevitably more critical of “the experiment” than most East Germans, she says, because she had a standard for comparison. She knew first-hand what life was like in the West; she understood its advantages in comparison with the DDR. Still, she also valued the egalitarianism, the sometimes daringly avant-garde intellectual atmosphere, and the skeptical spirit of anti-capitalist Alternative thinking in DDR life in the early ’60s. Until the late 1960s, she says, she thought that the weaknesses of socialism could be overcome.
“Prague, August 1968—when the Russian tanks rolled in. That was the watershed moment for me,” Heike says. When the Czech Politburo under Aleksandr Dubček openly defied Moscow during the heady spring of 1968, Heike was entranced. She admired Dubček’s Action Program, which renounced the Communist Party’s legal monopoly on power, acknowledged other political parties, permitted freedom of the press, created market incentives, introduced small-scale private enterprise, and decentralized government control of industry—precisely those reforms that a collapsing Soviet economy would compel Mikhail Gorbachev to propose two decades later for the USSR itself as part of glasnost and perestroika. (A bittersweet joke made the rounds in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s: Q: What’s the difference between Gorbachev and Dubček? A: 20 years.) Dubček’s reformist socialism resonated with the liberal proposals that some of Heike’s colleagues discussed in local Party meetings, she says. In revulsion against a Soviet dictatorship that had dominated and exploited Czechoslovakia since the communist coup of 1948, progressive Czech leaders sought a “third way” between capitalism and communism: a nation both socialist and profoundly democratic. But the Soviet invasion in August meant that the Czech reforms never came to fruition.
Because Czechoslovakia was for many years the only country to which East Germans could travel without a visa—and because of its proximity on the southern border of the DDR, less than two hours from Leipzig—the events of August 1968 left an open wound on her generation, Heike says. The deepest anguish derived from the guilt of knowing that NVA troops had helped put an end to the Prague Spring.
“Right then, I concluded that ‘das bessere Deutschland’ was a farce, an impossible dream,” Heike continues. Her own idealism was dashed when the Prague Spring wilted. “Right then, I began to think about emigrating back to the West. And the thought never left me after that. . . .”
Heike pauses and looks away. Her grandfather had died in Auschwitz, she says, and her family had reacted by closing their eyes to the Gulag. Immediately she frowns, annoyed. No, that’s too simple, her expression seems to say. But neither of us breaks the silence. Then she abruptly continues, picking up the narrative a generation later.
“Like my father, I couldn’t look that nightmare [a failed socialism] in the face. ‘Socialism can’t be reformed from within’—again and again, that was the lesson, the lesson of all the uprisings in Eastern Europe before ’68 and after. The system was Stalinism, not socialism. Barbarism with a human face.”
Her allusion to La barbarie de la visage humaine takes me by surprise. I wasn’t aware that the title of the controversial book by Maoist-turned-neoconservative Bernard-Henri Lévy had become a catch phrase in the east. Lévy is one of the Parisian nouveaux philosophes who was shell-shocked by the tumultuous events of 1968, a repentant leftist who proclaimed that the inevitable end of collectivism was totalitarianism.
“Or call it German-style ‘Stasinism,’ ” Heike quickly adds. “We had already lost almost 3 million people before the Wall went up. If you’re the government in a country of only 17 million, you don’t then go and murder or drive out millions more. Yes, Stasinism—Stalinism minus the camps and the physical terror. But barbarism just the same.
“But I couldn’t bear to know that,” Heike continues. “I was 22, I had just had my first baby. I pleaded with my husband [a Marxist-Leninist professor of philosophy] to consider emigrating to Austria. ‘What about me?’ he kept saying. ‘What will I do there?’ So we stayed.”
For Heike, disillusion came with Prague 1968. But the rendezvous with disenchantment came, sooner or later, for nearly everyone, she says. And yet, there was no single shared moment, no common nationwide point of no return for renouncing the dream of das bessere Deutschland. And that was the hardest part, she says. Was the early postwar era of her father’s generation really so different? I want to ask. But Heike effectively answers me: Each generation had its own unlessons, she says. Each generation had to unlearn and relearn for itself. Like those earlier communist pilgrims of the 1930s, who nurtured the flickering candle of Hope in exile or in concentration camps before the socialist sun rose over the eastern German ruins in 1945—through the pyres of the purges, the show trials, the mass executions, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and all the rest—successive generations of DDR citizens had to pass their own trials by fire in order to confirm their blind, unconditional faith. The tests were hardest if you actually lived in a communist country and saw your friends and family disappear or fall “out of favor” with the Party. Political romantics abroad could wax theoretical about “real existing socialism,” but eastern Europeans had to live under it. And yet, even when everything else had been taken from you, Hope remained. For, as Dubček later titled his autobiography, published posthumously: “Hope Dies Last.”
But die it eventually did. For nearly everyone in the DDR, the moment of recognition eventually came, Heike repeats. As though it were a long-resisted and deathly unpleasant initiation ceremony for the recalcitrant idealist. Or a belated coming-of-age, a second and curative Jugendweihe. For Heike’s paternal grandmother the date was 1953, when Russian troops ruthlessly suppressed the Arbei- teraufstand in East Berlin. For Heike’s mother it was 1956, when the world turned upside down in the wake of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” when the “Father of All Nations” suddenly stood revealed not just as a bad, “subjectivist” Party man but a murderer. For Heike’s old Russian teacher it was 1957, when Ulbricht silenced Ernst Bloch and convicted Wolfgang Harich and his intellectual circle around the Aufbau Verlag, all of it eerily reminiscent of the postwar show trials elsewhere in Eastern Europe—indeed of the Soviet show trials of 1936–38. For Heike’s older sisters it was 1961, when a desperate Ulbricht dammed up the westward flow of DDR migrants and erected “den antifaschistischen Schutzwall.” For a younger cousin, then a law student at Humboldt University, it was 1976, when the expulsion of Wolf Biermann ended the intellectuals’ honeymoon with Erich Honecker. Even for Heike’s resilient father, always the idealistic hard-liner, the date with the reality of “real existing socialism” finally came: in the mid-1970s, as the DDR began to “sell out to the fascists,” when the policy of Abgrenzung pursued by Honecker and Willi Stoph convinced him that the DDR would never offer a truly socialist alternative to the Bundesrepublik.
And for each of them, the depth of the disillusion reflected the majesty of the myth and the duration of the dream. For the vision of paradise over the horizon had proven nothing more than a tantalizing mirage.
So Heike stayed. She did her work at the University. She taught her classes. She fulfilled her committee obligations, one of which included helping to plan the academic ceremony for the University’s 575th anniversary in 1984. She published some articles on East European literature, invariably according to “the dialectical and materialist interpretation of History. . . . I would never have thought to have done otherwise,” she says. Enveloped in a chronic fatigue like the ubiquitous Leipzig smog, corroding from within like the brownstones on every city street, Heike fell distractedly into a mind-numbing routine. The years tumbled by. Bored and adrift throughout the late 1970s and ’80s, she and her husband would attend their weekly Party meetings, coming home demoralized.
“There was nothing to do afterwards but drink,” Heike recalls.
In the mid-1980s, as the SED Bonzen castigated as “bourgeois” the civil rights movements sweeping Eastern Europe and the USSR, the “Stasinism” of the DDR seemed hardly distinguishable to Heike from the Cold War decades under Ulbricht. She could only nod in agreement when she read Christoph Hein’s description of their land: “a fenced-in playground”—supervised by the Stasi no less. Fearing mass emigration to West Germany and the possible collapse of the DDR if the Party eased its vigilant watchfulness, the nearly paralyzed SED leadership reacted by turning the DDR into a more secure—i.e., repressive—state than any other in eastern Europe, the USSR included. No glasnost, no perestroika. And more so than other East Europeans—even if less acutely than Heike herself—“we East Germans knew what we were missing,” Heike says. Unlike the Bulgarians, Poles, Czechs, Rumanians, Hungarians, Albanians, and Russians, East Germans had a western measuring rod: the Bundesrepublik. It didn’t matter that the DDR was the most prosperous state in the East bloc; daily life was a constant reminder of the gap between east and west: East Germans came into contact with West Germany at every turn. They watched West German TV, listened to West German radio, and received their (by comparison) rich relatives and visitors from drüben.
Like other young and middle-aged SED members, Heike and her husband also felt the DDR was, by the late 1980s, being left behind in the reformist wave in the East bloc. They seconded the few outspoken liberal voices in the SED, she claims, such as Dresden Party boss Hans Modrow. They were indignant when, in November 1988, the SED banned the German edition of Sputnik, the Soviet magazine that had turned reformist and had condemned the Hitler-Soviet pact of 1939. Still, they said nothing publicly. Meanwhile the SED elders (“the senile old men”) continued to hide their eyes from the approaching deluge of History, Heike says.
Why did DDR leaders remain so willfully blind?
They didn’t, really, Heike explains. Their near-paralysis derived from their vague awareness that there was no way out. To call the basic principles of communism and, more explicitly, the legacy of Stalinism into question threatened the legitimacy of the DDR and its self-definition as an “anti-fascist bulwark” far more radically than it threatened the USSR. The Soviet Union could always reject Stalin as Lenin’s heir and appeal to a pre-Stalinist history.
Not so the DDR, which Stalin had single-handedly created out of the Russian occupation zone during 1945–49 and staffed with the cadre around Ulbricht. Moreover, the five East German Länder in the postwar Soviet zone had never any special relation before 1945; their existence was entirely the consequence of decisions made by foreign powers and contrary to the will of the majority of Germans: division and occupation. Unlike other Eastern European countries, then, the DDR had no separate national or linguistic or cultural identity to fall back on, through which it could legitimately claim sovereignty; the only real difference between the two Germanies was their political structure, and without the dream of a “socialist Fatherland” in the east, no compelling reason for two separate Ger- manies existed. Furthermore, West Germany’s 1949 constitution explicitly called for a reunited Germany, and an illegitimate DDR would have no basis to resist the popular urge for western freedoms and economic prosperity. Abgrenzung had sought to wipe out a “German” national consciousness and inculcate a “socialist,” “sovietized” national consciousness founded on the “good,” völkisch German past—which ultimately came even to include partial rehabilitation of onetime en emies of progressive History such as Luther, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck. In the end, however, the search for a separate DDR identity failed, as the cries through the streets—“Wir sind EIN Volk”—made clear.
By 1989, SED leaders could vaguely decipher the Chinese handwriting on the Wall: Given DDR history, a diplomatic solution could have no foundation. Given the mass unrest, a political solution was no longer workable: “Stasinism” no longer sufficed; only the Tiananmen Square option—collectivism’s “final” solution—remained. But, because Gorbachev opposed violence and SED higher-ups such as Egon Krenz evidently believed that the Party could retain control even while loosening its grip, the Party recoiled from Beijing-style butchery.
Yes, through it all she stayed, Heike says. With three children and a husband who couldn’t fathom the idea of leaving, emigration or Republikflucht was never a real option. Her two older sisters, however, did not stay. They emigrated back to Austria in the mid-1980s, having waited three years for permission to leave. Even though they pursued their goal legally, they were regarded “as traitors, as ‘enemies of the state,’ ” Heike says. From the week they applied to leave, they were prohibited from working in their professions (law and medicine)—even though moving to Austria, which was not a member of NATO or the Common Market, was not condemned nearly so severely by SED authorities as emigration to West Germany.
“I decided I just couldn’t put my family through such an ordeal as all that,” Heike says.
The words fall tonelessly. And then, her voice rising, Heike describes with awe the overwhelming autumn of 1989. Never in her own lifetime had Heike expected the Wall to come down. She had just, in the summer of 1989, taken her first trip to the West since adolescence, having been permitted to deliver a paper at a conference in Italy. A titanic battle seemed joined. Ronald Reagan’s controversial 1987 speech (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!”) was still ringing in European ears. And in mid-January 1989—just a few months before Heike’s Italy trip—Honecker had made his much-quoted statement that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in the twenty-second century, “defending” the DDR against western imperialists.
“Do you think the Wall could fall?” several people at the conference in Rome asked her, Heike recalls.
“No, never, but maybe things are loosening up,” she remembers answering. “The best proof of that is that I’m here, talking to you.”
“No,” she answers my question, with some irritation, it didn’t occur to her not to come back.
But events were already beginning to overtake the SED leadership. By late summer, voting with their feet, East Germans vacationing in Hungary began to force their way into the West German embassy in Budapest, willing to abandon everything, begging for asylum.
Heike herself was long past hoping for “socialism with a human face,” she says. Confused and ashamed, yet at the same time transfixed with fascination, she gorged on West German TV beginning in August 1989. She watched an everincreasing number of East German refugees flee their homes and seek asylum in the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. She watched Hungary open its border with Austria, resulting in 55,000 East Germans escaping to the West. And she watched the weeks of peaceful demonstrations on her doorstep—the Revolution der Kerzen in Leipzig, the so-called City of Heroes, where the “October Revolution” began. Heike was too confused—and not hypocritical enough—to participate in the protests against the SED. She had been a Nutzniesser (beneficiary of the system).
But she watched. She watched throughout November, even after the Wall had fallen, as 300,000 Leipzig citizens marched peacefully through the streets, going from church to church carrying lighted candles. And almost as excitedly she watched the Velvet Revolution unfold in Czechoslovakia that same month, and culminate in the comeback of the deposed Dubček, who had spent most of the previous two decades repairing tools in a Slovak machine shop. She watched Dubček’s triumphant return to Prague, as he stood on the balcony above Wenceslas Square, hand in hand with Vaclav Havel. The decent idealist was vindicated at last, as thousands jubilantly, indeed tearfully roared their approval. Hope died last—but was reborn in joy.
Heike’s own joy was mixed with shame. And even fear: In 1990, she thought she might lose her job. (She did, however, keep it; her teaching contract, due to expire in mid-1992, was extended. She survived the political and scholarly Überprüfung required of all East German faculty.) Her husband, 57, has already been fired. His department was “wrapped up” summarily: abgewickelt.
“ ‘Early retirement,’ he jokes, ‘it’s not so bad,’ ” Heike says, with a forced laugh. She pauses. “No, really he just sits at home and broods. The shame of it, and the guilt—never having taken a risk, never having stepped out of line, never having spoken up first. We’ll take it to our graves.”
She pauses again. Her voice is subdued and distant. “Nobody among us was a hero.”
And then suddenly: “ ‘Police files are our only claim to immortality.’ ”
I flinch.
Heike says it is a line from Kundera, from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,which she read in the early ’80s and is now teaching in a class. Before 1990, the novel—available in the DDR in Czech only—remained under lock and key in the library, strictly off-limits to all except DDR Slavic scholars. The novel consists of a series of scenes in which time is measured back and forth from that legendary Prague Spring of 1968.
We talk about Kundera’s novel and about Kundera himself—who eagerly joined the Czechoslovakian CP as a teenager, cheered the communist takeover in 1948, became an unperson after Prague 1968, and himself emigrated in the mid-’70s. And about the airless, claustrophobic character of DDR life under communism. And about the mortality of memory. Should one preserve, forget, or laugh away the painful past?
August 21, 1968. When the Soviet T-64s came rumbling in.
Heike glances away, then raises her head slightly. “ ‘The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke or insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint [übermalen] it.’ ” She is quoting Kundera again. She turns toward me and pats my notepad. She repeats the word “übermalen.” She smiles.
Heike mentions how Kundera’s characters suffer from litost, an untranslatable Czech word signifying an abject state caused by sudden insight into one’s own soul-sickness. She reaches into her book-bag for the Kundera novel and turns to a passage in which he writes of the Czech dissident Mirek: “He fought back his uncontrollable urge to reach far back into the past and smash it with his fist, an urge to slash the canvas of his youth to shreds.” She pauses. Her own hands are clenched. Her voice drops; she recites from memory Mirek’s thought before his arrest: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Hesitantly, I mention the novel’s protagonist, the unforgettable beauty, Tamina—exiled in Germany and working as a waitress—whose devouring passion is to retrieve the diaries that she abandoned in Czechoslovakia when she fled in 1968 after the Soviet tanks arrived. Heike nods gravely. Almost instantly, she finds the passage: “She has no desire to turn the past into poetry, she wants to give the past back its lost body . . . because if the shaky structure of her memories collapses like a badly pitched tent, all she will have left is the present, that invisible point, that mere nothing moving slowly toward death.”
Heike closes the book, resting it atop my notepad. Her eyes bright with tears, she vouchsafes me the novel’s closing line: “It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history.”
Heike’s voice is barely audible, but it floats onward, disembodied, dissociated. As if from a great distance, it speaks of the suffocating playground that was the DDR. About the exile from her homeland. No, about her twin exile: forced emigration from her ancestral Heimat of Austria and inner emigration from her adopted Heimat of eastern Germany. A daughter without a Fatherland. Within the border or beyond the border? It does not matter anymore.
Is this litost?
“The past—I can’t laugh it away and I can’t embrace it,” Heike whispers.
The class bell slices the air, cauterizing the moment. Rising to leave, Heike glances at the Aufbruch sculpture, her face expressionless.
Mourning, remembrance, guilt, emptiness, homelessness, the vertiginous urge to throw off the past completely. Nie wieder: the unbearable lightness of being.
Minutes later, Gerhard, 25, a Ph.D candidate in the Slavic Department, greets me. We leave behind the Aufbruch sculpture, walking inside and up the stairs to his office cubicle. Gerhard speaks forcefully. He is a former student of Heike and says proudly that he is a PDS member—one of the few in a discredited, rump party that suffers the taint of the SED’s failure, has shrunken overnight from 2.3 million members to 200,000, and boasts only 17 representatives in reunified Germany’s Bundestag. Having joined the SED in 1985, Gerhard had only been a member for four years before it fell apart. His view is a minority one, he says, but the task for him remains: to keep the flickering socialist torch aflame. When I respond that Heike and other Leipzig faculty seem to want to have nothing to do with the PDS, nor with politics or a reformed socialism, Gerhard waves his hand dismissively. “They’re from another generation,” he says.
Gesturing for me to seat myself, Gerhard shows me a newspaper headline about the University’s new rector, who has spent his entire career as a lowly lecturer in the chemistry department and was recently chosen to lead the University because of both his lifelong, public opposition to SED excesses and his reputation for integrity. “A good man,” Gerhard allows. But Gerhard considers the rector overzealous in his commitment to “moral renewal” in the University via ouster of former communists.
He himself is one of the rote Socken (Red socks), Gerhard says with a grin. The phrase makes me think of doubleheaders at Boston’s Fenway Park, but to Gerhard it’s the old term among non-SED members for dyed-in-the-wool Party members, a term that post-unification anti-communists throughout Germany now apply derisively to PDS members. Gerhard is defiantly taking back the phrase from the conservatives. Yes, he favors pluralist democracy; no, he does not support the hardcore Communist Platform, a small group of Marxist-Leninists within the PDS—sometimes known by the conservatives’ abusive term, rote Arschlöcher (Red assholes)—who still favor central planning, nationalization, and state ownership of the “means of production.” But Gerhard is a local leader in the Young Comrades, the successor organization to the FDJ.
“Talk of ‘renewal’!” Gerhard says. He considers PDS party chief Gregor Gysi a “genius.” Gerhard rhapsodizes about Gysi’s wit, his articulateness, his political intelligence. Gysi is no stuffy apparatchik, no Stalinist dinosaur. And indeed, with his sponsorship of rock’n’roll rallies and mascots such as Lulu the PDS clown, the 42-year-old Gysi—a Berlin lawyer who sometimes defended dissidents during the SED days, fought to legalize New Forum, and is now the youngest Communist Party chair in Europe—has repackaged the PDS as Germany’s party of youth, fresh ideas, and fun. The Party—it is still known as “the Party” to many members—has reformed itself and fulfilled its 1990 campaign slogans: “Better Red than Colorless.” “Left Is Lively.” “Left Feels Good.” And, considering its SED past, the PDS did well in last year’s three elections: nearly 30 percent in East Berlin, nearly 16 percent throughout eastern Germany. In just two short years, Gerhard says, Gysi has completely refurbished the PDS image and renewed the “democratic socialist” idea. Gerhard takes the possibility of a “third way” and the name of the PDS, which emphasizes democratic socialism, seriously. Just because Soviet socialism has crumbled doesn’t mean that socialism itself must be abandoned.
And the fact that the PDS has welcomed Stasi collaborators and former top SED members into its ranks—and, occasionally, even as candidates for public office—does not disturb Gerhard. “They bring valuable experience and deserve their own opportunity for self-renewal,” he says evenly. Nor is Gerhard unduly concerned about the arrest of the PDS’s two top campaign managers last year for diverting $72 million in SED funds abroad. Instead he notes sharply: “The West is wiping out everything we’ve had here, from our kindergartens and schools to our factories—the only thing ‘East German’ in the entire country now is the PDS!”
I mention my conversation with Heike about Prague 1968 and Kundera.
Gerhard’s smile vanishes. “They’re from another generation,” he says again, a note of weariness, or perhaps annoyance, slipping into his voice. As an example, he cites the transformation of Günter Bernard, a Leipzig sociology lecturer and former SED member, who has completed his own 180-degree Wende from far left to far right and now is party chief of the Republicans in Saxony.
Suddenly Gerhard leans forward and grins. He says that when he thinks of Prague 1968 and middle-aged former SED members disillusioned with socialism since that date, another passage from Kundera, a scene from one of his stories, comes to mind and expresses his disgust with their quietism. Walking through downtown Prague, a man sees another man throwing up on the sidewalk. He comes up to him, shakes his head, and says: “I know just what you mean!”
Talk of the East German generation of ’68 reminds Gerhard of Christoph Hein’s Der Tangospieler (The Tango Player), which he read last year. A film version has just opened in Leipzig movie theaters.
Gerhard jumps up, goes into a cubicle across the hallway, and returns with a copy of the novel. I haven’t read it; Gerhard explains that it is set chiefly during the spring and summer of 1968, and depicts the life of a 36-year-old Leipziger named Hans Peter Dallow, a Slavic history professor whose specialty is the study of the working class in postwar Czechoslovakia. Two years earlier, Dallow had filled in as a piano player for a student revue. Without knowing what he was getting himself into, Dallow had found himself accompanying—in public—a ditty with improvised lyrics satirizing an aged head of state—obviously Ulbricht. In a Kafkaesque irony characteristic of totalitarian injustice, Dallow then lost his university job and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. Now free in mid-1968, he is utterly mired in the past—and in self-pity. Indifferent to the world-shaking events in Prague, the history behind which he had spent years professing, he is furious with everyone he meets. Nothing is important compared to the personal suffering he has endured. An inner emigré, Dallow can merely mouth, over and over: “I was only the tango player.” His only concern is to have his name cleared and his former privileges restored.
The wheel does indeed eventually turn again. News arrives that Dallow can replace an old department colleague who, upon being informed by his students about the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague, had injudiciously expressed public doubt that the NVA would ever march against a socialist brotherland. The opportunistic Dallow does not hesitate to resume his career. Our final glimpse finds him happily ensconced in his old apartment, playing Chopin on the piano in sweet triumph, as he watches East German TV clips of Czech women and children welcoming Warsaw Pact troops with flower bouquets.
Gerhard waves the paperback at me. Der Tangospieler offers insight into the mindset of the disillusioned SED generation of ’68 today, he says. They play at remorse; they gaze at their navels. Whether guilty or not guilty, they are Guilty in the end. Gerhard flips to Hein’s description of Dallow’s image of the word “future” and reads aloud: “an enormous sheet of paper, white and terrifying.”
Tossing the novel on the desk, Gerhard leans back in his chair. “Their failures aren’t ours,” he says of Heike and his other teachers. “We are not afraid of the future.” He reminds me not to forget Marx’s warning about the need to break the grip of “the dead hand of the past.” Gerhard believes in moving on, in building a better future. He is indeed “from a different generation.” But what separates him from his elders is not just a few decades, but a chasm of experience. Their guilt—the legacy of years of disillusion and bad faith—is not his own, Gerhard says.
Gesturing expansively, his voice swelling, Gerhard declares: “Of course, they’ll never make a mistake again; they’ll never do anything again. It’s perfect,” Gerhard says, barely suppressing a derisive laugh. “If you do nothing, if you never get your hands dirty, you’ll never make a mistake, you’ll never be guilty! ‘Nie wieder!’ they say. Of course! How easy! Bury yourself in guilt, run from it!”
That attitude, Gerhard claims, facilitated the wave of assaults, just three weeks ago in late September, against immigrants and refugees in the depressed eastern town of Hoyerswerda, near the Polish border. After the attacks, German police bussed the foreigners out of town, unable to guarantee their protection. Hundreds of locals had watched, and even cheered, as the asylum seekers’ hostel had gone up in flames; despite outrage expressed by scattered voices, united opposition from Germans did not occur. The radical Right had thus achieved its aim: Hoyerswerda was now “foreigner-free.”
Gerhard spits out the word: “ausländerfrei.” He looks hard into my face. “I’m still a socialist, still a utopian,” he says. “Justice and decency for all! The ideals of socialism are still worth struggling for. We failed in the execution: the vision remains.”
Another line from Kundera that Heike had quoted leaps out at me: “Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise.”
But I do not quote it. I listen and say nothing. For I am “only an American,” I am from that Janus-faced thirtysomething generation between Heike’s and his own. I breathe the unbearably lighter air of America—indeed, of the American academy—where all is permitted but too little has mattered, precisely the opposite of the heavy atmosphere that has formed both of them. But clearly, my intellectual world suffers from its own sorts of ideological conformity, doesn’t it? Careerism? Status obsession? Gerhard races on:
“. . . And when I think of the relationship between the West and the Third World, of the resurgent Ausländerfeind?ichkeit, of the neo-Nazis on the march everywhere, I know we must do something, not merely run from the past.
“This country has been a microcosm of the whole world, a giant East-West laboratory to run one test over and over: Capitalism or socialism? Which will it be? And that’s still the question. Capitalism doesn’t represent the absolute truth! Capitalism hasn’t succeeded! And socialism hasn’t failed—it still hasn’t even been tried.
“We’re still a microcosm. By the way we treat the Asylanten, we reinforce or transform the relations between the industrialized and developing world. And those relations must be changed.
“Do I expect socialists to come to power in the next 20 or 30 years? No! Maybe never! But this much I do know: this capitalist system isn’t capable of solving mankind’s problems. When I think of this planet’s future, of the children and of the Third World, I know this world mustn’t—can’t—go on as it always has.”
I look across the table at that youthful face, in the springtime of Hope. None of its features betray any twisted or fanatical idealism. No marks whatsoever disclose any receding line from moral righteousness to the Realpolitik of reflexive expediency and revolutionary justice.
The human face of socialism, its sincere and earnest voice echoing in my ears.