Though the other chapters of this book deliberately leave many questions open, this one has a clear and simple thesis: East Germany did a better job of working off the Nazi past than West Germany. Like any attempt to make normative judgments about history, this one can, and will, be complicated. Still, the judgment will be a surprise to most Anglo-American readers. For most Germans, the claim is the philosophical equivalent of throwing down a glove in an old-fashioned duel.
The reunification of Germany is now celebrated as one of the few happy moments in twentieth-century history, but in the 1990 negotiations leading up to it, everyone outside Germany was scared. The original Allies, who still occupied the country, were particularly anxious: Would a reunited Germany return to its disastrous past? They sought to work some guarantees into the peace treaty that had waited forty-five years to be signed. Margaret Thatcher invited historians to investigate whether the Germans posed a threat to Europe, and she went herself to Moscow to enlist Gorbachev against reunification she feared would threaten world security. Hoping to support the continued existence of the GDR, François Mitterrand did the same. When that began to look impossible, he demanded that Germany give up the mark and accept the euro as the price of reunification. Gorbachev insisted that the reunited nation maintain, in perpetuity, the memorials to the Red Army soldiers who had died to liberate the country from fascism. The head of the U.S. Justice Department’s department for Nazi crimes, Neal Sher, knew his East German counterparts well enough to issue one request on his last visit to East Germany’s attorney general in June 1990: that a reunited Germany would assume East Germany’s standards, not the West’s, when examining Nazi crimes.1
It did not happen, and East Germany’s ways of working-off-the-past have been largely forgotten. The very nicest thing a West German will say about them is that East Germany had verordneter antifascism—antifascism by decree. Such remarks bring East Germans to laughter on good days and angry incomprehension on others. “Antifascism was state policy, and rightly so,” said the writer Ingo Schulze. For British and American readers, even this much has been forgotten; not many remember how the war was won. The Red Army had been fighting, and dying, for three long years before Stalin persuaded the other Allies to open up that Western Front. Thirty-seven thousand Allied ground troops and seventeen thousand Allied air force members lost their lives in the Battle of Normandy. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens—twelve million of them members of the army—lost their lives in the course of the war.
My trust in The New York Times’s foreign reporting was undermined when the paper ran an article explaining the context of the terrorist bombing that shook Berlin in December 2016. Pointing out that a ruined church towered over the market where the murders took place, the author opined, “After the war, East Germany rebuilt historic landmarks, hoping to erase the memory of Nazism. But West Berliners preserved the Gedächtniskirche as a ruin—a testament to the destruction and terror Germans brought upon themselves, a daily reminder never to forget.”2
Almost nothing in this claim is true. East Berlin tore down many historic landmarks, most notably the central palace now being rebuilt from scratch, for they wanted to excise every symbol of bombastic imperialism. Not far from the palace, they installed two memorials to guard against forgetfulness. One is a grand monument to the victims of fascism and militarism, complete with honor guard, eternal flame, and Käthe Kollwitz’s peasant take on the Pietà. (The honor guard, a troop of stiff soldiers, disappeared when the GDR did.) The smaller memorial is dedicated to the Red Orchestra, the name the Gestapo gave to a bundle of resistance groups, most of whom the Nazis executed. West Berlin had nothing comparable. The plaque before the ruined church tower read A REMINDER OF THE JUDGMENT OF GOD. Judgments of God are notoriously unpolitical, though politicians the world over read every stroke of lightning as a sign that God is on their side. Throughout the 1980s, progressive West Berliners vigorously argued for a worthier monument to the main victims of the war. For the ruined church tower with its vapid plaque suggests, without actually asserting, that the worst victims were those Germans whose churches and homes were bombed. The Times got the story exactly backward, despite the fact that the author of the piece lived in Berlin for two years. It’s impossible to walk down the city’s main boulevard without seeing both East German monuments. When he strolled down Unter den Linden, what did the journalist fail to see?
German readers cannot be so uninformed, but their perception is beset by a different kind of problem. Three decades after reunification, many tensions between East and West remain. Some have roots in old rivalries, and some of the tensions are new. It’s now common to say that the events of 1989 brought not a reunion of East and West, but a colonization of the East by the West. Three decades later, all but 1.7 percent of the leading positions in politics, industry, media, and academia in the East are still filled by West Germans. Most East Germans find the colonization narrative self-evident.
I have no intention to argue that the GDR was a model state, nor do I intend to excuse its most famous institution, the Stasi. It’s worth remembering, however, that even Edward Snowden’s most enthusiastic supporters refrained from reducing the entire United States of America to its surveillance programs. The GDR deserves the same courtesy.
Nothing raises East-West hackles more than the question: Whose Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung was better? Did the East bring more Nazis to trial? Did the West support the State of Israel? German working-off-the-past must be understood through this most interesting of Cold War rivalries. When I first came to Berlin, in 1982, I worked on my language skills by listening to the news from opposing channels. From West German television I learned about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; East German television offered news about U.S. support for right-wing militias in Central America. Listening to both, I was pretty well informed.
It was a crucial moment in my own education. In divided Berlin I learned how much background noise shapes our perception of the world. Even those who’d been taught to think critically, as I had, could not help seeing the world through the philosophical frameworks that surround us. Those frameworks are all the more powerful for looking like banalities that are altogether free of philosophical assumptions. This doesn’t mean I’d suddenly switched frameworks to decide that the Eastern version of history was the right one, still less that I’d decided that nothing is true. I just became aware that you need to see events from many different angles before you can get as close as possible to the truth about them.
My American passport and a generous fellowship during my first two years in the city allowed me to experience both sides directly. All I had to do was take a subway to a border crossing, answer a question or two from a guard, exchange twenty-five West marks for twenty-five East marks, and I was behind the Iron Curtain. The rivalry between the city’s two halves was often expressed in physical terms: if West Berlin had one opera house, East Berlin had two; and to make up for the larger area of square kilometers allotted to the French, British, and American zones that combined to form West Berlin, East Berlin went for height. The tallest building in the city, which couldn’t be missed for miles around, towered over Alexanderplatz. It was the kind of sparring that made for subsidized easy living on both sides of town. Both halves of the city were showcases that devoted considerable resources to putting their best feet forward. On one point, however, the sparks flew so fiercely that no one could see straight: each side accused the other of failing to come to terms with fascism, and each insisted it had done so itself.
How did each half of the country work, however fitfully, to turn German self-perception from victim to perpetrator? Looking at Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung through the prism of East-West rivalry is a way to look at the elements that must be part of any nation’s attempt to face its national crimes. The Cold War makes the German case unique, but no less an example to other nations for all that. Every case is unique, and each one requires a great deal of contextual understanding. Still, some aspects of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung seem common to any culture.
These are crucial facets of any successful attempt to work off a nation’s criminal past.
1. The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative. Here language is front and center. Was the Civil War about slavery or states’ rights? The U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services isn’t certain. Was May 8, 1945, a Day of Liberation or a Day of Unconditional Capitulation to Foreign Powers? Since the GDR called it a “Day of Liberation” from its inception, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer thought the use of the word liberation was communist. Although the East German narrative, like most any narrative, was incomplete, its tenor was very clear: NAZIS WERE BAD, DEFEATING THEM GOOD was never in doubt in one side of the country. For a good thirty years in the West, by contrast, that simple claim was drenched in ambivalence.
2. Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols, and many symbols involve remembering the dead. Which heroes do we valorize, which victims do we mourn? The United States has hundreds of monuments depicting a noble-looking Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army. In 2018, Bryan Stevenson dedicated a national monument to honor the victims of lynching, but where are the national monuments to the freedom fighter John Brown—or at least to Harriet Tubman? There are no monuments to the Nazis in Germany, East or West, but only after reunification did West Germany build significant monuments to the victims.
3. Narratives are transported through education. What are children taught to remember, and what are they meant to forget? American textbooks have been improved since I was a child, when the heroic story of western expansion left out the genocide of Native Americans entirely, glossed over the horrors of slavery, and never mentioned Jim Crow. East German history textbooks were resolutely antifascist from the beginning. In the first decades after the war, West German children were left with the impression that history stopped after 1933; neither their teachers nor their textbooks discussed the Nazi period. Today Nazism is not merely covered in history classes; it has a central place in subjects like literature and art.
4. Words are even more powerful when set to music. So can we sing “Dixie”? What about the German national anthem? It gives most foreigners a chill, for they cannot help thinking of “Deutschland über alles.” The anthem’s defenders are keen to point out that the tune was written by Joseph Haydn long ago. That notwithstanding, the GDR wrote new music as well as lyrics for its own national anthem. A national anthem, done properly, expresses its people’s best hopes. Done properly. It may be time for the United States to rewrite our national anthem, with its unsingable tune and its reference to a war no one remembers. If it weren’t hopelessly old-fashioned, I’d vote for Paul Robeson’s version of “Ballad for Americans,” the only song ever played at the Democratic, Republican, and Communist party national conventions. The year was 1940.
5. What about things that are less symbolic: hard, cold things like prison cells and cash? Are perpetrators brought to justice and placed behind bars? Is restitution made to victims of injustice? It took decades to bring the murderers in the most famous civil rights cases—Medgar Evers, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—to justice, and most criminals never faced justice at all. The Emmett Till case was reopened in 2018—sixty-three years after the murder. But what about the men who have killed unarmed black children in recent years? The man who shot Trayvon Martin is free; Tamir Rice’s killer was never indicted, though he was fired from the Cleveland police force, but he was hired by the police in another Ohio town. The list could be easily continued. West German justice prosecuted only a tiny number of Nazis and usually commuted the sentences of those who were convicted. East Germany tried and convicted a far greater proportion of war criminals. Both countries paid reparations, in different ways, for crimes committed in the Nazi era. As of this writing, the United States has refused to consider a congressional resolution to discuss the possibility of reparations for slavery.
This list is not exhaustive. Depending on time and place, other elements may come into play in a country’s attempt to work off its debts to the past. Any attempt that does not include these elements, however, is likely to be partial and thin. Without remembering Martin Luther King’s calls for economic justice, making his birthday a national holiday is hollow.
Before comparing eastern and western narratives of the war, it’s important to understand the changes in the narrative through which the West remembered the East. Both came together in the Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit), which rocked West Germany in 1986. It began with a metaphorical bombshell thrown by the conservative historian and Heidegger student Ernst Nolte. He charged that all of Hitler’s crimes, and the misdemeanors as well, were a reaction to Stalin, whom Hitler had imitated. The ensuing debate took up more than a year of media time, involving not just historians and philosophers but nearly every journalist in the country. From its beginnings in the question of who started what, the debate unfolded into a discussion of whether fascism and communism can ever be compared. The left-leaning philosopher Jürgen Habermas was not the only one to argue they cannot. The centrist Rudolf Augstein used the magazine he published, Der Spiegel, to reinforce the point in no uncertain terms: Comparing communism to fascism, he wrote, was not only a way of avoiding responsibility for the latter, but a way of trivializing the nature of Nazi crimes. Nothing is worse than the deliberate murder of millions for being a member of the wrong tribe.
It’s important to note that the debate concerned the legitimacy of comparing Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin’s crimes in the ’30s and the extent of the gulag system were known well enough in 1986. Still, Habermas, Augstein, and many others insisted that any comparison between those crimes and the crimes of the Nazis was morally illegitimate. The crimes of neighboring East Germany played no part at all in the debate. Despite a Stalinist period in the ’50s, the GDR’s offenses were trivial when compared with its Soviet big brother. As the East German playwright Heiner Müller would later say, the GDR left behind mountains of Stasi files, not mountains of corpses. Or as the historian Mary Fulbrook later put it laconically, there is a difference between having been a party secretary and having been a mass murderer. In his book of open letters to Adolf Eichmann’s son Klaus, We, Sons of Eichmann, the philosopher Günther Anders wrote:
It’s true—and that’s awful enough—that Stalin was willing to accept millions of victims year after year. Nevertheless, and we must not obscure the difference—the thought of industrial liquidation of masses of human beings, a systematic production of corpses like Hitler and Eichmann produced, never crossed his mind. Not even the partisan German historians in the Historikerstreit dared to accuse Stalin of that.3
After a fitful start, late ’80s West Germany seemed to have achieved a consensus: Nazi crimes are incomparable to any others, and any attempt to compare them is an attempt to get the Germans off the hook. One-half of Todorov’s principle—Germans should focus on the singularity of the Holocaust—was accepted.
Few but historians remember the Historians’ Debate today, and the consensus it produced has been forgotten. Under cover of vague claims about totalitarianism, comparisons between communism and fascism support a small intellectual industry. Well-meaning West Germans often preface remarks on the subject with the formula “I don’t want to equate them, but…” before going on to equate them by implication. The phrase “the two German dictatorships,” a not very subtle way of denying the differences between them, now trips off many a tongue. There are monuments where the words TO THE VICTIMS OF THE TWO GERMAN DICTATORSHIPS are literally chiseled in the stone. Before 1990, the word Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung itself referred only to the need to work off Nazi history. After reunification there were demands for a second wave of working-off-the-past that would work off communist crimes in a way, its advocates admitted, that West Germany had failed to work off Nazi ones. The complexities of the second wave are beyond the scope of this work, but the very insistence on it was another way of saying that Nazism and communism were equally destructive.
To be sure, the German Democratic Republic was democratic only in name. The media was heavily censored, the borders were closed, and elections were a national joke. But once you equate the GDR with Nazi Germany, everything about the GDR is poisoned. Much like the 1950s tendency to describe communism as a malevolent disease, it moves the discourse from politics to pathology.4 This leaves no room for any reasoned discussion of political principles and practices. All you can do with Nazis and diseases is get rid of them.
The international drive to equate fascism and communism is not just a problem for understanding twentieth-century history. How we remember the past constrains the possibilities we consider for the future. If communism is painted black, neoliberalism has won. Any appeal to solidarity—or human motives other than the endless competition neoliberals view as natural—will be read as a call for bloodshed. For the moment I’m concerned with the ways the equation falsified historical memory, leading to nearly complete amnesia about East Germany’s antifascist past. Some historians have examined the subject, but most popular memory now assumes that Germany’s working off the Nazi past began with reunification.
The fact that the division of Germany was viewed as punishment for its war crimes lends a little credence to that claim. The Nobel laureate Günter Grass, for example, opposed reunification in 1990 on the grounds that the penance for Auschwitz had not yet been paid. And the joy with which the fall of the Wall was celebrated in Berlin hadn’t much to do with seeing long-lost cousins or compatriots; after a few days of hugging strangers, tensions between East and West remained fraught. The rejoicing was grounded in another feeling, which many expressed the moment they teetered joyfully on that Wall: the war, they shouted, is finally over. But although the Wall’s end symbolized the war’s end, designating 1989 as the beginning of German working-off-the-past is a slick but sloppy way of ignoring all that the GDR had done before.
The difference between grand monuments in Berlin is staggering. The Holocaust Memorial is the size of two football fields, and it occupies one of the most central and expensive pieces of real estate in Germany’s capital. Rather than selling it off to a major insurance or automobile company, the government decided it should be used for a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Five acres right next to the country’s national symbol, Brandenburg Gate, was a dramatic statement from the reunited republic, and it’s been controversial. As late as 2017 a candidate for the right-wing AfD party complained about the “symbol of national shame” at the heart of the capital. Nor was it easy to get the monument built, for such attitudes were very common in the 1990s.
The first demands for a significant Holocaust memorial in place of the bombed-out church came from a small group of West Berliners, including the philosopher Margherita von Brentano, the historian Eberhard Jäckel, and the journalist Lea Rosh, who took over the initiative entirely after von Brentano’s death. After considerable lobbying, parliament agreed to build something, and sent out a call for designs. The ensuing debate, along with the fifty proposals that made the short list, fills a volume the size of a Manhattan phone book. The winning proposal was drafted by the American architect Peter Eisenman, whose 2,711 concrete stelae now fill the space, looking like a postmodern take on an old Jewish cemetery. After critics complained that the monument is abstract enough to represent almost anything, a center documenting the murder of Europe’s Jews, with texts and photos, was placed underground. You can find all the information you want there, but few of the thousands of visitors taking selfies before the slabs decide to enter it. To increasing irritation that public behavior at the monument is inappropriate for such somber space, Eisenman had few words: he’d built the monument the way he built it; now it was up to the visitors to decide how it was used.
I attended the dedication of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as the memorial is officially called. It was a cool morning in May 2005, and speakers included, among others, the president of parliament and the head of the official Jewish Community. They were accompanied by somber Jewish music and a rabbi who said Kaddish at the end. The memorial was not yet dotted with scantily clad tourists eating ice cream. Descriptions of it had filled the press long before the opening, so I knew that the differing heights and angles of the stelae were not really meant to evoke an old graveyard, but were placed to create the sense of fear and alienation that concentration camp prisoners sensed every day. I wandered in search of that sense. I tried to think about Auschwitz, or the million murdered children in whose names, among others, the stelae had been raised. I failed. After weaving my body through the slabs a little longer, I walked out into the day, discontent.
In the center of the city, the Holocaust Memorial is very hard to miss. To see the Soviet Memorial of Honor, the largest war monument in what once was East Berlin, you must go out to the park in Treptow. One day a year, the place is very full. By the time the unconditional surrender took place in a small villa on Berlin’s outskirts on May 8, 1945, it was May 9 in Moscow, which thus became the most important holiday in the Soviet calendar, and today in the Russian. That’s the date when the Liberation is celebrated in Treptow, where children in dress clothes and occasional copies of Red Army uniforms play catch or Frisbee as their parents pose for pictures. Many are earnest, laying single red carnations at one or another station of the memorial. Some wear tags with the name of a fallen relative; some explain the events to their children. Others are mainly there to picnic with friends from Kirghiz or Kazakhstan, celebrating a holiday that, like American Memorial Day, has less to do with the battle that occasioned it than a chance to relive a celebration of their youth, and that on a fine spring day. Presumably their children will continue the ritual. In insisting on the preservation of this and other Soviet monuments, Gorbachev was right to fear that the West would prefer to forget the Red Army’s contribution to the fascist defeat. Even many who were alive at the time already have.
On any other day of the year the giant memorial is almost empty, leaving the few visitors a chance to face its monumental solemnity. Seven thousand of the seventy-three thousand Red Army soldiers who lost their lives in the battle for Berlin are buried there. The first thing you see on entering the memorial is a mourning mother, her bowed head and body cut into large stone, surrounded by poplars. Turn left onto the walkway bordered by weeping willows and you’ll see a half arch, each side decorated by a soldier, helmet in hand, kneeling to honor his fallen comrades. Like the mother’s, the soldiers’ statues are larger than life, and they seem even larger until you look up and see the centerpiece of the memorial, far away on a hilltop: a thirty-meter-high statue of a Red Army soldier. His left arm holds a child he has saved from destruction; his right holds a sword, with which he has smashed the swastika at his feet. Unveiled in 1949, it was intended by the Soviet command to be the largest war memorial in the world.
All the texts at the memorial were written by Stalin. You must walk a long way from the weeping willows to the soldier on the mound, past unmarked graves covered with ivy and flanked by two lines of marble sarcophagi, each decorated with a bas-relief telling part of the story of the Great Patriotic War. On one side in German, the other in Russian, the sarcophagi-like structures use Stalin’s words to tell the war’s history. Most are simple references to the brutality of the Wehrmacht, the bravery of the Red Army, the steadfastness of the population behind the lines. Sometimes criminals can tell the truth too. Only the first quote, which says that everything in the Soviet Union was fine until the Germans invaded, is false.
Mischa Gabowitsch was born in 1977 in Moscow, but grew up in the German-French borderlands. He was the longtime editor of two major social science journals in Russia and is currently writing a history of Soviet war memorials. He has also written critically about Russian liberals’ admiration of German atonement. On a raw December day, just after he’d published a book about practices surrounding Soviet war memorials in five European countries, I asked him to walk me through Treptow.
“Treptow and the Holocaust Memorial stand for different sides of history, but they aren’t complementary,” Mischa told me. “Each one is missing a major part of history the other one contains. The Holocaust Memorial doesn’t stand for the Holocaust in the East, but only for what happened in the extermination camps. The fact that millions of others were shot, burned, and buried alive is mentioned in the underground museum, but it isn’t present symbolically.” The Holocaust Memorial leaves out millions of victims to focus on the Jews; the Soviet monument has little room for victims at all. It commemorates heroes, and even they are anonymized. “Even if you leave out Stalin’s own victims, there’s nothing about the Siege of Leningrad, nothing about the prisoners of war,” Mischa charged. What Treptow tells, and tells quite literally, is a triumphal narrative. Evil, in the shape of a smashed-up swastika, was overcome by the courage and kindness—remember the rescued child on the soldier’s arm—of the Red Army. That is indeed part of the story, along with the Red Army’s less savory actions, but narratives of good smashing evil make many uneasy. Some say we live in a post-heroic moment; it’s easier to acknowledge victims than to lift up heroes. “It would be nice to be able to say that putting both monuments together would give us the whole story,” says Mischa, “but that wouldn’t be enough. Each is missing too much. Still, it would be good if we could at least begin to look at them together.”
I asked him about a common complaint about Soviet-era monuments: even when they commemorate victims rather than heroes, they seldom use the word Jew. “First of all,” he said, “this is only partly true.” In fact, hundreds of monuments were built at the initiative of Jewish survivors that featured Jewish symbolism or inscriptions in Hebrew or Yiddish. Most of them are near extermination sites in small towns or villages and so they have been less visible than the giant memorials in big cities—this has been called the Babi Yar syndrome.5 “But,” he continued, “to the extent that ethnicity was indeed suppressed, there was a deliberate decision to describe the victims as Soviet citizens.” More than 120 recognized ethnic groups lived in the Soviet Union. “Why single out one group of people based on ethnicity when there was a village of non-Jews next door that was burned down for other reasons, whose people died just as horribly?” Non-Jewish urban dwellers and peasants were massacred in retaliation for partisan activities, and three million prisoners of war died of mistreatment. Slavic lives hardly mattered, even though Slavs were slated for slavery rather than death. “Not every Slav was designated for extermination, but should we discriminate against the people who happened to be in a category that was less systematically exterminated than another? I don’t know,” he said. One reason Jews were hardly mentioned in the official Soviet narrative was the same reason they were hardly mentioned by Roosevelt. Both the Russian and the American government were aware of native anti-Semitism.
“You have to categorize people one way or another,” Mischa continued. “You can categorize them in the ethnic-based language of the perpetrators, or you can call them Soviet citizens. The last is very problematic when you think about residents of Western Ukraine, who’d been forcibly made into Soviet citizens two years before the Nazis arrived. It’s certainly not the way they viewed themselves. Still, there’s an argument for rejecting the categories of the perpetrator, though I think people should commemorate their dead in whatever terms they choose.”
Lately, people from the former Soviet Union have turned from anonymous heroic collective commemorations to seeking the graves where their loved ones were buried. Mischa pointed out the paper signs, often written by children, that decorate some of the mass graves with the names of individual soldiers. Their birth dates are different, but their death days are close: they all fell within a few days fighting the brutal and desperate attempt the Nazis made to defend Berlin to the end.
Mischa spoke of the tension within Berlin’s Jewish community, a majority of whose members now come from the former Soviet Union. The Russian Jews want less talk of the Holocaust, more about their parents and grandparents who were soldiers in the Red Army. They are tired of the focus on victims; they want to remember the heroes—or if we are to remember the victims, it should be all of them: Jews along with millions of others in the Soviet Union. Riffing on Todorov’s principle, Mischa agreed that the focus must change from country to country. “Russia should talk more about what the Holocaust against the Jews meant, since it failed to do so before. In Germany the main challenge now is to make people understand that there are other perspectives on the war, and if you’re not exclusively focused on the Holocaust, you’re not denying it or engaging in anti-Semitism.” He thought the long parliamentary debate about the Holocaust Memorial was framed as a generational legacy. “We have enshrined one narrative: the national crime was that Germans killed Jews. By solidifying the narrative in stones, they made it impossible for future generations to think about it in any other way.”
The official GDR narrative was simple: we are the other Germany, antifascists from the start. For the political and cultural leadership, the narrative was actually true. Some were communists who fled Germany just after the Nazis took power; those who didn’t landed as political prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Hitler’s first victims were communists. Many who would form the Communist Party’s elite were what the United States called “prematurely antifascist,” who fought for the Republic in Spain. They returned to Germany a decade later in the wake of the Red Army. On June 11, 1945, the Central Committee of the newly constituted German Communist Party issued a founding statement:
In every German the conscience and shame must burn. The German people carry a significant part of guilt and responsibility for the war and its consequences. Hitler is not the only one who is guilty of crimes against humanity! Part of the guilt must be borne by the ten million Germans who voted for Hitler in 1932, although we communists warned: whoever votes for Hitler votes for war … It was our misfortune that broad sections of the population lost the elementary feeling for decency and justice and followed Hitler when he promised them a well-filled table at the cost of war and plunder.6
No such claim was made by any German authority in the Western Zones. Their narrative was not quite the Lost Cause saga. The good times under the Nazis had been too short, and the war too devastating, to develop the kind of nostalgia for dirndls that Southerners feel for hoopskirts. As incapable of real nostalgia for the Nazi past as they were incapable of celebrating its ending, most West Germans floundered in the muck of victimhood for two or three decades. The proud and decisive call to atonement that rang out in the East just a month after Berlin was surrendered was absent in the West.
But that was official, antifascism by decree. Did East German citizens identify with the antifascist politics that were prescribed, or did they swallow it because of a need to toe party lines? I decided to interview friends and acquaintances who’d grown up in the GDR. Three of them were Jewish, all of them were critical of much GDR policy, and several had been active dissidents. As any historian can tell you, memories often distort. Yet by choosing those who, with one exception, had been openly critical of the GDR while it lasted, I knew I was speaking with people who had not been bound by party lines.
I began, however, with a West German who headed the West German diplomatic mission to East Germany. He couldn’t be called the ambassador, because it couldn’t be called an embassy. That would have meant that the West acknowledged East Germany as a country, which would have meant accepting the division of Germany as final. Hence Hans Otto Bräutigam was called the permanent representative during most of the ten years he lived in East Berlin.
The words old-school gentleman don’t do the man justice. Hans Otto Bräutigam was born into a Catholic family in a small Westphalian town. His father was a naval officer in World War I who later directed the chemical division of a steel factory. Bräutigam’s father had no respect for Hitler, whom he contemptuously referred to as “the corporal,” but he joined the Nazi Party early on because he agreed with its foreign policy: revising the Versailles Treaty, defending Germany against Bolshevism.
“Anti-Bolshevism was far more important than anti-Semitism,” Bräutigam explained. “Most Germans believed that our national destiny was to protect Europe from communism. As a former officer who felt loyal to his comrades, my father tried to enlist in the Wehrmacht. Since his job at the steel factory was important for the arms industry, the Wehrmacht turned him down.”
“That was fortunate.” I know too many Germans who, to this day, remain torn by images of what their fathers did, or did not do, on one front or another. Unless Papa was one of the few Nazis who were actually tried for war crimes, what he did in the war was left to his children’s imaginations.
“Yes,” said Bräutigam, but his voice still quavered all these decades later. “But why did he even think about enlisting? He was a nationalist patriot, or a patriotic nationalist. Like so many others, he distinguished between Hitler and the German nation, and he felt loyal to the latter. The priority was fighting communism. His brother felt the same. None of them were anti-Semites.”
“Then it’s interesting that most of your professional life was focused on the East.”
“True enough. But there my family didn’t really influence me; they never experienced the GDR. My interest was another: I always believed that the German question could only be resolved if both East and West viewed each other with respect. I wasn’t inclined to the left in those days, and certainly not to the GDR’s version of socialism. Like Willy Brandt, I sought a certain closeness to the GDR for diplomatic and political reasons. Then I met so many people I admired there. Writers like Christa Wolf and Christoph Hein, church people like Manfred Stolpe and Friedrich Schorlemmer. Ordinary people, too, who wanted nothing to do with politics.”
All that was much later. Hans Otto Bräutigam, who was born in 1931, was lucky. He remembers bombs falling on neighbors’ houses, but his own was not hit. Like every other ten-year-old, he joined the junior wing of Hitler Youth, but he was spared much further entanglement in Nazi organizations. The family’s conservative Catholic roots, and his father’s contempt for the corporal, provided an alternative to Nazi ideology. After the war, the Americans dismantled the steel factory where his father oversaw the labor that provided parts for the Nazi war machine. His father found a job with a small family firm that produced industrial polish. Hans Otto left the provinces to become a lawyer, eventually attaining a Ph.D. in international law. In 1956 he received a fellowship to spend a year at Harvard Law School.
Bräutigam returned from Harvard to the silence and repression that characterized the time. He joined the foreign service and soon found himself specializing in West Germany’s relations with the East. In his long professional career he came to know it like no other West German I’ve met. In 1974, even mutual acknowledgment was a diplomatic achievement. Long negotiations on every detail were required to establish the Permanent Mission—down to the question of whether Permanent and Mission should be capitalized or not. Bräutigam saw his task as building diplomatic relations that would lead to concrete improvements in human lives: allowing families divided by the border more access to each other, organizing better energy and transit policies for encircled West Berlin. Though carefully refraining from supporting any dissident activities, the Permanent Mission, settled in the heart of East Berlin, became a place where GDR citizens could come for information as well as for informal jazz concerts and poetry readings. In the Cold War era, it was often the only contact between citizens of two countries who’d been taught to regard each other as the worst of enemies. Reunification was an unimaginable goal; the highest hope was that small, slow steps might lead the two countries to the sort of loose confederation of states that had made up Germany through the late nineteenth century. Such small steps were crucial in those moments in the ’80s when the Cold War threatened to boil over. After American nuclear missiles were stationed on West German territory, the decade of increasingly close cooperation on minor issues played a role in averting major disasters.
Bräutigam headed the mission, where he did his “duty with pleasure” until he became the West German ambassador to the UN. After nearly two decades of preoccupation with German-German relations, he looked forward to experiencing the wider world he’d hoped to encounter when he joined the foreign services in his youth. By the time he was appointed to the UN, it was early 1989, and he wondered if it was the right time to go. Opposition in the GDR was growing. Despite his intimate knowledge of the country, Bräutigam no more predicted the peaceful revolution than anyone else that winter. His feeling that something was about to change was only a feeling, after all, and the bureaucratic wheels had already rolled. He couldn’t find a serious reason to prevent him from doing his duty, though he left for New York with a heavy heart. That’s where he was when the reunification he’d spent so many years working to prepare took place. He never thought he’d live to see it. “I really suffered, being away from Berlin at that moment.”
Bräutigam shook his head with a disbelieving smile when I told him the name of the book for which I wanted an interview. “I don’t believe we can be a model for others,” he said, turning serious. “In the years after the war we had a very hard time taking responsibility. It took twenty years before we began to develop the consciousness for it—through the Auschwitz trial, which was more important within Germany than the Eichmann trial. The Nuremberg Trials were quietly and bitterly rejected as victors’ justice. I don’t see Germany as a model,” he repeated. “It took us too long, and too many people rejected responsibility.”
That’s a claim most thoughtful Germans repeat. Ralph Giordano, a half-Jewish German journalist, devoted a thick book called The Second Guilt to the deep repression of what had happened in the war and who was to blame for it. West Germans, who made up much of what once had been the German nation, confined their memories to the end of the war: the bombings, the losses, the hunger. The idea that any of this might be considered deserved punishment for starting and supporting the deadliest war in human history crossed hardly a mind. The nation stewed in its own pain, and devoted itself to cleaning up the cracked brick and broken concrete strewn through its cities. It took decades before there was much interest in tackling the moral ruins.
“But that’s important for other countries to know,” I assured Bräutigam. “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is a process. It takes time.”
I turned to the main question that concerned me, for I hoped to find in him one of the few people who can talk about German-German relations without resentment or bias. His perspective is probably unique, now that his predecessor as permanent representative, Günter Gaus, has died. Did Bräutigam think East German antifascism was for real?
“Antifascism was GDR ideology from the beginning,” he replied. “You could call it their Staatsräson. I thought one of East Germany’s greatest strengths was the way they condemned fascism, far earlier than the Federal Republic.”
“Western critics call it ‘antifascism by decree.’”
“That’s not how I experienced it. It was the deepest part of their belief system.”
The West’s position is meant to convey that antifascism in the East was prescribed from above, as part of a policy that was sometimes used to justify acts of state that were ultimately unjustifiable. But wasn’t it right to decree that the seventeen million Germans left in the Soviet zone should reject fascism rather than see themselves as the war’s primary victims?
Initially, East Germans were no more naturally inclined to do so than their Western compatriots. The best sources on the subject are the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish scholar of the French Enlightenment whose deportation was prevented by his loyal Aryan wife, who refused state pressure to divorce him. After he was forced to resign his professorship, Klemperer took to writing excruciatingly detailed journals that provide a unique picture of daily life in Nazi Dresden. When published in 1988, after his death, the meticulous, monumental volumes became bestsellers. Public curiosity about life under the Nazis did not extend to the journals he wrote in the first years after the war, for although they were published, they did not receive the attention of the earlier journals. (Instead of an English version of Ich sitze zwischen allen Stuhlen—I am sitting between all the camps—the English translation was published under the title The Lesser Evil, embodying a political judgment completely at odds with the book itself.) This is unfortunate, since the later journals are at least as informative as the earlier bestsellers.
In them Klemperer described scenes that are both harrowing and funny: former Nazis who came to him seeking testimony of their good character to ease the path to employment, or at least better rations. A music teacher wanted credit for the fact that she never stopped playing Mendelssohn-Bartholdy; a former student wanted him to attest to the antifascist tenor of his doctoral dissertation. The few people who had continued to greet him on the street during the Nazi era wanted him to corroborate that; some even offered to pay him. Knowing how craven most characters had been led the very bourgeois Klemperer to join the Communist Party, a move he had once found unthinkable. Because he had the opportunity to observe Dresdeners all through the war, he confided to his diary in May ’46, “Who do I still trust in Germany? No one.” In February ’46 he had already written, “I am tending even more to support a state of East Germany that would be a part of Soviet Russia. That’s how much I’ve changed!” Klemperer wasn’t blaming the petty bourgeoisie or the illiterate mob. On a trip to Berlin in January 1946 he recorded, “Reactionaries were supported by three pillars: the Junkers, the army, and the universities. Only the first two have fallen (with the Liberation).” The universities remained elite bastions of Nazi supporters. Klemperer was only one of many who believed that a long and thoroughgoing “antifascism by decree” was needed to root out the racist and reactionary sentiments still present throughout German society.
“I was so impressed by Klemperer’s diaries that I bought copies for each of my children,” said Bräutigam. “I told them they were required reading.”
Bräutigam confirmed other facts that have quietly dropped out of so many accounts of postwar history: East Germany put far more old Nazis on trial, and out of office, than the West. The occupying forces in the American and British zones initially planned a large denazification program that would divide Germans into five categories according to their degree of guilt, and would absolve, punish, or reeducate accordingly, but the task was overwhelming. There were nowhere near enough Allied soldiers with the linguistic competence to read and evaluate the questionnaires distributed to Germans who held positions of power in the Nazi regime. And when the Cold War began, the United States and Britain were far more interested in securing allies against the Soviet Union than in digging up their sordid pasts. The denazification program was turned over to the West German government, which had no inclination to pursue it. Soon thereafter the efforts were discontinued. Instead of examining and punishing perpetrators, Adenauer’s government turned to recompensing victims.
Konrad Adenauer, a conservative Catholic who became the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, made a deal that few in Germany mentioned but everyone understood. His decision to pay significant amounts of money to the State of Israel, and to individual Holocaust survivors, was controversial in his native country. That was one reason the payments were called compensation rather than reparations, a word that reminded too many of the detested Versailles Treaty.
“The Federal Republic managed to avoid the question of reparations for decades by arguing they should be determined by a peace treaty that hadn’t been signed yet,” said Bräutigam. “But paying compensation, however we called it, and establishing diplomatic relations with Israel were necessary conditions for our acceptance into the community of nations. After all the terrible things Germans had done, it was not at all obvious that we should be accepted.”
“But wasn’t the unspoken bargain for the payments the understanding that West Germany would not engage in Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung? That Adenauer’s government could continue to employ high-ranking Nazis in prominent places, that there would be no political or cultural confrontation with the Third Reich—”
“You’re right,” he said. “Adenauer spoke of silent forgetting, but he was hardly the only West German who hoped that if we never spoke of the Nazi period, it would all be forgotten. That’s changed in the last few decades. No one complains anymore that we lost the eastern territories to Poland. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to do more, those first years after the war. People were exhausted. The country had to be rebuilt. It made sense in the ’50s to look to the future rather than the past.”
West Germany’s economic miracle has been described as a colossal act of collective repression, the way shoveling shit from dawn to dusk might take your mind off a love story that went wrong. The philosopher Hermann Lübbe, who had been what he called a harmless Nazi, put the matter more ponderously: the country could not have been rebuilt, he argued, without “communicative silence.” While the Marshall Plan was crucial in rebuilding the West German economy, another spur to all that silent, stolid hard work was the desire for distraction. It’s a process that functioned well on both sides of divided Germany.
Bräutigam’s work has been focused on things one can measure: compensation, reparations, hard facts of foreign policy, but they are prepared through the forms of soft diplomacy he practiced. I am equally interested in the symbolic; above all, making sure things are called by their proper names. When President Richard von Weizsäcker made German history in 1985 by calling May 8 the Day of Liberation, I couldn’t understand the fanfare that followed. The tone of his speech reflected the arid, measured coolness most German politicians project, and its content seemed banal. We shouldn’t remember the end of the war without remembering its beginning. No nation is free from war and violence, but the genocide of the Jews is without example in history. Other peoples were victims of a war that Germany initiated before we fell victim to it ourselves. The dry, droning prose went on for nearly an hour. Who needed to hear this, forty years after the war?
Millions of West Germans, as it turned out, who had hitherto called it the Day of Defeat—or of Unconditional Surrender, if they were aiming for neutrality. Most avoided the reference altogether. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder would later praise the speech for having created a collective norm, a new historical identity. Reading the speech today, I understand its importance, for I now understand what had seemed incomprehensible. Up to that moment the majority of West Germans considered themselves to be the war’s worst victims. Von Weizsäcker knew his audience far better than I did, for his famous speech began by acknowledging all that. Only by taking their sense of suffering seriously could he lead them to acknowledge that they owed the Allies a debt for bringing them the liberation they were too weak and too blinded to bring on themselves.
In a particularly elegant piece of rhetoric, the president’s speech ended by identifying the German people with the children of Israel. On the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war, why not take a leaf from the book that sustained the people his army tried to destroy? Israel stayed in the desert for forty years before a new historical epoch could begin. Forty years were necessary for a complete change of the generation of fathers who were responsible at the time. Was he comparing slavish longing for the fleshpots of Egypt with the bootlicking service in a murderous regime? Probably not. Nor is there evidence that Weizsäcker identified with Moses. But his hair was all white and his father long gone, enabling him to say what the rest of the world took for granted: there were many who suffered more than the Germans, and their suffering was Germany’s fault.
“But wasn’t it always called the Day of Liberation in the East?” I asked Bräutigam.
“It was, and it was celebrated, along with the victory of the Soviet Union. This wasn’t just an obligation; many East Germans truly felt grateful.”
When the East German writer Daniela Dahn met Richard von Weizsäcker years after the famous speech, she pointed out to him that the GDR had always referred to May 8 as the Day of Liberation, and had made it a national holiday. “Weizsäcker laughed, he was friendly, but I could see that the penny had dropped. He’d never thought about it. Everyone in the West behaved as if no one had ever thought to call May 8 the Day of Liberation.”
“Were the East German commemorations of the liberation genuine?” I asked Bräutigam. “I know schoolchildren were taught to sing songs like ‘Thank You, Soviet Soldiers.’ Did they mean it?”
“Many really did, and many had strong emotional ties to the Soviet Union. Christa Wolf, for example, or Jens Reich. They were much like the feelings my generation had for America, in the West: gratitude for the liberation. Gratitude for the peace. It’s no longer so emotional, but it’s an important part of German history.”
“There aren’t many West Germans who share your perspective on German history.”
“That is true.”
“I take it you don’t share the current inclination to talk of two German dictatorships, as if fascism and communism were equivalent.”
“Absolutely not,” he answered, speaking louder and more vehemently than before. “Ganz und gar nicht. They weren’t similar at all. I thought the comparison was absurd from the start.”
“So why do you think the comparison has become so common?”
Bräutigam sighed. “Perhaps it’s a normal process. The GDR is nearer in time, so the history is more present. There aren’t many left who actually experienced the Nazi years.”
“If it were former East Germans making the comparison, it might make sense, but—”
“People from the East never make the comparison.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Most of them think Nazism and communism aren’t comparable at all. They know the GDR was much more complex than it’s pictured in the West, something that’s obscured by this eternal Stasi discussion—which is of very little value if you really want to understand the country.” He sighed once again. “Look, there’s always been a tendency in West Germany to try to forget the Nazi period entirely. It’s not as bad as it was in the ’50s, but the tendency is still there.”
I suspect that the equivalence now drawn between fascism and communism serves an even darker purpose than repression. I don’t think it’s conscious, but that makes it even stronger. Few Wehrmacht soldiers were moved to take up arms in order to mow down Jewish civilians, though few disobeyed orders to do so once behind the front lines. After 1935 there was a draft on, which could usually be avoided only if, like Bräutigam’s father, you worked in a vital war industry or in a concentration camp. But no dictatorship gets far by merely commanding its troops; it has to inspire them. The heroic ethos the Nazis cultivated would not have been furthered by exhorting recruits to shoot long-bearded old men or to bayonet babies; those acts took place, but they were not advertised.7 The call to defend Europe from the communist menace was loud, clear, and far more effective. Sometimes communists were depicted with the same hooked noses that graced caricatures of fat bankers, as every student of Nazi propaganda has noted. But especially after the war began in earnest, the emphasis was less on the Jewish and more on the Bolshevik menaces. After the tide turned at Stalingrad, the call to defend home and family from the Soviets wasn’t even propaganda, for it was clear that the Red Army would not end its answer to the German invasion until it entered the gates of Berlin.
As Hitler wrote after the defeat of France, “I could have thrown myself heart and soul into the destruction of bolshevism, which is Germany’s essential task, the ambition of my life, and the raison d’être of National Socialism.” That drive to destroy bolshevism “would have been coupled with the conquest of vast spaces in the east … to ensure the future well-being of the German people.”8 The Wehrmacht did not invade Poland and Russia in order to maximize the number of Jews it could murder; its mission was wider in scope. To say this is not, of course, to engage in Holocaust denial, or to overlook the ways in which anti-Semitism was essential to Nazi ideology. Arno Mayer, one of the few historians writing in English who has emphasized the centrality of anticommunism to the Nazi program, wrote that “there is no question but that in Germany the assault on Jews was grafted onto a violent backlash against democratic liberalism, advanced capitalism and cultural modernism. All three had been critical pillars and vehicles of Jewish emancipation.”9 But he also insisted that “although antisemitism was an essential tenet of the Nazi worldview, it was neither its foundation nor its principal or sole intention.”10 During the war, similar views were echoed by official American sources. In 1944, for example, the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy wrote a pamphlet for American soldiers explaining the causes of the war. Territorial expansion, and the interests of arms manufacturers, take first place; anti-Semitism is mentioned in passing.11
No one in Germany doubts that anti-Semitism polluted most of the air left to breathe in those twelve poisoned years. But everyone in Germany knows that the heroic aura that still surrounds the Wehrmacht’s survivors, and its fallen, derives from the lost battle with the communist foe. Only right-wing forces actually assert it. Still, the lingering guilt few Germans can entirely shake off could be assuaged by revamping Nazi anticommunism. Papa, or Grandpa, probably did not pick up his gun to kill helpless Jews. It was Bolsheviks he was after; Jews were just in the way. The worse the Bolsheviks now appear, the better the Nazis look in retrospect. If fascism and communism are equal, weren’t Papa and Grandpa fighting evil too?
“There we’re in agreement,” said Bräutigam. “I think that’s the decisive reason for the equivalence: there’s still a deep, unspoken need for exoneration for the Nazis. That’s why people prefer to focus on the GDR.”
In 2003 the historian Tony Judt asked me to co-organize an international conference comparing fascism and communism. He thought it would be good for philosophers and historians to discuss the question together, and he wanted to do so at the Einstein Forum. The Remarque Institute at NYU, which he headed, could put up half the funds if I could find the other. Sitting in a basement restaurant in New York City, we began to plot the program.
“One difference is this,” said Tony, who’d been one of the first Western thinkers to criticize East European socialism from the left. “I’d sit down at a table with an ex-Stalinist. I wouldn’t sit down with an ex-Nazi.”
Only much later did I reflect that for most West Germans, the opposite was true. As children, they’d been likely to sit at the breakfast table every morning with an ex-Nazi or two; they were unlikely to have ever met an ex-Stalinist. At the time, I could only agree, and suggest an ex-Stalinist to invite.
“Markus Wolf is a stroke of genius,” said Tony. “Do you think you can get him?”
During most of the many years that Markus Wolf headed the East German equivalent of the CIA, he was known as the man without a face, for he’d never been photographed. He was also said to run the best intelligence agency in the world, with the possible exception of the Mossad. In 1986 he retired and began to criticize the GDR government. He spent the first years of his retirement writing a moving and thoughtful memoir of his extraordinary life.
Born in 1923 in Germany, Mischa Wolf, as he was known, fled to Moscow with his parents and brother Konrad when the Nazis took power. His father, Friedrich, wasn’t religious, but like many others, he would have fallen foul of the Nazis on racial grounds. Friedrich didn’t wait for the Nuremberg Laws but left Germany in 1934, as he was not only a Jew but a communist who had dedicated his life as a doctor to improving health conditions among the poor, and writing antifascist plays on the side.
The family grew up in Moscow, under the shadow of Stalin’s terror but not directly affected by it, unlike many of their friends in the émigré community. (Possibly because Friedrich volunteered to serve as a doctor in Spain, believing, like many, that the Spanish Civil War was a less dangerous place than Moscow at the height of the Terror.) Unlike his younger brother, Konrad, who fought with the Red Army all the way to Berlin, Mischa worked behind the lines building airplanes. When the war was over, the family returned to Berlin, where their history and talents made them part of the GDR elite. Friedrich became the country’s first ambassador to Poland, Konrad became East Germany’s best filmmaker and later president of its Academy of Arts, and Mischa rose to become head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. When the Wall finally fell, Mischa was indicted for treason. After briefly fleeing to Moscow, he returned to stand trial in Berlin, where he was acquitted of all charges. The court agreed with the defense: every nation is entitled to a foreign intelligence service, and he was guilty of nothing but running East Germany’s very well.
Mischa Wolf said he’d be happy to accept our invitation, and asked what he should do for the conference. We’d agreed that informal dialogue would be better than a formal lecture. The question was, with whom? I asked Hans Otto Bräutigam if he would agree to a public discussion with Wolf. He asked for three days’ time to think it over. Wolf was happy to speak with Bräutigam, but as he’d never been allowed inside an English-speaking country, he wasn’t sure his English would be up to the task. I assured him that Tony and I would be happy to translate if the need arose, and that, I thought, was that.
It proved easier to interest historians in the conference topic than it was to engage philosophers; my field isn’t known for much reflection on actual events. But Tony was the sort of person who could persuade the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm to attend, even after lambasting his autobiography in The New York Review, so with a superb list of historians and others, I wrote to several German organizations that fund this sort of thing. They all gave the same answer: the conference looks splendid, they’d be happy to fund it—as long as I disinvited Markus Wolf.
I understood why Bräutigam had asked for time to think it over; he knew how controversial it would be. In the end I got the funding from the Open Society Foundation in New York, and the conference, which took place in 2005, was excellent. The discussion between Bräutigam and Wolf produced no earthshaking insights. They agreed on most essential matters; both held that though Stalinism was a perversion of an ideal of equality that began in the Enlightenment, Nazism had no ideals, beyond rampant tribalism, to pervert at all. Under Stalin, at the latest, communism turned totalitarian. But unless you believe states of mind have no meaning, there’s a world of difference between a person who began by fighting for equality and solidarity and one who began from a racist worldview. That’s why Tony was willing to meet with one, but wouldn’t share a table with the other.
Other speakers at the conference talked of differences between ideology and ethics, intention and circumstance, gray zones and accountability. Wolf’s English turned out to be better than he’d feared, and Tony and I were so impressed by him that we wanted to keep the conversation going. At the closing dinner of the conference, Tony invited Wolf to be a guest at the Remarque Institute the following year. Wolf was glad to agree; he’d never been to New York, he had a half brother in the States whom he hadn’t seen in half a century, and they were both getting on in years. Tony and I began to plan another joint event, this time in New York. I still have emails from him brimming with excitement over details.
But Mischa Wolf wasn’t granted a visa to enter the United States of America. After a number of angry inquiries, Tony learned that the refusal came from close to the top. Condoleezza Rice had conferred with Angela Merkel, who was not yet chancellor but the head of the opposition Christian Democratic Union. Both of them decided: no way. Tony protested and went through back channels, but the State Department stayed firm and the party Tony had planned so carefully never happened. Mischa Wolf died in his sleep a year later. He never got to see his half brother.
The story shows something about East-West relations and the difficulty of openly discussing the way the Nazi years continued to live on past the war and drive the deepest tensions between East and West. It became even more interesting a few years later, when The New York Review published a long article after Tony’s tragically untimely death. The author of the tribute was Timothy Snyder, who later made some questionable equations between fascism and communism. He had been at the conference and thought it worthwhile to write that “once, at a conference in Berlin, the former East German spymaster Markus Wolf maliciously asked him to repeat a question in German. Tony did so, but with a kind of hesitation that was uncharacteristic of him … The Holocaust, on Tony’s account, was everywhere and nowhere in his upbringing, like a vapor.”12
Reading the piece, I was stunned. There had been nothing malicious in Wolf’s use of German. He’d been promised help with simultaneous translation, if needed, and if Tony hesitated, it was only because his German wasn’t perfect. In any case, the efforts he made to get Wolf to New York the following year proved he had taken no offense at the question; quite the contrary. How could Snyder interpret the exchange as malicious—except on the assumption that anything said by an ex-communist is said with evil intent?
A conservative West German who spent ten years of his life as a diplomat in East Germany is one source of information that’s as untainted as possible by ideological loyalty. Numbers could be another one. In the past twenty years Germany has devoted significant resources to careful historical examinations of its Nazi past. Major government organizations like the Foreign Office or the Justice Department have commissioned studies showing how many former Nazis continued to work in them after the war. Major industries followed suit. With so much meticulous research concerning so many details, surely someone must have tabulated an overview: How many old Nazis were left in power, East and West? How many were put on trial, and how many of those were convicted? How much money did the West spend on reparations to the State of Israel, and how much did East Germany pay to the Soviet Union? I’ve never believed that numbers reveal everything; I just thought they would be reliable.
Perhaps it is a case of such detailed research into trees that no one asked about the forest, but as I pored over hundreds of pages on the history of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, I grew increasingly discouraged. When two studies, conducted two years apart, gave different figures about the numbers of Nazis tried and convicted in both German states, what hope could I have of getting the numbers right? An American historian consoled me. “We don’t even know how many Americans were killed in the Civil War,” said Jennifer Stollman. “Not to mention how many Africans died in the Middle Passage. Estimates range from four million to twenty million. The first thing you learn in cliometrics is that numbers are written down by people.”
That means that although numbers are available, some of them will be political. Sometimes the politics behind the counting are obvious. After reunification, the government commissioned a study of how many grave desecrations were taking place in the former GDR. The number of tombstones knocked over or smeared with swastikas were certainly disturbing. The trouble was that no one bothered to commission a study of the number of desecrations in the West during the same period. There turned out to be more, but since no one was interested in devoting resources to hiring someone to count them, the figures are inexact.13 Political interests make the question of counting the number of old Nazis who were left in office—government, police, universities—almost maddening. Too many institutions did not want to know. Having cast itself as an antifascist state, the GDR did not want to acknowledge any at all, though everyone knew there were more than a few. The western side of the story is so complicated that it could be a subject for dark comedy, if you like that sort of thing. At the end of the war the American army captured a cache of 10.7 million Nazi Party membership cards, which it kept in American hands. Given how many SS officers tried to exchange their uniforms for jackets with yellow stars, Americans did not trust the Germans to preserve the definitive records of who was a Nazi or not. A little later, the Cold War made the question who can we trust not to be a Nazi? far less important than the question who can we trust to be anticommunist? Recognizing the names of many prominent politicians while looking through the party cards, the Americans put the evidence under lock and key at the Berlin Document Center. Access was severely restricted, as they didn’t want to embarrass their most important allies in the Cold War. The German allies found it very convenient to leave the documents under American control. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for example, the prominent foreign minister who knew that his own party card was in the file, asked the Americans to resist growing pressure to turn over the archives to West Germany. Finally tired of bearing the blame for not releasing information, the Americans insisted that the Germans take over the archives in 1994—two years after Genscher retired.
And that’s just an introduction to the question of why all things Nazi are hard to count. Records are incomplete, whether lost in the fires of war or deliberately suppressed. Comparisons are hard to calculate: it’s not easy to determine the value of the plants and train tracks that flowed from East Germany to the Soviet Union in relation to the value of the money transfers that flowed from West Germany to Israel. Quite a lot of research is still in progress, and ten years’ time may yield more reliable figures. For now, these estimates are compiled from the least tendentious sources.
In East Germany, 12,890 Nazis were found guilty, 129 were sentenced to death, and the others were given prison terms of varying lengths. In West Germany, 6,488 were found guilty, no death sentences were carried out, and most prison sentences were quickly commuted. Most were tried not as murderers, but as accomplices to murder. As a result, for example, a certain Josef Oberhauser, tried as an accomplice to murder of more than three hundred thousand people in Belzec, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison; this amounts to 7.8 minutes for each murder.14 Similar but not identical figures are recorded by Andreas Eichmüller and Malte Herwig.15 As the (West) German professor of criminal justice Ingo Müller concludes from these numbers:
In East Germany there were thus twice as many convictions as in West Germany; relative to population numbers six times as many. Thereby it must be considered that the majority of those former Nazis who were most heavily implicated preferred to go to the Western Zones when possible.16
The paucity of convictions in the West is no surprise, given how many former Nazis worked at the Ministry of Justice—66 percent of leading officials as late as 1966—and the Bundeskriminalamt, the equivalent of the FBI, three-quarters of whose executive employees had been Nazis, with more than half of those belonging to the SS.17 The German Federal Intelligence Service was, with the help of the CIA, led by Reinhard Gehlen—not only a Nazi but the general in charge of military intelligence during the war against Russia, who afterward helped his comrades, like Adolf Eichmann’s chief assistant, escape prosecution. Such facts explain why the West German government was hardly dogged about pursuing and prosecuting others.
The progressive Left and Green parties have led the cry in parliament for thoroughgoing investigations of Nazi influences in West German ministries, particularly after the investigation of the terrorist group National Socialist Underground was suspiciously hampered by those federal agencies that should have investigated the murders of nine brown citizens from 2000 to 2007. Predictably, some Christian Democratic parliamentarians opposed approving funds for thoroughgoing historical investigations of West German ministries, on the grounds that “there were old Nazis in East Germany too.” It’s unlikely that the latter will ever be exactly counted, but in 2016 the government voted to devote 4 million euros to a comprehensive investigation of the West.
The troubles they will encounter are foreshadowed by the reception of The Office and the Past (Das Amt und die Vergangenheit), an 880-page book devoted to the Foreign Office during the Third Reich. Largely because of Deputy Foreign Minister Ernst von Weizsäcker’s deceptive testimony during the Nuremberg Trials, the Foreign Office had an undeserved reputation as an office of quiet resistance during the Nazi era. A commission of five internationally renowned historians, including one from Israel and one from the United States, drew the opposite conclusion: the Foreign Office was crucially involved in making the Holocaust happen. This book, published in 2010, created so much debate that the debate is now itself a subject of historical investigation.18 Historians not included in the commission complained that the commission’s sources were inadequate; the commission complained of files destroyed and documents disappeared. The excluded historians complained that the commission should take an introductory course in historical method; the commission responded by suggesting that the colleagues were simply jealous that they hadn’t been chosen to join in the work. These were only some of the arguments among the community of professional historians. Outside that community, some called the book a witch hunt reminiscent of East German propaganda; others responded by calling them old Nazis attempting to restore the honor of their fallen colleagues. Those debates took place between 2011 and 2015.
A preliminary study of the Ministries of the Interior found that, at its highest level in 1961, 66 percent of employees of the West German Interior Ministry had been Nazis; between 1962 and 1970 the percentage was 50 percent. The percentage of Nazis in the East German Interior Ministry was 14 percent. This was significantly higher than the GDR wished to admit, but significantly lower than what was the case in the West.19
In short, though all reliable sources agree that there were far more old Nazis in office in West than in East Germany, exact numbers are hard to get—even for a single ministry. The figures given above must be understood as preliminary. The 4-million-euro comprehensive study commissioned in 2016 is scheduled to be published in 2020. Given that the German desire for thoroughness often overrides the German desire for punctuality, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.
The Federal Office of Political Education published a study of all the monuments erected to the victims of National Socialism before 1990. Since Berlin is the best place to make East/West comparisons, I will limit myself to those. Counting everything from a small plaque on a building to a large sculptured monument, the tally is 246 in the East, 177 in the West.20 While we are counting, we should also remember that East Berlin in 1989 had a population of 1,297,212 and an area of 409 square kilometers, while West Berlin contained 1,854,552 people in an area of 480 square kilometers. On both sides, the monuments include memorials to places where synagogues once stood, as well as tributes to Jews and other opponents of the regime who were murdered by the Nazis. There are expected differences. East Berlin commemorated more resistance heroes, particularly if they were communists, as well as the five thousand Germans who were prematurely antifascist enough to join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. West Berlin contains more monuments dedicated to Christian leaders who fell victim to the Nazis, and one that honors the many gay victims who often go uncounted. Scanning the careful compilation, one fact is striking: nearly half of the West Berlin monuments were constructed in the 1980s, when the popular pressure that eventually led to the construction of the Holocaust Memorial produced a wave of smaller monuments that engaged West Berliners felt should have been erected long before.
One particular sort of monument outside Berlin itself can be compared fairly easily. In the GDR, the concentration camps Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen were restored and turned into museums. The funds for the restoration came from both the state and individual donations, and every schoolchild, at some point in their education, was taken to visit at least one. In the West, by contrast, there was no public funding for Dachau until 1965. Only then did the pressure of the Comité international de Dachau, an organization of former prisoners, compel the state of Bavaria to construct a memorial. The hundreds of smaller camps in the state remain unmarked. Until reunification, West Germany offered no federal funding for the preservation or support of any concentration camp memorial.
Calculating these numbers is particularly complicated because so many components are involved. Compensation to individual victims of the Nazis is one thing; reparation to entire nations for the damage the Wehrmacht inflicted on their people and property is another. Nor is it clear how to calculate the latter alone. Billions of marks in physical plant were transferred from East Germany to the Soviet Union. When calculating their value, does one calculate the worth of the factories in 1953 or the lost income the factories would have generated had they remained on German soil?
According to the most reliable studies, the Federal Republic (BRD) paid about 80 billion DM in compensation to individual victims, which include lump sum payments to the State of Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference.21 Totals for the German Democratic Republic are harder to find; the best estimates range from 1 to 2 billion DM. The GDR paid compensation only to victims who were living in the GDR—one reason why this sum looks paltry in comparison with what was paid by the West. When one looks at reparations, however, the percentages are reversed. The most conservative estimate of GDR reparations is 90 billion DM, while the BRD payed 19.5 billion DM. (These figures are calculated according to the value of the deutschmark in 1953. In today’s currency, the GDR would have paid 180 billion euros in reparations.) Because East Germany had only 40 percent of the population of West Germany, the difference in per capita amount of reparations paid is even more striking: the ratio is roughly 110 (East) to 3 (West).22 The effect on the East German economy was devastating, a major reason it fell significantly behind the West. Although the Potsdam Agreement originally stipulated that both Germanys would compensate the Soviet Union for the devastation the Wehrmacht wreaked, East Germans paid the lion’s share of the bill.
If numbers are problematic, symbols are simply complicated.
When “Deutschland über alles” was written in 1841, it meant something different entirely. It wasn’t a sinister expression of German superiority, but a plea to put petty differences behind and unite thirty-seven principalities into a national whole. But even the West German government, which banned the first two verses in 1952, knew that an appeal to originalism wouldn’t fly. The references to German women, and territorial claims no longer possible, were contaminated, but all that was left after they were removed was the harmless but hackneyed third stanza, which is now sung alone as the national anthem.
Unity, justice and liberty
For the German fatherland
Let us all strive for that
In brotherhood with heart and hand!
Unity, justice and liberty
Are the foundation for happiness
Flourish in the radiance of this happiness
Bloom, oh German fatherland
There was an alternative. In 1949 the GDR commissioned a new national anthem, “Risen from the Ruins.” The tune Hanns Eisler wrote for it combines sweet major with rousing minor strains in a stirring if schmaltzy way particularly suited to inspiring national sentiment. The words written by the official poet Johannes R. Becher expressed as much commitment to Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as a national anthem can contain. These are the first verses:
From the ruins risen newly
To the future turned we stand
May we serve your good weal truly
Deutschland our fatherland
Triumph over bygone sorrow
Can in unity be won
For we must attain a morrow
When over Germany
Shines a radiant sun
May joy and peace inspire
Germany our fatherland
Peace is all the world’s desire
To the peoples give your hand
In brotherhood united
We shall crush the people’s foe
May our path by peace be lighted
That no mother shall ever again have to
Mourn her son in woe
When the East abandoned its demand for unification in exchange for hard cash and better relations with its western neighbor, the words were no longer sung in public. All that remained was Hanns Eisler’s tune.
“Risen from the Ruins” could have been the ideal anthem for the newly united Germany, acknowledging the terror of the past, proclaiming the hopes for another future. Does it matter that Becher, who wrote the lyrics, later served the state in its most Stalinist phase? Do we know what later happened to Francis Scott Key, who wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner”? Or the unknown author of “God Save the Queen”? That was roughly the argument of Lothar de Maizière, the first and last democratically elected chancellor of the GDR. In the feverishly hurried negotiations leading up to reunification, he pointed out that the words could be sung to the old Haydn tune the world knows as “Deutschland über alles” if the West insisted on retaining a piece of its past. Holding all the economic cards in their hands, the West answered: no. With the Christian Democrats in power, it was not surprising. They needed decades to acknowledge the need for any form of working off the German past, and they never explored what needs to be worked off in their own party history. Why would they want to be reminded of that past every time the national anthem was sung?
The only vestige of an East German symbol that survives in Berlin today is the jaunty little man who signals stop and go at traffic lights, decidedly more appealing than the robotic-looking figures that once regulated West Berlin pedestrians. If you want to take home a mug or a T-shirt with an emblem of the city, it’s the easiest one to find. The souvenir shops will never tell you how contested it all was, and the younger sales clerks are unlikely to know it themselves.
But a national anthem is part of state propaganda, decreed from above. The GDR used its antifascism as a weapon to accuse its western neighbor.
East Germany was quick to use as propaganda for its own state the fact that West Germany neither investigated nor prosecuted former Nazis, but the fact is no less true. In both German states, everyone knew the Nazi years were still present, but that fact was either hardened into dogma or left entirely unspoken. The East German dogma: As the first antifascist state on German soil, we have broken every continuity with the fascist past. The West German dogma: As a totalitarian ideology that suppresses individual freedom, communism is no better than fascism; hence the GDR is no break with the past at all. Since neither dogma fit the facts, silence was often preferred.
There were old Nazis in the GDR too.
Of course there were. It had been the same nation, after all. The East had fewer Nazis to start with, since so many fled to the West as the Eastern Front crumbled. Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik hordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit; even those who were not openly anti-Semitic were openly and bitterly anticommunist. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.23
East German antifascism was displayed to win favor with the Soviet occupiers.
As West German reparations payments were made to win favor with the American occupiers. Both sides used different forms of working-off-the-past to curry favor with the overlords who occupied the country till the peace treaties were signed in 1990. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is never merely internal. Every country that undertakes it is always making a statement to the outside world. President Kennedy used civil rights legislation as a tool in the Cold War after the Soviet Union, in the wake of postcolonial revolutions in Africa, pointed out that American segregation was thoroughly at odds with American ideals. Whatever outside pressures helped to produce the civil rights legislation of the ’60s, its passage was a good. Whatever outside pressures strengthened the GDR’s public commitment to antifascism, that commitment was a good.
East Germany used antifascism as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression.
It did indeed. The most clear and stupid instance was building a 128-kilometer concrete barrier around West Berlin and calling it the Antifascist Protection Wall. Everyone knew that its purpose was not to keep invaders out, but to keep citizens in. The name the government used for the Wall probably created more contempt and cynicism than anything else it did. Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is always political, and like anything else, including baby pictures and the Bible, it can be politically abused. Still, even those former dissidents who wish the GDR had spent more time working off its Stalinist crimes believe it did well in working off the Nazi ones.
By claiming its place in history as the antifascist state risen from the ruins on German soil and suggesting that the Nazis were a West German problem, the GDR did distort. And its claim that getting rid of capitalism would get rid of fascism was as one-sided as the BRD’s claim that getting rid of open anti-Semitism was all it would take to get rid of fascism. By valorizing the Red Army, the GDR managed to suggest that they were part of its victory—so much so, it’s occasionally claimed, that children were confused about which army their fathers had served in the war. The government’s position left most East Germans convinced they were, by nature, on the right side of history. And this in turn is a dangerous suggestion, for being on the right side of history in one moment is no guarantee that you will remain there—as the career of Erich Mielke, who began by fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War and ended as the head of the Stasi, surely shows. Nonetheless, in putting itself on the side of antifascism and inviting those forced to emigrate during the Nazi years to return to rebuild another Germany, the GDR put itself on the right side of history at least once.
East German working off was superficial. It may have been government policy, but it didn’t extend to personal confrontation.
The philosopher Stanley Cavell divided thinkers into those whose main categories are political and those whose categories are primarily psychological.24 For East Germans, political categories were front and center; West Germans focused on the psychological.25 When the West German ’68ers exploded in rage over the lack of working off in the first postwar decades, they insisted that working off meant reckoning—and often violent confrontation—with their parents. This kind of personal encounter rarely took place in the GDR. As the (West German) philosopher Bettina Stangneth put it, “Working through history there wasn’t a matter of self-enlightenment. Marxism said that change is a matter of changing political and economic relations. Once you change those relations, and the political leadership, evil is overcome, and you need no further enlightenment. It’s an overly optimistic ideology.”
I believe a thoroughgoing working off of a nation’s crimes requires both political and psychological changes. But if I had to set priorities, I’d prefer that political commitments—expressed in laws preventing expressions of racism, punishing racist crime, and roundly condemning it from the highest levels of government to the teachings in elementary schools—come first.
East Germany was anti-Semitic.
In 1991 the West German research institute EMNID published a study comparing anti-Semitic attitudes in East and West. It was so soon after reunification that the lines between the two former states were still clear. Their verdict: 16 percent of the population of West German states showed extreme anti-Semitic tendencies, while 4 percent of the East German population did.26 Jews in the GDR who survived the Nazi years received a host of benefits, ranging from a large state pension to privileged housing to free public transportation. And though the Nazis’ anticommunism was emphasized more than their anti-Semitism, East Germany also thoroughly documented the latter. The historian Renate Kirchner counted 1,086 books the GDR published about Jews and anti-Semitism. More than one thousand films and television programs regularly presented the Holocaust to a broad public long before West German television showed the American television series Holocaust.27
The anti-Semitism that coincided with Stalin’s worst anti-Semitic policies cannot be ignored. It’s also true that, like the Soviet Union, the GDR sided with the Arab states during the Six-Day War in 1967. Virtually everything else about West and East German forms of working-off-the-past remains a matter of argument. As the historian Mario Kessler summarized: “Reading all these works, which often refer to the same sources to support their claims, shows how historians can draw very different conclusions, or rather how much their ideological and political standpoints influence their judgment.”28
If the GDR was so good at working off the crimes of Nazism, why didn’t it tackle the crimes of Stalinism?
Excellent question. Many East Germans think the GDR might have survived if it had.
Jens Reich is a molecular biologist who was a prominent dissident in the GDR—so prominent that he lost his job leading a biology institute when he refused to join the party and pledge loyalty to the system. He was given a less interesting job in the provinces, where he continued both his scientific research and his political work organizing others in critical discussion groups that were hoping to change East Germany.
We met in his house in a decidedly bourgeois corner of what was formerly West Berlin. “We didn’t want to end the GDR, but to reform it.” Everyone who was actually involved in the opposition says the same thing.
Jens Reich’s father served as a doctor on the Eastern Front. I asked if they ever argued about the war.
“My father insisted that the Wehrmacht did not only consist of criminals.”
“This was before the Wehrmacht Exhibit?”
“In the GDR we were talking about the criminality of the Wehrmacht in the 1950s. My father was on the front, and he also spoke of building clinics in the villages that served the local population as well as the soldiers.” They also fought about the behavior of the American forces during the war. “Father was angry because they immediately withdrew from cities where they encountered resistance, and bombed from the air.” This led to thousands of civilian deaths. “I thought it was understandable. Since they were suffering in the Pacific, they couldn’t afford to lose soldiers here.”
The arguments cannot have been bitter ones, for Jens speaks of his father with love and respect. Returning from the war, he joined the Communist Party, wanting to help build a new, socialist Germany. Since most doctors had gone to the West, where salaries were far higher, his services were welcome. He built up a hospital. “Father suffered under the stupidities of an authoritarian system, but he never said a word against the Soviet Union, nor against the GDR.”
Jens Reich remembers how the history of the Nazi period was discussed in school. The main focus was on the heroes of the antifascist resistance, but stories of the victims were told as well. “I don’t know anyone who thought the Day of Liberation was a Day of Foreign Domination, as was common in the West. It was a day of defeat, but many really experienced it as liberation.” The celebration of resistance heroes helped avoid psychological burdens, so that children didn’t have to grow up feeling they were part of a criminal nation. “We didn’t learn everything, but we learned a lot. In the West the history lessons ended with Kaiser Wilhelm.”
Like others, Reich insists on distinguishing between particular epochs in the GDR. The Stalinism of the ’50s gave way to “a sad time; after the Wall was built, we couldn’t leave, but it was no longer a brutal dictatorship.” There was still a lot of censorship, but what Reich remembers today is how easy it was to get around it. In his own experience there was no anti-Semitism. Most educated citizens, he said, didn’t approve of the government’s position during the Six-Day War. “In the West the left was very anti-Israel, which was not the case with us.” Nor did he detect any anti-Russian sentiment. “Anyone who was fanatically anti-Russian went to the West. The rest of us knew about the Wehrmacht and the SS and thought What the hell did we do there?” Reich was a member of the organization for German-Soviet friendship and had many colleagues—half of them Jewish—in the Soviet Union. Nor did he sense xenophobia toward other nationalities: “Look, we were cut off from much of the world. We were happy to see every foreigner.”
The informed GDR citizen, he said, was always in an ambivalent position. Many of those who truly wanted to build a new Germany were given honorary posts where they couldn’t influence anything. “Many were frustrated with the party as it held on to its foundational antifascist narrative when the party itself had become so stiff and hardened that the young could no longer believe in it. The older people should have faced up to it earlier and said this is not my socialism. Still, the reproach that our antifascism was empty is not one I can accept. In those matters I have no complaint.”
Friedrich Schorlemmer is a tall, fine-featured man whose sonorous voice must have served him during the years he spent as pastor of the church where Martin Luther did, or did not, nail the ninety-five theses. Historians still disagree about that, but Schorlemmer pointed out the door where the theses would have been fastened if the story is true. Though he’s retired, Schorlemmer is clearly at home in the cathedral, where he showed me the renovations for the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. He’s also at home in Wittenberg itself, where nearly every passerby greets him on the cobblestone streets; if the passersby are tourists, Schorlemmer stops to help them find their way. Those who know him do not forget the movement he organized in 1983 called Swords into Plowshares. A fierce pacifist, he protested against GDR militarism. Even those who missed the demonstration itself remember the famous photo of the bare-armed blacksmith whom Schorlemmer invited in order to make the metaphor explicit by beating an actual weapon of war into an agricultural tool. A monument now marks the spot. He was also among the first to protest against the GDR’s environmental policies, or lack thereof.
“Western journalists didn’t know what to call us. We weren’t the opposition, and ‘dissident’ wasn’t quite right either, so they called us civil rights activists. The Stasi estimated there were fifty thousand of us, but I think that’s rather high.”
I told him that Hans Otto Bräutigam insisted I speak with him. “Bräutigam is a lovely, clear-sighted man. He asked questions, and he listened. His picture of the GDR was neither too dark nor too pretty.” Schorlemmer recalled speaking in his usual resounding voice while traveling on a ferry with Bräutigam, who wanted to protect him by warning him to speak softly. He appreciated the concern, but “My attitude was always: they should know what I have to say.”
“Didn’t everyone know they were being overheard by the Stasi?”
“Some say that to justify the fact that they did nothing; others say it to make out that they were braver than they were. I knew they were listening, though I didn’t know they’d gone so far as to wire the bathroom and the hallway. I had a major who accompanied my whole life, and I learned more from him after reunification than I did from my Stasi files.” He shook his head. “The Stasi was there, but I wouldn’t compare it with the surveillance in South Africa, for example. It didn’t determine our lives. We spent most of our time enjoying ordinary things: a wonderful Gouda, a drinkable red wine.”
Born in a small village in 1944, Friedrich Schorlemmer cannot remember the war. But his father, who was also a pastor, served as a medical orderly on the Eastern Front, and he left his son a diary that, had anyone found it, would have sent him to prison—at best. As fifteen-year-old Friedrich began to read Holocaust literature, he attacked his parents: How could you permit this to happen? His mother cried; his father looked stonefaced, but later offered to talk to him about the war at length.
As a medical orderly, Friedrich’s father never fired a shot, but he considered himself a perpetrator anyway, for he moved with the troops all the way to the outskirts of Moscow. Schorlemmer brought his father’s diary from the study and read me an entry from February 13, 1942. “‘We’ve just received sharp orders: the civilian population should be more afraid of German soldiers than of Russian partisans. Villages that shelter partisans should be extinguished: man, woman, and child. We’re to take everything: the last cow, the last seeds. This is no heroic war, but a war of destruction in its bloodiest form.’” The diary also told how his father was saved by a Russian babushka who let him sleep on her oven. Without her he would have frozen to death. Though her own sons had been killed by the Wehrmacht, she didn’t view him as a murderer, just a young man in need of help. “My father told me about the greatness of the Soviet human being—so it was called at the time—because he’d experienced it.”
The consensus in the GDR, said Schorlemmer, was clear, even among families who talked less openly about the war than his did. “We didn’t call it World War Two, we called it the German War of Theft and Extermination. Period. In contrast to West Germany, there was widespread acknowledgment of the suffering we caused. Everyone knew about the starvation in Leningrad and who was responsible for it. Or the incredible Battle of Stalingrad.”
There’s at least one East German who describes himself as a victim of the war: Joachim Gauck, a different East German pastor, who became president of Germany in 2012. His autobiography exudes outrage over the moment when Soviet soldiers took his father away to a POW camp. When I mentioned the book, Schorlemmer grew indignant. “That book is dishonest because it hides so much. Why was his father arrested? He was a fervent Nazi, one of the first to join the party, and he was an important man in the marines. On top of that, he came back after five years; many did not. What does Gauck have to whine about?”
“If few in the East echoed Gauck’s reaction, how was the war commemorated?”
“In my father’s generation there were still people who said privately At least we managed to hold out against the world for six years. People who suffered under the Nazis experienced May 8 as a day of liberation, and they wanted it to be honored. It wasn’t really internalized by the masses, though Weizsäcker’s speech had an impact on the East too. Today I think it was also a speech about German unity: we are united in guilt, whatever system we lived in. We’re united in common responsibility.”
Schorlemmer praised East German art, particularly film and literature, for working off the Nazi past as well as developing sympathy for Russia. He said he can still be shocked when he sees a film about the war—and wonders whether he can be certain he would not have joined in the killing himself. As for Russia: “We had to deal with the nation that made the most sacrifices in the war. They’d been despised as Slavic Untermenschen, and suddenly they were our conquerors.” It was hard to swallow, but many East Germans wound up considering the conquerors as friends. “Some of them, like the officers Klemperer knew who admired German culture, were trying out progressive cultural ideas they couldn’t have tried at home under Stalin.” The West Germans identified with Americans, but “the American losses weren’t comparable to the Russian ones—” He interrupted himself; he is a pastor after all. “Every single death is evil, it can’t be a matter of numbers. But the scorched-earth policy we left behind in Russia was unique.”
Schorlemmer still serves often as pastor, and he recently presided over the burial of someone who had gone to a Soviet prison in his father’s stead. The prisoners had to clear minefields in the Oderbruch; only one in eight survived. “Can one blame the Russians for sending prisoners of war to do that? They were German mines that were meant for the Red Army. And the man’s father wasn’t sentenced by accident. He would have been a Nazi, though as pastor, I didn’t want to ask at the funeral.”
We talk about East German symbols. He finds the Treptow monument more moving than the Holocaust Memorial. “Those blocks are not accessible.” He can still get teary when he hears the line from the former national anthem: “Never again shall a mother have to mourn her son.” “It’s a little bombastic, but sometimes the soul needs that kind of thing to break the hard crust that forms around it. The GDR had a lot of peace songs, and people still sing along when I quote them at lectures. They’re romantic songs in the best sense—the sense that people long for something and feel lifted up by that longing.”
As different as working-off-the-past was in East and West, Schorlemmer thinks they had something in common: both were able to create the feeling that the Nazis were responsible—and that the Nazis were someone else. In the West, the Nazis were those big bosses at the top. In the East, the identification with the victims went so far that they were able to forget their own complicity and view the Nazis as a Western problem. Though there were more Nazis in the West and more identification with the victims in the East, “that’s only half the story,” he said. “As Germans in the East, we never fully worked through our own responsibility.”
I reminded Schorlemmer that we’d first met years earlier, when he invited me to a symposium about racism he had organized for Martin Luther King’s birthday. What does he think other countries can learn from Germany’s unfinished, imperfect working off of its debts?
He answered without hesitating. “You can learn that no country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss into which we fell. And once it begins, there will always be people who shut down their consciences and side with the strongman. Knowing that, we need to develop a kind of preventative uncertainty. If even the land of Beethoven and Bach and Thomas Mann and Kant and Hegel could do that—” He paused. “But it also means we are all capable of asking for forgiveness, and of giving it as well—without denying what happened. That takes time. I don’t mean that time heals all wounds, but it takes time to realize that one was a perpetrator before one was a victim and that one became a victim because one began as a perpetrator. But if we don’t believe that self-knowledge and conversion and building a society based on human rights is possible, then the damage starts all over again.”
Hermann Simon owes his life to the Red Army. His mother was a young middle-class Jew who spent the war hidden in Berlin. Before her death, he persuaded her to dictate a memoir of her wartime experience, now published as Untergetaucht (In Hiding). Her description of life underground—avoiding betrayal, seeking shelter and, when possible, food—is so exact and so gripping that after reading it, I was moved to trace some of her steps. The house where she stayed most often is not far from my own. It is one of the few in the neighborhood that retains the gray-brown plaster unrenovated since the war. Other than that, it looks perfectly ordinary. It had been a shelter from the fear, and often the sexual exploitation, she found elsewhere during the war. Impressed by the fact that simple working people helped her far more often than the better-situated bourgeoisie, she joined the Communist Party soon after liberation.
“Of course we called it liberation,” said Simon.
His mother became a professor of philosophy at the Humboldt University, where his father, who fought with the British during the war, became a professor of Jewish studies. Unlike most communists, they were members of the Jewish Community. “I was lucky,” said Simon. “My parents registered me at birth as a Jew. I had a bar mitzvah. Everyone knew we were Jewish; it was never a fact that had to be discovered.”
Hermann Simon studied history and spent years researching old coins before he decided that researching old Jews was more interesting. He published a history of the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue when it was still in ruins, and he was one of the people responsible for the GDR commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht. In November 1988 there were speeches aplenty on the other side of the Wall. East Germany took the occasion to begin renovating the synagogue, once the largest in Germany, and establishing a Jewish Center inside it. The center now hosts an exhibit, a large library, and a research center, and the only Berlin synagogue where men and women can sit together. Hermann Simon was its director for twenty-seven years, until he retired in 2014. His tenure was marred by reports that he had contact with the Stasi, but he was cleared of any damaging charges and honored by the present state.
He is skeptical about some of the ways in which East Germany worked off its Nazi past. “We were the new Germany, the victors. There were children who thought their West grandpa was in the Wehrmacht, their East grandpa in the Red Army. It took time for the young to realize that the Nazi terror wasn’t confined to West Berlin neighborhoods like Schöneberg or Wedding; it happened right here in Berlin Mitte, the capital of the GDR.” He always found the monument at Treptow kitschy. “Still, I’ve never forgotten that I have the Red Army to thank for my own existence.”
Nor could he complain about anti-Semitism in the GDR. “Everyone has anti-Semitic experiences. My relatives in Canada can sing you songs about it. There was very little in East Germany, partly because the law came down hard on it and partly because the worst Nazis went to the West, where they were safer. There may have been anti-Semitism in corners of the country, but I never experienced it. In a sense, we lived on an island, like my American friends. None of them has ever met a Trump voter.”
He recalled many discussions of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in school, as well as the enormous amount of reparations that were paid to the Soviet Union, and he never heard a word of resentment about them. He was cautious, however, about predicting the future; he knew the country he grew up in, but reunification has produced a new one. After twenty-seven years living in it, he doesn’t feel he’s known it long enough to make a judgment.
“The current attitude is, we are the perpetrators, not the victims. I don’t know how long that will last. Attitudes can change very suddenly.”
It’s a German sort of skepticism that has nothing to do with Simon’s background. Everyone warns of the need for continued vigilance.
Jalda Rebling was born in 1951 in Amsterdam after her mother returned there from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where she was with Anne and Margot Frank when they died. Jalda’s mother was both a Jew and a communist. Her father was neither; he emigrated from Germany to Holland just because he loathed the Nazis. He later was honored by Yad Vashem for risking his life trying to save Jews from deportation. Jalda’s mother was among them when the Gestapo found them in 1944.
“They were betrayed by the Dutch, not the Germans. Nowhere did the deportations function so smoothly as in Holland. The Dutch are loyal servants of the state. If the state tells them to do something, they do it.” More people were deported to Auschwitz from Amsterdam than anywhere else. Lin Jaldati—Jalda’s mother—and her aunt were the only members of their family to survive. Jalda’s older sister, who was two at the time, was hidden with a Dutch family hours before the Gestapo arrived. She always feared she might have babbled something that gave them away.
After the war, Lin Jaldati found her husband and daughter waiting, but the return to Amsterdam was hard to bear, particularly after 1948, when McCarthyite anticommunism made it impossible for people with their political views to earn a living. When her father was offered a job as music critic for a GDR newspaper in 1953, the family moved to Berlin. There her mother became famous as a singer of Yiddish songs. Her voice and her story were celebrated as heroic; only her daughter knew how often she succumbed to panic attacks and depression.
Having parents who were resistance heroes and the first to perform Yiddish music onstage gave Jalda a protected life. “I was a VIP child; I could get away with things.” During the Six-Day War a functionary told her to take off the Star of David she always wore, saying it was a symbol of Zionist aggression. “It’s a symbol of my grandparents who were murdered in Auschwitz,” she replied. That shut him up.
“I don’t miss the GDR for a moment, and I don’t play along with anyone who tells me how wonderful it was. But I also don’t play along with anyone who tells me it was awful.”
“So you weren’t a party member like your parents?”
“Sure I was a party member.” She laughed ruefully. “I wanted to change the world and thought I could best do so from inside the party. Much later I understood that the world could only be changed from the outside.”
Jalda didn’t intend to follow in her mother’s footsteps, but when her mother asked her to join her for a concert commemorating Anne Frank, she discovered that she too loved to sing Yiddish music. A concert tour in America brought Jalda together with the Jewish Renewal movement, where she found the joy she’d experienced in her mother’s songs. “Before that, I only thought of synagogues as places of mourning.” She went on to study in the United States and became a cantor. Jalda founded a small congregation just outside of Berlin, where she lives with her wife, Amy Adam, a Jewish artist whose own mother also survived Auschwitz. The two of them often work together on projects meant to spread the message that Judaism isn’t all about tragedy.
“Yiddish is the language of the powerless,” said Jalda. “It has everything the German language doesn’t have. Humor, irony—which great German writer has those?”
“Well, there’s Heine.”
“Exactly. Heine and Tucholsky.” We laughed, knowing that both were Jewish. I wonder why East Berlin has a street named after Heine and a statue of him in the city center. West Berlin’s poets’ quarter has none, though there are several streets named after Goethe and Schiller. This could be accidental. Or not.
“Yiddish songs were taken up by the civil rights movement in the GDR. It was a way of identifying with the power of the powerless.”
Still, she told me there was anti-Semitism under the surface in the GDR. “A swastika was smeared on our mailbox. That could have been anticommunist or anti-Semitic. You never know.”
Jalda has noticed subtle anti-Semitism in the klezmer scene. Before giving a concert at a large Berlin theater, she was introduced by someone who expressed his gratitude that Yiddish had been preserved in America so it could return to Germany. “So the Shoah was not that bad after all?” she shot back. The story reminded me of the way some Southern plantations market the blues along with hoopskirts and mint juleps. Could slavery have been so awful if it produced that great music? But is that rank racism, or a lack of sensitivity for nuance?
Jalda described another concert with a mixed group of musicians at the Jewish Community Center. She wore a concert dress, but the non-Jewish musicians were dressed in jeans. “The members of the Community—you know, the kind who wear too much gold and too much perfume, but they were survivors—found it disrespectful. They decided they’d never again invite goyim to play klezmer. So there was a discussion in the klezmer scene over who has the right to play Yiddish music. Only Jews? And does that mean Jews can’t play Bach? Utter nonsense,” she concluded. I decided that a conversation about cultural appropriation would take us into the morning hours.
She knows that serious discussions of the Nazi past are taking place now. “Too late, but at least they’re taking place, unlike in Holland or France.” Jalda doesn’t think that average citizens want enlightenment. They care about being left in peace, staying healthy, having a decent apartment. “People who ask questions that don’t have simple answers have always been rare.”
I disagreed. Unexamined pasts eventually seep into the quiet lives people try to lead. “Human beings need more than bread and circuses.”
“Of course they do. The question is whether they want it.”
She doesn’t believe the Enlightenment has failed us in regard to anti-Semitism; she thinks we need more of it. Books and lectures don’t work alone; the only thing that’s effective is personal interaction. She described the project her wife created, in which the two of them take a painted bus to small towns and talk to people about Judaism. “We put a question mark in the children’s heads. We start with the Muslim children.”
“But that’s enlightenment too. I saw it happen in Mississippi.”
She wasn’t sure whether to agree. “Perhaps we need more books and lectures too. Before talking to you, I didn’t realize that the Russian side of the war isn’t present in the U.S. and Great Britain. Now it explains some of the conversations I’ve had there. We always knew what went on in the Western world. I didn’t know how little they knew about the Eastern one.”
Ingo Schulze’s novels are bestsellers in German, and they’ve been translated into thirty other languages. That’s why he’s often described as the best writer to come out of the East. “It’s meant as a compliment, but they’re not conscious of the impact. Would anyone call someone the best writer to come out of the West?”
“It’s like calling someone in America the best black philosopher.”
“Exactly.”
He was born in 1962, a child of the GDR. “Antifascism was everywhere, and with good reason too. It’s nonsense to call it prescribed. The communists were the first group the Nazis persecuted. Then came the Social Democrats, then everyone else.” There were school visits from resistance veterans, a class trip to Buchenwald. His connection to Russian culture is particularly strong because of his family’s story. His grandfather built airplanes during World War II. The Russians took him, as the Americans took Wernher von Braun and others. They lived on the Volga, north of Moscow, for ten years. “Compared to living conditions in the GDR just after the war, things were comfortable. Afterwards my mother was often homesick for Russia.” He never discussed the war with his family, “though it was rough to know your grandfather built planes for the Nazis.”
Soviet literature and film played a big role in Ingo’s life; he collected Soviet army medals as a child. “And then, crazily enough, the impulse to revolution came from Russia.” One month before the Wall fell, Gorbachev had warned party leader Erich Honecker: Life punishes those who come too late. Support for the dissidents came from the Soviet Union. “It was German communists—not communists really, but party bosses—who opposed reform.” And, Ingo repeated, it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz.
“Did you learn about the American contributions at Normandy?”
“Our relationship to America was ambivalent. We heard about how long they took to open a second front; we heard about the Anglo-American terror attack on Dresden. And everything was overshadowed by Hiroshima.” From Berlin to Vladivostok, everyone in Eastern Europe was brought up with the knowledge that only one country in the world ever actually deployed nuclear weapons.
As a child, however, it felt strange to identify with the Russians, and no one wanted to identify with the Germans. “So we played cowboys and Indians. The only problem was that everyone wanted to be an Indian. Nobody wanted to play the greedy occupiers.” Despite his childhood knowledge of what the palefaces did to Native Americans, Ingo grew up with a strong sense of another America. He saw Harry Belafonte cry over the great actor and activist Paul Robeson during a concert in East Berlin, which still has a street named after Robeson.
When I arrived in Berlin in 1982, the stationing of nuclear missiles in Germany and the wars in Central America were on many minds. In West Berlin cafés, exiled Chileans far outnumbered American expats. West Berliners’ reactions when they heard I was American were very hard to take. If they didn’t blame me for Ronald Reagan, they attacked me over McDonald’s. East Berliners, who were even less likely to meet Americans, had other associations; they usually asked if I knew the radical philosopher Angela Davis.
“I spent my allowance for Angela Davis,” says Ingo. “That was normal, like solidarity with Chile. Even we dissidents knew the putsch was a crime. Lots of things were named after Salvador Allende.”
When he isn’t writing novels or spending time with his daughters, Ingo is politically active. He writes pieces that are deep and clever, gives speeches and interviews about current affairs in Germany. His criticism of the neoliberal order is as fierce as his long-ago criticism of the East German one. Since he grew up in Dresden, I asked why he thinks the far right has gained such a stronghold there.
“Dresden was always conservative,” he said. “And conservatives always move to the right when they’re dissatisfied. So they call it a scandal that German pensioners have to collect bottles out of trash cans while all the refugees are given money. It is a scandal that people don’t have decent pensions, but the one has nothing to do with the other.” The living conditions of many citizens whose lifelong work left them with inadequate pensions is often appalling, and they do collect bottles to recycle for pennies. Ingo sees this as a growing problem; it just happened earlier in the East, where pensions are lower and savings were unnecessary. The state took care of its own.
“Conservatives think in national terms rather than social ones. You’re not going to win votes by telling people the truth: that our comfortable lifestyle is dependent on exploiting developing countries. That’s a major cause of the flood of refugees. Still, one has to say it: you can’t really work for social justice in one country without working for it in the rest of the world.”
There is something about Ingo that’s as upright and good-hearted as the hero of his latest novel, Peter Holtz, which some critics dismissed as kitschy. Who still believes there could be someone who always tries to act in the name of the universal common good? Ingo was on his way to a reading of the new novel, and I hurried to ask him what he thinks was wrong with East Germany’s antifascism.
“If the working off of the Nazi era had been better, the GDR would have been a different country. But that would have meant speaking about Stalinist crimes as well. Everybody knew about them, but they weren’t discussed in public.”
What can other countries learn from the German experience?
“To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It’s crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror. Germany didn’t do it willingly. It’s still not completed. Even today we have problems thinking about the cruelties of our colonial history.”
One dreary day in November 2016 some forty historians, sociologists, and writers arrived at the Jewish Museum Berlin to exchange notes at a private conference about Jews in East Germany. None of them were young, and many of them were East German Jews. From the West came a few Germans, a Frenchwoman, and three Americans, including myself. We shared many points of agreement.
1. The West never invited Jewish émigrés to return; the East did. Not everyone in the East wanted them back, but enough leaders in culture and science did. It was the Aryans at the universities who insisted on hiring the Jewish professors that were needed, and the GDR government sent the invitation.
2. Those Jews and others who did return had a deep desire to build a better Germany. They didn’t want to be victims, but to be active; they didn’t want their suffering to have been in vain. They had a strong sense of social responsibility and a belief that social injustice leads to violence. As Germans, they refused to accept the Nazi view that they did not belong there. Whose Germany was it, anyway? And as left-leaning as they were, they were appalled by the American anticommunism of the McCarthy years. “My parents came back after they witnessed the Rosenberg trial,” said one participant. The United States executed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Bertolt Brecht didn’t wait that long; he left America after being questioned by the HUAC.
3. There was anti-Semitism in both East and West populations. What was different was the leadership, and the leadership set very different tones. Still, both sides were concerned to impress the rest of the world with signals against anti-Semitism.
4. Every state has its own myths. In the GDR it was the myth of the antifascist state. In the BRD the myth was another: from dogcatcher to diplomat, nobody but the handful of criminals in charge had any idea of what was happening in the East. Our men at the front there were gallant fighters, not criminals.
The East German faces looked tense. They acknowledged the truth of these claims, but they didn’t like the tone. One remarked that after they’ve lost everything else, even East Germany’s history has been appropriated. Since 1989 the sovereign interpretations of East German history, which claim it was hard to be Jewish there, all come from the West. “That’s not how I remember it,” said one East German Jew.
“They’re talking about a country I never lived in,” said Daniela Dahn, an East German writer best known for a series of sharp, fierce critiques of the reunification process. Nor does she understand those who say the Holocaust was not discussed in the GDR. “Where were they?” In the seventh and eighth grades, half of all the literature taught in German classes was devoted to it; in the final year of school, it was still a third. “It was rather too much than too little, especially since we all had to visit Buchenwald. Not to mention all the war films made by DEFA, the East German state film studio, at a time when West German film was waxing lyrical about country girls in Bavaria.”
Since many at the conference were historians, there was a discussion of the differences between history and memory. “Why are written sources sacrosanct?” asked the French historian Sonia Combe. “Stasi files can lie. Records are incomplete. Even if testimonies don’t provide the same information as the documents, I often find that witnesses provide answers where documents cannot.”
Watching the other faces, I remembered a 1993 conference at the University of Minnesota. Shortly after reunification there were attacks on refugee asylums, East and West. Thousands of Germans formed lines, holding candles to protest, but everyone who watched Germany was worried: Had reunification opened the door to racist nationalism?
Having just published my first book, Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin, I’d been invited as the voice of Jews who’d lived in Germany. An Afro-German woman and a Turkish man rounded out the representatives of those who were expected to talk about xenophobia from the inside. The rest of the speakers were West Germans.
My talk had nothing to do with East-West comparisons, though one sentence mentioned that I’d felt more comfortable as a Jew and a foreigner in East than in West Berlin. The room erupted. Though the claim was incidental to my talk, it was all anyone wished to discuss. The West Germans were enraged. One after the other stood up to correct me.
“I’m talking about my own experience,” I said.
“And mine,” said the Afro-German.
“And mine,” said the Turk.
If you invite representative voices, shouldn’t you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it’s called whitesplaining. There isn’t a word for it in German.
I turned back to the present, watching faces grow tenser. The conference at the Jewish museum was composed of experts on the subject of East Germany and its Jews. It concluded with another claim on which all could agree: Isn’t it amazing that we’re still arguing about these matters a quarter century past reunification?
I left the conference more convinced than ever: German reunification will not be complete until both sides stop competing with each other and acknowledge that the other side’s efforts, while partial and framed by Cold War ideologies, were genuine efforts too.
The most thoughtful Germans, East and West, are reluctant to praise German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. They are too aware of its flaws, its incompleteness on both sides of the Wall. The greatest flaw was common to both, as Friedrich Schorlemmer pointed out: far too often, the real fascists were the Others. In both cases, responsibility was deflected. In neither case were many able to say I was guilty. In both cases, every form of working off was instrumentalized, indeed weaponized as potent ammunition against each other in the long Cold War.
Yet looking at the evidence, it’s hard to disagree with Malte Herwig: “If Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung were an Olympic sport, the GDR justice system would be ahead of the BRD to the very end.” Those who contest the reality of East German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung should at least begin to doubt. First and most important, those who experienced life in East Germany experienced Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung as genuine, even when they were critical of most other aspects of that life. Second: Shouldn’t some form of antifascism have been imposed by the government? All the Allies originally believed it was necessary; the Western Allies simply gave it up early. As a result, almost any West German who attended school in the ’50s and ’60s can tell a story about one teacher or another who was given to egregious Nazi expressions, each more militaristic or racist than the other. And since, with the exception of prominent figures like Heidegger or Schmitt, former Nazis remained in their professorships after the war, the steady drip of Nazi-like propaganda would continue until the students were well into their twenties.29 East Germany removed such possibilities from its inception. On August 24, 1949, the Executive Committee of the Party decreed:
The resolute continuation of democratic school reform is of essential importance in the further development of social conditions in Germany, especially the consolidation of the anti-Fascist democratic order … In view of the intensification and inevitability of this struggle, these tasks can be fulfilled only if every teacher and educator combats all reactionary and neo-Fascist, militaristic, war-mongering and especially anti-Soviet influences and theories, any religious, national and racial hatred.
The history textbooks were standardized throughout the country; new editions appeared every few years, and every school received them at the same time. As elsewhere, that history was put into the service of the Cold War. Every East German textbook written until 1990 contained the following quote from Harry Truman: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” It was used as propaganda, but the accuracy of the quote is undeniable. Truman gave it to The New York Times in 1941, when he was still a senator.
To repeat: being on the right side of history at one time is no guarantee that you’ll be on the right side of history at another. The GDR had periods of that Stalinism which is the death of real socialism. Lies were numerous, and lives were destroyed. But there were moments when it was on the right side of history. To forget that is to falsify not only history but politics and morals as well. For that amnesia is a way of externalizing and demonizing evil—the surest way to perpetuate evils in the future.