Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and Post WWII Politics;
the Struggle for the Unification of Germany

Ash, Timothy Garton, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent
            Random House, NY, NY 1993
Fulbrook, Mary, Anatomy of a Dictatorship; Inside the GDR 1949-1989
            Oxford Press, NY, NY 1995
Herf, Jeffery, Divided Memory; The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys
      Harvard Press, Cambridge, London 1997

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Pivotal to our understanding of the events in history is our appreciation for the way people and societies filter memory of those ordeals; how we confront, or master the past, a term in German known as Vergangenheitsbewaltigung.  If post WWII German political behaviour is any indication of how we handle unfavourable events, history shows that we tend to initially suppress bad memories in an effort to move forward. The various political and social avenues taken by post WWII Germany on both sides of the Berlin Wall demonstrate an effort to cope with the memories of the Holocaust with economic salve, moving speeches, and in some cases, a disassociation with responsibility and restitution for those who came under such horrific persecution. With such different approaches to reckoning with the past, how could Germany ever coalesce and become a unified nation? Herf, Fulbrook and Ash all illuminate ways in which post WWII Germany managed with a nation imbued with guilt, blame and defeat.

Herf’s post WWII East Germany bore no responsibility for or connection to a pre war fascist West Germany or a post war capitalistic bourgeoisie. Herf emphasises the question of whether forgetting the Jewish catastrophe in the postwar years was inseparable from the forgetting of WWII and “what Winston Churchill aptly called the “unnatural alliance” of the Soviet Union and the West which had made possible Nazism’s defeat.” (8) He also asserts that because political opponents of the Nazi regime had found either political asylum abroad or survived through political withdrawal in a kind of “in house” emigration, the leaders of Weimar’s anti-Nazi party were still alive in 1945. The inherited traditions and ideologies these leaders carried in their hearts and minds became ever more precious sources of meaning with which to interpret the present and to shape the memory of the recent past. Using newly released Stasi (secret police) and East German archival files, Herf is able to uncover much of what, until this publication, was unexplored political writings and legal procedures. As such, the story of East German post WWII history finally takes its place and according to Herf, assumes a more prominent position it has long deserved in history.

Although Herf covers both East and West Germany rather equally, what is new in this monograph of post WWII Germany, according to Herf, is the fresh information and insight on East German activities since the war. Post WWII East German leaders denied that Nazism had much to do with Anti-Semitism, and preferred to focus on a triumphant Communist Germany than on restitution for Jews; they forwarded Weimar era political traditions and anti-Nazi emigration to the period after 1945 in what Herf describes as “multiple restorations”.

In an effort to purge East Germany of the capitalist, or “cosmopolitan” bourgeois tendencies witnessed in the West, East German leaders flushed out the individuals whose propaganda threatened East German socialist and communist plans. The result would be a 1953 revolt and the loss of thousands of lives. East German communist leaders saw the Jewish question as that of a class struggle, and not one in need of further consideration. Opinionated Communist thinkers such as Paul Merker, who openly criticised the lack of Jewish support, sympathy, and restitution, would suffer the consequences of his compassion and find himself under arrest, the subject of a trial in 1955, and exiled from East Germany. Thought to be an agent of imperialist intelligence, and active in their service, elites claimed he had committed crimes against Article 6, which made it illegal to express religious racial or national hatred or militaristic propaganda. Under Directive 38, he was found to be an activist, who could be punished as had endangered the peace of the German people by spreading socialist rumours.(126) Hermann Matern, an anti-Semite, anti-American and the author of “Lessons of the Trial Against the Slansky Conspiracy Center,” a seminal document concerning the Jewish condition after the war, accused Merker of caring about the Jews because Americans and wealthy Jews paid him to do so. Merker was charged by Matern with dishonestly transforming “the maximum profits of the monopoly capitalists which had been squeezed out of the German and foreign workers into a supposed property of the Jewish people.” (128) The Merker trial highlighted the ways in which the refusal by which most communists to grapple at all seriously with the Holocaust were linked to persistent and powerful strain of communist anti-Semitism. Herf points out that this fitted quite neatly into the Soviet policy of opposition to an imperialist Israel and the Soviet’s other client states in the Middle East. Any recognition of the racial element of Nazism in the GDR was treated as a threat to the founding myths that supported Ulbricht and his successors. Leo Zuckermann, another Jewish sympathiser, was also found in contempt, and both men fled to Mexico City where they would stay in exile until East Germany was willing to face its past deeds. It was not until 1990 that East Germany came to terms with the responsibility of wrongdoing and make restitution and establish relations with the state of Israel.

On the other side of the wall however, a persistent need to right the wrongdoing during the war was felt, albeit in different modes of thought. Social Democrats led by Kurt Schumacher and his colleagues, prodded conservatives toward a policy of greater memory, justice, and reparations than would otherwise have been evident throughout the 1950s. Opinion, however, was not uniform nor without dispute. Herf’s main contribution here is to demonstrate that the political culture of the divided Germanys was result less of the importation of previously unknown traditions (such as influence from the allied forces) than of a radical shift in the balance of power among pre-existing German traditions. Certainly allied forces played an important role, but for Herf they were not as pivotal as has been previously argued. The Nuremberg interregnum in both East and West rested on a combination of imposition, repression, and selection. With the history of a conservative Adenauer, a liberal Heuss, and a socialist Schumacher, West Germany had a long road to travel before it would see political harmony and an agreed treatment of the problem of the memory of the Holocaust. They would have to face complete defeat, a total discrediting of the former regime, and accept the nature and the extent of the crimes committed. Adenauer, for all his good intention, was slow to move; but strongly felt that Germany must address the past in order to look to the future. Regardless of who was in power, an honest effort to face the past was inseparable from establishing a democracy in Germany.

While East and West struggled with their respective ideologies and attitudes towards reparation and restitution, the question of a future unification of Germany would loom large. In Timothy Garton Ash’s study, the major initiative that contributed to the unification of Germany was Willy Brandt's Ostopolitik, the goal of which was to reduce tensions between the two countries by establishing cooperative relationships in the hope that they would constitute an evolutionary process toward unification. For Ash, the question is squarely located in Western as well as in Eastern European context, where it belongs. This policy established communication between two Germanys on different levels and provided a framework for peaceful and constructive resolution of disputes between the two countries, as well as the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

 
The issue of “normalcy” for a nation with respect to inclusion in European affairs is of central importance to Ash’s survey. Both Germanys had specific ideas about what a normal country or nation should interact with other nations. However, these ideas were not similar and neither of them were “normal” when compared to neighbouring countries; Ash suggests that being “normal” would have been impossible with the memory of Hitler and the Holocaust in Germany’s past.  Furthermore, Ash tells us, living with the Berlin Wall build squarely dividing the country in half and the disparities between the two would never allow Germany to seem “normal”, even after the dissolution of Yalta.  Germany does not exist in a vacuum, it sits in the centre of Europe and lest anyone forget, was the tyrant of Europe, a fact that all Europeans and Americans alike are unlikely to forget. In order for the rest of the world to accept Germany as normal, Germany would have to struggle with their own sense of normalcy and deal with the memories; memories held by other countries and those memories found within the nation.

  
Many attempts to rectify this situation were made, but none seem to have worked. In the late 1950s, Adenauer had hoped that joining NATO and heralding European integration would create an immediate front with the West. This would signify a desire to salve the memories with world peace and democratic participation as well as demonstrate economic power and readiness that would impress Eastern European and Russian leaders to lean toward the dissolution of Yalta. But the Soviet government’s response in 1961 was to erect the Berlin Wall, thereby dashing any immediate hopes of early unification. Brandt, however, took a different path in leading Germany through unification efforts with an attempt at détente with the East at a more grass roots and societal level than strictly from top down.

If Germany sought to be normal, the country’s unification in 1990 was an opportunity for Germany to cure the ills of the past and progress down the path of normalcy, but it failed miserably to do so. It had an opportunity to use its enormous economic power peacefully and constructively, but did not do so. They failed to redefine their own national interest and create an individual and unique representation within the Western European sphere. (409) Trying to please everyone, German foreign policy remained a conflicting hodgepodge of goals and agendas. They befriended the United States and fancied France; they preferred Poland, and honoured Russia. These inconsistencies would be explicable during the years in which the Berlin Wall stood, however once Yalta had been dissolved, the country did not resolve the conflicting nature of their goals and the country was unable to provide a cohesive account of their strategy in the atmosphere of foreign policy.
In one example of their contradictory moves, as part of a policy of cooperation between West and East Germany, West Germany agreed to give East Germany 14 billion DM to assist in their economic recovery. (158)  This financial assistance was aimed at helping East and West resolve tensions regarding the capitalistic disparity in both domestic and world markets. It also should have showed good faith on the part of the West. Fourteen million DMs should have helped East Germans financially catch up with their Western counterparts, improving the quality of life for East German citizens in many ways. But as any macroeconomics student can explain, this act of what Ash describes as “socialist consumerism” only served to complicate matters driving inflation so high that the average working Berliner could not afford to live on their income. The bequest did little or nothing to help get East Germany on its financially independent feet, but actually bankrupted the GDR in the process.

In the end, Ash has a few suggestions for Germany and their postunification priorities; that political and economical resources should be used to further the democratic consolidation of Central Europe, but he also doubts that is possible. Ahs claims that in order for Germany to be a fully “normal” Western European country, they would have to have neighbours such as France and Britain on both sides; yet they do not and therefore are at a stalemate. They will have to create their own sphere of existence and manage to thrive in between the East and the West. It would seem that German policy makers would be better prepared than in the past to take advantage of the opportunities to their East. More importantly perhaps, is the fact that the nations to the East of Germany are now themselves more prepared to integrate and provide a burgeoning atmosphere for trade, democracy, and peace. While Ash is repeatedly guarded about the leaders of the Eastern block, this is overly cautions. It would seem that German leaders have been their own worst enemies all along. Perhaps if German policy makers cease trying to please everyone and develop a cohesive foreign policy plan, they can bring a unified Germany into the twenty first century.

Fulbrook takes yet another look at the era in her survey of dictatorship in Germany. At one time the GDR was the most successful country in the Soviet block. What caused its dissolution? Using newly released documents from the state security office, interviews and party papers, Fulbrook attempts to demonstrate the cause of the collapse: the flaw was mainly within the GDR itself. Investigators and bureaus which had previously been in place to nullify centrifugal forces within the GDR were no longer in existence; therefore, detrimental forces pressed onward, strengthening like a tornado and eventually causing the collapse of the system. Fulbrook also focuses on the Protestant church in her unique aim for blame, showing that it was in the church that civil rights groups began to form which later would manage to undermine the dictatorship overthrow regime in the struggle of 1989. She also ultimately sees Gorbachev as a powerful segue to reform that encouraged the uprising of 1989.

Fulbrook doesn’t stop her analysis with internal centrifugal forces, however, in her quest to determine the cause for the GDR collapse. She also points to external, western influences that came in reaction to the West’s interpretation of a clinging pattern of behaviour. Allied force ideology encouraged acts that were not advisable in the GDR.  Just as the French Revolution had influenced Prussian leaders and threatened a revolution a century before, western ideology was seen as a threat to the regime. In addition, Fulbrook claims that one of the major mistakes the regime made was the forced unification of the Communist party and the Social Democratic party into the Socialist Unity Party. Such a use of force causes mistrust, and later would help undermine the regime as they opted for more and more repression, creating more and more dissatisfaction among their citizens. Rigid, secretive and oppressive, the regime proved to be their own worst enemy as citizens would finally find support within the evangelical churches and move to over throw the government. The newly available documents Fulbrook has scoured reveal the absurd, and in principle unrealisable goal of obtaining the total ideological subordination of the population. There was total party control of all aspects of social and individual life, as the state reached into the household sphere, including that of “parenting as an instrument of political indoctrination and subordination to the higher collective purposes of the state”. (3) This resistance was urged on by the required stint in the National Army, a phase of East German life few young people wished to experience. The regime began to lack legitimacy in the eyes of the new generation despite its international legitimacy that came with the completion of the Ostopolitik and membership in the UN after 1972. Perhaps most relevant of all, Fulbrook points to the fact that most of these younger citizens had no memory of Germany prior to the division, hence the natural state for them was in fact that of two Germanys. With this factor in mind, it is particularly compelling that with such a large youth population, that Germany moved to unite after all.

Moving away from the previous notion that there was a direct connection between the uprisings of post WWII; that economic depression was the primary cause for the rebellions of 1953 and 1989, Fulbrook suggests that financial woes were perhaps a catalyst, but not the cause. (199) It is interesting that prior to this generation, most citizens, as disgruntled as they may have been, failed to move to alter the system, feeling oppressed and unable to enact a change. Until the late 1970s, public discord remained controlled and unorganised, when a new generation of citizens matured who protested against the system by means of civil disobedience. Supported and gaining confidence from the Protestant churches, this new breed of citizen was much more politically organised and had an agenda they would see to fruition.

The Church had been the one institution that Hitler and Nazism had not been able to quash. In contrast to the political conflict within the party, the Protestant Church possessed a “Declaration of Guilt” that overrode any internal divisions at the time. (92) Persistence of a new generation would eventually overcome resistance, and in the case of the GDR, according to Fulbrook, it was equally due to the new leader’s attitude of tolerance as well as the citizens’ resolve and adherence to Soll rather than Haben. For the Church, to hold onto their citizens and regain what had become a declining audience, they had to become more tolerant of Socialism and work within the system. For the state, however, in an effort to appease and simultaneously quash the effective actions of the church, paranoid state leaders made agreements that would be their own undoing. The state cleverly sought to co-opt Christians for their own purposes.(110) But their efforts did not beget control of the churches under the state as was hoped by negotiators, but instead landed the role of pastors of East German society in the limelight.

Crucial to the appreciation of Fulbrook’s work (and in our other author’s efforts) is the nature of the sources she is grappling with. As she explains in the opening of her book, the sources reveal perceptions and views that are selective and partial, often reflecting on the interests of the present than that of the past. With what seems to be everyone’s hand in the interpretive pot, it is difficult to unravel the tangled strings and knots of this historical matt. Fulbrook points out that “…memories challenge reconstructions, personal experience queries documentary evidence, the sands on which any new interpretation is to be constructed are constantly shifting as the archival remnants of dictatorships are denounced as distortions, the memoirs as cover-ups, analysis as politically motivated and self sided.” (7) These are the problems with interpretations and memory that all historians must grapple with when reviewing and researching. Gleaning through documents with an eye for credibility and bias is never easy. Defining the truth from fiction, comparing the words of the victim to the words of the perpetrator and forming a conclusion is always a challenge. These are also the problems society has to struggle with when reconstructing the past in a digestible, acceptable package which will enable us to move forward, to heal, and to thrive. Herf, Ash and Fulbrook have all had to grapple with the issue of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung and how German leaders have sorted through their respective methods of mastering their past. Frustrating as it may be for both historian and policy maker, Nazi Germany cannot be put aside and the Holocaust can never be forgotten. Hopefully, we will continue to learn from the past. As Ash points out, there are worse things than a combination of scepticism and hope.

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Amanda von Argyriadis is a second year PhD student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She holds a BSFS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and an MA in Early Modern European history from George Mason University. Her current work reflects a blend of studies, with a major in American cultural history and a minor in European cultural history. Both areas of study are based in the Twentieth century, with an emphasis on immigration topics.