Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History

3 | Comparing Dictatorships: Toward a Social History of the German Democratic Republic

III Comparing Dictatorships: Toward a Social History of the German Democratic Republic Why a History of the gDr? J ohann Gustav Droysen, historian and philosopher of history in nineteenth-century Germany, refused to accept Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history) as a legitimate part of the discipline. His reason was not the fear that l’histoire du temps présent would still be too near and raise too much passion so that an objective historical evaluation would still be impossible. Nor was he afraid that the relevant sources would not yet be sufficiently available, for historical research proper must be based on archival sources. Rather, he did not regard the most recent developments as a legitimate topic of historical research because it was not yet clear where they would go and how they would end, for a good historical narrative could only be written, according to Droysen, if the results and the consequences of past phenomena could be taken into account.1 In early October 1990, the German Democratic Republic, the socialist gdr, which a year before had celebrated its fortieth birthday, ceased to exist. Its history became a quickly expanding field of scholarly research. After all, the subject matter to be studied had ended; the result seemed to be clear; and ample sources were made available to historians, since the “second German dictatorship” did not leave mountains of dead behind like the first, the Nazi dictatorship, but instead mountains of files and dossiers. The most secret and the most trivial, the most delicate and the most normal facets of the perished regime became accessible as far as they had found their ways 36 civil society and dictatorship into written documents of any sort. The history of the gdr became a boom field, with much public interest.2 Three expectations guided historical research on the gdr in the early 1990s. First, nearly everybody had been surprised by the fast and smooth way in which the gdr had been overthrown , dissolved, and merged into the Federal Republic, which thus had expanded its territory to the east and increased its population from 63 million to 80 million, but had not changed much of its structure. One knew of course that social and cultural unification had barely begun and that difficult times could lie ahead, particularly with respect to the economy. But the expectation was that the process of adjusting what was left of the gdr to the enlarged Federal Republic would continue fast. It was widely expected that the gdr would soon be a quickly fading memory while becoming part of our common history, debated of course but increasingly distant. Second, West German conservatives and East German dissidents , very different in most other respects, had a common political aim when they practiced or supported the study of gdr history, namely the retrospective delegitimization of the gdr in moral and political terms. The aim was a fundamentally critical history of the gdr, from which one would set oneself apart while reconstructing it.3 Yet there were also deep rifts and active fronts, particularly between West and East but also between the minority of East German dissidents, who had actively supported the nonviolent revolution of 1989/90 and demanded historical recognition, and those in the mostly silent East German majority, who had supported or accepted the old system and now felt they had lost but did not give up their claim for a meaningful and even dignified past. All this influenced the way in which the scholarly reconstruction of the gdr history began. Third, the need was felt to place the history of the gdr in broader contexts. The collapse of the sed (Socialist Unity Comparing Dictatorships 37 Party) system was obviously part of the breakdown of communism in Europe and beyond, a global caesura that would lead Eric Hobsbawm among others to speak of the “short twentieth century,” starting with World War I and ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.4 How were historians to interpret the history of East Germany in the context of the history of communism? How relate it to the history of the other German state, the Federal Republic of Germany, and to German history in general? Seen in such contexts, how important would these forty gdr years turn out to be in the long run—perhaps not more than a mere footnote to world history, as the East German writer Stefan Heym sarcastically remarked in March 1990...