Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History

4 | Dealing with Difficult Pasts: Collective Memories and Politics in Germany after 1945 and 1990

IV Dealing with Difficult Pasts: Collective Memories and Politics in Germany after 1945 and 1990 he two German states, the Federal Republic of Germany (frg) in the West and the German Democratic Republic (gdr) in the East, were strikingly different : one with a market economy, a pluralist society, a parliamentary democracy, very much part of the Western camp under the leadership of the United States; the other with a statesocialisteconomy ,athinlydisguisedone-partydictatorshipwith Marxism-Leninism as an obligatory state ideology, very much part of the Eastern bloc under Soviet hegemony.1 But the two states also had some things in common, for example a common past. Both were postfascist systems. How did they relate to their National Socialist past?—Nazi Germany and the gdr were very different, but one can see them as the two German dictatorships of the twentieth century.2 From this perspective, it becomes interesting to study in a comparative way how the two systems were remembered and dealt with after they ended: Nazi-Germany after 1945 and the gdr after 1990. Comparing, of course, means looking for similarities and differences. Usually , historians find differences more interesting.3 First I shall discuss how West Germans and East Germans dealt with their fascist past between 1945 and 1989. Then I shall compare the post-1989/90 memories and remembrance strategies with the post-1945 ones. I shall end with some remarks on the situation today and offer some general conclusions. T 70 civil society and dictatorship How West germans and East germans Dealt with Their Nazi Past, 1945–1990 When the Westphalian Peace Treaty brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648, it prescribed what many political settlements have stipulated before and thereafter: eternal forgetting and amnesty for all the offenses, cruelties, and crimes committed during the previous war. It was forbidden to debate them in public, for fear that they would create new tensions and conflicts.4 The documents that ended the Second World War held the opposite message. They required that the crimes of the war and the guilt of the losers be openly dealt with. This had something to do with the nature of World War II: The denazification and democratization of Germany had been one of the declared war aims of the Allies. In contrast to wars in previous centuries, the Second World War had been defined, conducted, and legitimized as a total war, implying a fundamental fight over values and worldviews. It had been a war justified as a moral crusade and a defense of civilization by the Allies.5 It followed that, after 1945, war crimes and war criminals had to be discovered, exposed, and punished—as revenge, as a contribution to justice , and as a strategy for making the former enemy and the world “safe for democracy,” although the victors were committed to very different concepts of democracy. The ways in which Germans have dealt with their Nazi past have deeply changed. To a minor extent, these shifts were due to new results of historical research and changing historical knowledge. To a much larger extent, they resulted from the changing constellations within which Germans in West and East related to their past in order to meet the changing challenges of their present. At any time different and conflicting ways of remembering, forgetting, and repressing the past, of evaluating and interpreting the Nazi period, coexisted and Dealing with Difficult Pasts 71 influenced one another. There was always much heterogeneity . Still, with respect to how Germans in the West and the East dealt with their Nazi past, one can try to distinguish four different periods: 1945–1948, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the “long 1960s,” and the years from the mid-1970s until 1989/90.6 postwar years In the immediate postwar period, between 1945 and 1948, the main driving forces behind most efforts to expose the atrocities and the guilt of National Socialist Germany were the victors , who now held power in occupied Germany. The domestic forces behind the “denazification” of 1945–1948 were less important, but they also existed. There were small antifascist committees, composed of Germans on the left; there was an early confession of guilt by the Protestant churches right after the war. Moreover, there were German leaders like Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Schumacher in the West or Walter Ulbricht in the East who had returned from exile, from prison, or from a...