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9. "Imprisoned, Murdered, Besmirched"
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357 9 “Imprisoned, Murdered, Besmirched” Throughout their history, the Germans have repeatedly found themselves trying to come to terms with their past, and the period following the collapse of the SED state was no exception.1 After all, over more than forty years the GDR and FRG governments had cultivated widely divergent understandings of what it meant to be German. Each state developed its own master narrative designed not only to justify its own social, economic, and political system, but simultaneously to undermine the legitimacy of the rival German state. In the case of East Germany , as we have seen, the ruling SED fostered an elaborate myth of antifascism, in which the leaders of the GDR were either those who had fought the longest and most valiantly against National Socialism or their heirs. In the eyes of East Germany’s leaders, this version of the past not only legitimized a separate, socialist, German state by joining it to the glorious traditions of the international Communist movement and the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Third Reich in the Second World War but at the same time linked the FRG with the horrific traditions of fascism, antihumanism, capitalist exploitation, war, and genocide engendered by Hitler’s Germany. The FRG also sought to justify its existence through a politically charged interpretation of recent German history. Although, like the GDR, the FRG sought legitimacy through distancing itself from the crimes of the Third Reich, its legitimizing myth was very different from that offered by the East. Yet both legitimizing narratives were based on a common historical experience—the crimes committed during the Third Reich in the name of the German people. In general, public discourse in the FRG, when it dealt with the issue at all, tended to view the Third Reich and its crimes as manifestations of totalitarianism. That is, Nazi Germany was a one-party state based 358 HITLER’S RIVAL on mass mobilization of the population, an all-encompassing ideology, complete with centrally controlled media, a command economy, and a secret police.2 With the advent of the cold war, this understanding of Hitler’s Germany became increasingly popular in the West because it explicitly linked Nazism and Stalinism, thereby legitimizing the ongoing struggle against the Soviet Union and its East German ally. As early as 1948, in the midst of the Berlin airlift, the city’s mayor, Ernst Reuter, made this association explicit when he informed an American audience that the Germans “[o]nce again” confronted “a dictatorship that wants to oppress our people and is trying to break our moral and political will to resist. . . . This time we must stand up for our freedom.”3 Reuter and others sought clearly to link Germanness with the creation of democratic institutions. If one accepted the contention that Stalinism and National Socialism were “different sides of the same coin,” then clearly the FRG was the only legitimate German state and the proper focus of German national identity. Although the totalitarian model lost a great deal of support during the course of the 1970s, it reemerged in the late 1980s.4 In other words, both the FRG and the GDR sought legitimacy by seeking to distinguish their social and political systems from those of the Third Reich. Given this ideological dichotomy, encouraged by both governments for more than forty years, it is not surprising that westerners and easterners developed very different views regarding what it meant to be German—differing national identities that remained relatively unimportant as long as Germany was divided. Because of the dramatic events of 1989–1991, however, constructing a unified national identity once again became a major concern. Much like 1918 and 1945, the Germans faced a Stunde Null (zero hour) when they had to make some major decisions regarding their future. As is always the case in the German context, perceptions of the past would have a dramatic effect on the present and future understanding of what it meant to be German. The city of Berlin had long been at the heart of conflict between the rival social and political systems. In 1979, for example, SED chairman Erich Honecker publicly stated that the East German capital should “from today forward” serve as “a symbol for the victorious advance of socialism on German soil.”5 Indeed, both sides of the Berlin Wall became centers for politically charged remembrance of recent German history. East Berlin had its Lenin Monument, Luxemburg Platz, and Karl Liebknecht Straße, immortalizing important figures...