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a. James mcadams Transitional Justice and the Politicization of Memory in post-1989 Europe In late May 2008, the past came back to haunt Gregor Gysi. Marianne Birthler, the commissioner of Germany’s office for the disposition of the files of East Germany’s former state security service (Stasi), produced records that confirmed what had long been suspected : Gysi, a former lawyer and the Bundestag Fraktionschef of Germany’s increasingly popular radical leftist party, Die Linke, had “knowingly and voluntarily” shared information about his clients with the Stasi. This revelation led to a modest inter-party debate about Gysi’s suitability to be a member of parliament. Several members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) demanded his resignation . In response, Gysi argued that the case against him was based on a flawed understanding of the role of a lawyer in East Germany. But both he and his critics knew what the battle was really about. By 2008, Die Linke had become the fourth-largest party in the Bundestag and was an active presence in many of the Länder. Thus, all of Germany’s mainstream parties were pleased to transmute the accusations against Gysi into a compelling lesson for the voting public. Die Linke was unfit to govern, they argued, because its leaders were unwilling to come to terms with their sordid past. Not to be outdone, Die Linke’s leaders were equally opportunistic in reacting to these attacks. They sought to transform the Gysi case into “l’Affaire Gysi”! The governing parties were, as Gysi himself put it, “distraught by the success of [his] party” and desperately searching for ways to contain its ascendency. For this reason, he maintained, the Stasi accusations were not about him at all. They were the opening salvos of an epochal battle between the status quo parties of old Germany and a fresh vision of Germany’s future. 510 THE END AND THE BEGINNING At least Gysi wanted us to believe that more salvos were coming. In fact, when the federal elections to the Bundestag took place a year and a half later in September 2009 and Die Linke squared off against the CDU, Gysi’s Stasi connections came up briefly, but they were only a blip on the radar compared to the weighty issues of domestic economic policy and foreign affairs that separated the two parties. To be sure, a CDU parliamentarian from Berlin, Karl Georg Wellmann, used the moment to equate Die Linke with the East German dictatorship: “They don’t say the Stasi was so bad,” he claimed. “They think the Wall had some good sides to it. Gysi worked for the Stasi ... in a high level position. I don’t trust them, and a lot of Germans don’t trust them.”1 But this was not high politics. One way or another, it seemed, the prospects for an “Affaire Gysi” had vanished. Nonetheless, the fact that the event did not amount to all that it was promised to be does not mean that it was insignificant. For at least three reasons, this apparently unremarkable episode in the Federal Republic’s history can provide us with insight into the long, strange trip that the theme of “transitional justice” has taken since it first emerged as a burning issue in Eastern Europe in 1989. First, there is the matter of prediction. To listen to the experts back then, one could have assumed that a controversy like that surrounding Gysi would not even come up twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It could not be in the Federal Republic’s interest, we were assured, to let the communist past get in the way of the full and efficient incorporation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the unified German state. Second, there is the issue of expectations. As interesting as the dispute over Gysi may have been for those observers, such as this writer, who were looking for it, the Eastern Europeans who engaged in the heated debates over the merits of transitional justice in 1989 and 1990 had anticipated much more. Whether they were in East Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, or Prague, the proponents and opponents of different forms of reckoning with the dictatorial past—criminal trials, political disqualification , property restitution, and truth commissions—had expected a gut-wrenching period of hard decisions and emotional anguish. Yet the attacks on Gysi promised about as much excitement as any routine 1 CSMoniter.com, September 25, 2009. [18.221.98.71] Project...

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