How Memory Divides

The Search for Identity in Eastern Germany

Jeremy Brooke Straughn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351613415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Physiological Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book examines the paradox of collective identity in eastern Germany in the wake of German reunification. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, citizens of the former German Democratic Republic were confronted with a dilemma: Were they already Germans without qualification, like their compatriots in the West? Or did they remain "East Germans" for the time being, with an identity tied to their distinct past, as if they were foreigners who had migrated without leaving home? How Memory Divides shows that these questions remain unresolved even today, less because of any "incomplete unity" between Germans in West and East, than because of the contradictory ways in which "easterners" themselves have remembered their past. Drawing on a unique study spanning two decades, the author reveals how divergent biographical memories have given rise to life stories with a diverse array of genres and storylines at odds with official accounts of the GDR and its demise. Over time, efforts to effect unity between West and East have reproduced divisions within the East. This book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and politics with interests in memory, heritage, and identity.

Part 1

Where Memory Divides

1 Introduction

The Berlin Wall and German Dictatorship in Official Remembrance

On a chilly Sunday morning, Angela Merkel approaches a 12-feet-high barrier of concrete panels at the newly christened Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Vacant guard towers peer blindly from the no-man’s-land just behind. A reporter from Der Spiegel magazine records the drama of the moment. The day begins with a series of “mini-borders.” Separated from spectators, guests, and photographers by a red cordon, the German Chancellor prepares to insert a rose into a remnant of the Hinterlandmauer. ¹ “Her entourage is already moving; but Merkel pauses. She fumbles with a cordon and opens it. It is a small gesture, off script, and a silent signal for the guests: You may place your own roses now” (Meiritz 2014: n.p.).²

The date is November 9, 2014—25 years to the day after the celebrated opening of the border between the German Democratic Republic and West Berlin. Shortly afterward, Merkel again takes the lead, as VIPs insert lit candles in rows of cast-iron sandboxes. Making her way to the speaker’s podium, the German Chancellor greets supporters across a low metal-grate fence amid large silver balloons which line the Wall’s former path through the once-divided city. Two hours after her arrival, Merkel is ready to address the crowd.

“Like no other date,” Chancellor Merkel begins, “the ninth of November encapsulates German history in the twentieth century” (Merkel 2014: n.p.). A litany ensues, chronicling events in German history, all from the first half of the century, that had occurred on that date: The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918, Hitler’s attempted overthrow of the Weimar Republic in 1923, and the pogroms against Jewish citizens by the SA and SS in 1938. Of the last, she adds grimly: “That was the harbinger of the murder of millions, of the civilizational rupture of the Shoah” (Merkel 2014: n.p.).

The fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most iconic single event of 1989—a fateful turning point in the Peaceful Revolution that overthrew Socialist Unity Party (SED) rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is remembered as the exuberant moment when reunification ceased to be merely a subject of wistful conjecture and acquired virtually inexorable momentum. Almost as soon as it had occurred, contemporaneous news coverage of the event laid the groundwork for its establishment in global collective memory as a symbol of the end of Europe’s Cold War division (Sonnevend 2016). For more than a quarter-century since, its anniversary has been commemorated with even more fanfare than the official Day of German Unity in early October.

Yet, in Germany, national commemorations comprise a genre of memory-practice that entails a distinctive genre constraints (Olick 2007: ch. 4). Even as they celebrate German unity and nationhood, commemorative observances must avoid the appearance of “forgetting” certain earlier, deeply troubled events of German history. To do so could potentially jeopardize the tenuous compromise in which Germany’s return to normalcy in the post-War era came at the price of a perpetual coming to terms with the unique evil perpetrated by the Third Reich (Maier 1997; Markovits and Reich 1997; Olick 2007). Consequently, remembrance of the fall of the Wall as reunified Germany’s founding event also presents special challenges, beginning with the anniversary date itself. By calendrical coincidence, what has become known as the “fall of the Berlin Wall” occurred on a day already encumbered by previous events in German history—most notably, the onset of the 1938 pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht). Before 1990, November 9 had primarily been an occasion for Holocaust remembrance (Kattago 2001: 103–106). Hence, celebrating German unity on that date cannot be allowed to wholly displace the commemoration of the millions who lost their lives at the hands of the Third Reich.

The ceremony is carefully staged, the address well-crafted. It is among the Chancellor’s most eloquent and comprehensive public statements to date on the subject of German unity and collective accountability. In just a few short sentences, her prologue traces the long arc of German history in the twentieth century, from the collapse of Weimar democracy and the subsequent descent into unspeakable, murderous criminality under the Third Reich to Germany’s reunification and rehabilitation at the price of perpetual remembrance of the past. As if to reinforce the point, the atmosphere is suitably grave, the liturgical staging almost funerary—befitting a memorial service for fallen soldiers and civilian casualties in some long-ago war.

In many respects, the 30th anniversary ceremony in 2019 has proven to be more remake than sequel. Uttered once again in close proximity to the Berlin Wall Memorial, the analogous passage of the Chancellor’s address amounts a terse paraphrase of its precursor delivered five years before, just a few steps away:

The 9th of November, ladies and gentlemen, is a fateful day in German history. Today, we also commemorate the victims of the November pogroms in the year 1938 … And what followed was the crime against humanity of the civilizational rupture of the Shoah.

(Bundesregierung 2020)

Nor was there any reason to reinvent the wheel. Commemorative speeches on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall have become a tradition of their own—a memory genre with its own genre memory, each successive observance in tacit dialog with its predecessors (Olick 2007). On both occasions, Merkel’s speech borrows from a script that has evolved over more than two decades, in which references to Kristallnacht are a recurring leitmotif. Each anniversary address must find a way to surmount the challenge created by the radical incongruity between the November 9 events in 1938 and 1989—the former involving anti-Jewish terror and persecution, the latter elation and camaraderie among Germans.³ If the fall of the Wall is to be honored on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, it must be done in a spirit of humility and responsibility. Thus, in her 25th anniversary address, the Chancellor continues: “For this reason, I feel … not only joy, but also and above all the responsibility that German history as a whole has assigned to us” (Merkel 2014). Whatever else may unite Germans, accepting collective responsibility for “German history as a whole” must be part of the bargain. Only on this condition can November 9, once a “day of shame and disgrace,” be remembered as a “day of joy and happiness” (Merkel 2014), as reflecting “in a special way both the terrible and the happy moments of history” (Bundesregierung 2020).

Yet, neither the responsibility to remember the Holocaust nor the calendrical overlap between 1938 and 1989 fully accounts for the somber choreography of the occasion. The flowers have not been placed in remembrance of the millions murdered during the horrific years of the Shoah, but in honor of hundreds of Germans who died attempting to flee the GDR during the 28 years in which the Wall still stood. If the mention of Kristallnacht signals penitence for collective complicity under the Third Reich, the siting of the ritual at the Berlin Wall Memorial serves to underscore the motif of German victimhood and division. Sixteen years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Bernauer Strasse had been the setting of a remarkable, weeks-long drama that began on August 13, 1961 with the sealing of the interzonal border between West Berlin and the GDR’s capital city. The Memorial’s new open-air exhibit is devoted to the history of the Wall’s construction, of its various casualties, of daring attempts at escape and rescue, many of them ending in tragedy (Bach 2016; Harrison 2019). The grand opening of the memorial site thus supplies a fitting occasion and venue for the ritual acknowledgment of the Wall’s bloody legacy. In the ceremony’s final act, the Chancellor’s address is delivered in front of the former “death zone” (Todesstreifen), backdropped by a scrim depicting a throng of East Germans flooding through a wide breach in Wall. With the invocation of November 9, 1938, the rhetorical stage is set for an extended reflection on the significance of 1989 in the light of those who died or suffered persecution at the hands of the “SED Dictatorship” and of those who played a decisive role in its peaceful overthrow, thereby leveling the path for reunification.⁴

The symbolic synergy between setting and ceremony is emblematic. Over successive occasions, the ritual has come to embody a commemorative repertoire that historian Martin Sabrow has called Dictatorship Memory (Diktaturgedächtnis) (Sabrow 2009, 2012)—a “pattern of GDR remembrance” (Erinnerungsmuster der DDR) that centers on motifs and memorial sites devoted to the remembrance of victims of oppression under SED rule, of the villainy of the perpetrators, and of the heroism of those who opposed and ultimately helped topple Germany’s “second dictatorship” in the name of freedom and rule of law (Hess 2016a; Meyen 2013; cf. A. Assmann 2012; Cooke 2005; Fulbrook 1997; Ross 2002). In the most recent November 9 addresses, it is also this negative image the provides the proximate historical context against which alone the fall of the Wall can be declared a “day of joy and happiness.” If preliminary references to Kristallnacht reaffirm the responsibility of all Germans to remember the evils of National Socialism, they also license the more immediate commemorative aim—to enjoin audiences to honor the victims of Germany’s “second dictatorship,” along with the heroes who opposed and ultimately defeated it. Taken together, official memory of the GDR and of the fall of the Wall comprise reunified Germany’s founding mythology—a legitimating doctrine and narrative anchor for fostering historical consensus and national unity among citizens of the contemporary Federal Republic.

But has official memory-work indeed succeeded in these aims?

“Is Germany Still Divided”?

According to many observers, the evidence points in quite the opposite direction. Far from achieving consensus and unity, pessimists suggest, Germany has remained “divided” by an “invisible Wall” or “Wall in the head” that survived the dismantling of the physical Wall, thereby calling into question the prospects for “inner unity” suddenly rendered conceivable again by the opening of the borders in November 1989. Long prevalent in Germany itself, the “Wall in the head” cites a jaundiced refrain that gained substantial traction in public discourse during the first decade after the opening of the border.⁵ The initial tone of hopeful optimism had been memorably conveyed as early as mid-November 1989 by former Chancellor Willy Brandt (who had also been Mayor of West Berlin):

The division of Europe, Germany, and Berlin grew out of the [Second World] War and the inability of the victorious allies to come to an agreement … Now we are experiencing … how the two parts of Europe are growing together again.

(Brandt 1992: 43)

Within a few years after reunification, the theme of “mental walls” began to appear in countless newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly publications, and other media. For a decade or more, similar motifs also belonged to the official commemorative repertoire, by way of contrast to the euphoric communitas symbolized by the fall of the Wall. As early as the third anniversary of November 9, Chancellor Helmut Kohl would offer a more chastened assessment of German unity, alluding to perceived barriers between Germans “in East and West” that many were attributing to residual “legacies of division.” Although the “German division has been overcome since October 3, 1990,” he cautioned, “the inner unity of our Fatherland is not yet complete by a long stretch” (Kohl 1992). The tenth anniversary would again provide an occasion to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall as reunified Germany’s founding moment and to look ahead to a day when Germans were truly “united” at long...