Becoming East German

Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler

Mary Fulbrook, Andrew I. Port, Mary Fulbrook, Andrew I. Port

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857459756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

PART I

Memory and Identity after Nazism

CHAPTER 1

East Germans in a Post-Nazi State

Communities of Experience, Connection, and Identification

MARY FULBROOK

The pre-1945 dimension to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is central to understanding its history. Yet, the implications at a personal, subjective level of the radical historical rupture of 1945 still remain relatively unexplored and undertheorized. The continuing legacies of a still salient past have often been subsumed under a now inflated notion of “collective memory.”¹ Historians have tended to focus on public practices of remembrance, memorialization, and representation, often following Pierre Nora’s conception of “sites of memory” that stand for and may displace “real memories.”² Historians have less frequently engaged with the collective construction of accounts of the past among the kinds of small communities, families, and informal groups discussed by Maurice Halbwachs and which are of interest to social psychologists; or with the lingering individual legacies and representations of trauma with which literary scholars and psychotherapists have been particularly concerned.³ These wider theoretical emphases and omissions appear magnified when considering the historiography of the GDR. While historians looking at the legacies of the Holocaust and the relations between trauma and memory have largely focused on Western societies, historians of “collective memory” in the GDR have focused almost exclusively on state-sponsored and official representations of the GDR as the “anti-fascist state.”

The purpose of this essay is to suggest ways of connecting the familiar narrative of public practices of remembrance in the GDR with personal legacies of the past, by focusing on what may be termed communities of experience, connection, and identification. What follows is intended merely to give a preliminary indication of the complexity of the ways in which the significance of the Nazi past was transformed in the GDR. It is also intended to suggest a more differentiated way of exploring significations of past and present than is offered by approaches focusing on “collective memory” understood primarily in terms of cultural and political representations and dominant narratives.⁴

Communities of Experience, Connection, and Identification

There is a tendency in dichotomous approaches to the GDR to consider “state” and “society” as relatively static, all-encompassing categories, juxtaposing public and private as though collective actors remained the same over time. But East German society was no more homogeneous with respect to personal legacies of the Nazi past across generations than it was in any other respect. In exploring relationships with a specific past, it is helpful to distinguish between what may be called communities of experience, connection, and identification. These are conceptual categories developed for purposes of analysis: theoretical terms, not concepts that people themselves would have necessarily recognized or accepted—although they do often map onto substantive concepts current either at the time or later, such as “victims of fascism,” “second generation,” and “war children.” What, then, is signified by each of these conceptual terms?

The term “community of experience” designates those who personally lived through a particularly significant historical event or period and shared certain experiences—even if what they shared were common challenges rather than individual responses, as they faced divergent twists and turns of fate. “Communities of connection” are made up of those people who did not themselves consciously experience this “salient past,” but who nevertheless, and not necessarily by choice, were in some way linked with the people who did: the children and grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators or Holocaust victims and survivors, for example, but also friends, relatives, and other members of society who were emotionally or practically affected in some way. Hence this is not a purely generational or familial term; nor do all relatives necessarily have any sense of “connection”; nor do those who are affected necessarily have to be aware of the consequences of the past for their own lives. Choice is, however, a greater component of the final category—though with qualifications, since the availability and desirability of particular forms of identification depend on the social, political, and cultural context of “choosing.” “Communities of identification” are those who, by identifying or empathizing with the fates of others, find a particular past to be one of heightened personal significance. Patterns of identification are likely to be more variable than the legacies of the past among the directly affected communities of experience. But the extent to which such variations are primarily bounded by national public representations, or vary with, for example, personal experiences, family backgrounds, social networks, or transnational cultural developments, is an empirical question requiring further exploration.⁵

A particular past may not be of persisting relevance to everyone in any specific area at any given time. But these categories may provide a useful way in which to understand the undulating and shifting landscapes of confrontations with the past, as the remembering agents who endow it with significance change over time. This people-centered approach allows us to look at the changing interrelations between “public” and “private,” between dominant, prevalent, and marginalized narratives, between cultural representations, socially current interpretations, and personal significations of a salient past in later circumstances. It also allows us, in principle, to make comparisons, exploring the ways in which the “same” past can have different significance under later circumstances. This essay focuses on just a few examples, but the theoretical approach is designed specifically to allow for broader comparisons across a far broader geographical and temporal range.

Structural Filters among Communities of Experience

Experiences of Nazism and war entailed seismic shifts in identity—both self-chosen and externally attributed, even forcibly imposed—during the 1930s and early 1940s. There were, correspondingly, many differing communities of experience across Europe, where people had experienced Nazism, Stalinism, and the violent upheavals of war in a variety of ways: “victimhood,” “resistance,” or “collaboration,” for example, could mean quite different things depending on context—both at the time of the experiences and in later reinterpretations.⁶

Postwar circumstances both filtered and reshaped how key “defining experiences” were perceived and how people felt they could or should express themselves about their past, partially deflecting the political and “racial” fault lines of the Nazi period. Among those who had, to some degree, supported and gone along with Nazism, earlier faith in Adolf Hitler and pride in being German, while now publicly rejected, could nevertheless continue in new ways in face of unpopular denazification policies, while other experiences evoked a new “community of fate.” Memories of wartime air raids were augmented and complicated by postwar experiences of flight and expulsion, of rape and robbery at the hands of Soviet soldiers, of personal bereavement and worry about missing friends and family members. Survivors of “racial” persecution often faced further experiences of rejection, as in the case of Polish Jews who were widely met with hostility upon seeking their former homes in Poland. Identities continued to be reconsidered and reconfigured in the maelstrom of postwar population movements and migrations. In short, narratives of the past were crucially affected not only by experiences under Nazism, but also by rapidly changing postwar contexts.

Personal narratives were shaped in the context of emergent wider, prevalent, and dominant discourses about the past. Considerations about the “politics of the past” varied according to political circumstances, with key differences between dictatorial and democratic conditions. In Konrad Adenauer’s West Germany, the desire to appeal to a wide constituency meant not only public acknowledgment of historical responsibility—in which many prominent West Germans later took an almost perverse pride—but also, paradoxically, the practical, material, and symbolic inclusion of former Nazis and beneficiaries of Nazism. The dominant narrative was thus one of acknowledging collective responsibility without any concession of guilt, while looking after those who had actively sustained the Nazi racial community. Thus there was relatively little incongruity between official proclamations and private narratives in the first decade or so of West Germany’s existence.⁷

In the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) and subsequently the GDR, the dominant public narrative was that of active “anti-fascist” resistance.⁸ The regime developed shrines to Communist martyrs such as Ernst Thälmann; it designated and orchestrated visits to “national” sites of memory such as Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and other quasi-sacred places; and it sought to influence younger generations.⁹ The ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) also went to considerable lengths—through, for example, the activities of the National Front (NF) and the German National Democratic Party (NDPD)—to attempt to win over and “convert,” or at least neutralize and contain, those former “nominal” Nazis deemed capable of redemption. The official conception of an “anti-fascist state” was intrinsically distorted and never entirely successful: the emphasis on liberation at the hands of the Soviets was at odds with private memories of defeat; denazification could be critiqued as serving Communist political and socioeconomic goals; the official line was partially undercut by family narratives; it was progressively overlaid by Cold War rhetoric and instrumentalized for political purposes. That the SED based much of the GDR’s claim to legitimacy on being the “anti-fascist state” is nevertheless significant: it served to filter and color public expressions of private memories, and to exclude certain areas almost entirely from the consciousness of later generations.

This is evident even when we ask about private narratives of the past among victims of persecution on “racial” grounds. With respect to Western Europe and North America, the “myth of silence,” or the notion that Holocaust survivors “did not talk” about their experiences in the early postwar years, has been radically revised.¹⁰ Yet this is an area that has only recently been addressed with respect to the GDR. This question is one with many aspects. Holocaust scholars have begun to focus on discussing the ways in which the character of such accounts changed, with differences between accounts produced close to the experiences of persecution and those produced years later. “Bearing witness” could mean very different things for diarists in the ghetto, for witnesses at later war-crimes trials, for writers of memoirs at different stages of life, and for oral history interviewees half a century after the war’s end.¹¹

Clearly there are varying personal reasons why some survivors prioritized putting what energy they had into making a new life and tried not to burden the next generation, allowing their own w...