HOW CAN GERMANY DEFUSE ITS NEIGHBORS' FEARS?
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would not help anybody. The viewpoint of the victims is thus dismissed
as narrow-minded and intolerant. On the other hand, in all the other
former Communist countries, many ask whether social peace can be at–
tained in the absence of justice. Can an authentic, non-authoritarian left
develop unless the former Communists accept responsibility for what they
did to their subjects? What kind of morality would justify universal
amnesty, and how can one prevent the triumph of amnesia? Can the past
be treated as an alien continent, a forgotten province of unspeakable
nightmares and unavowable treasons? The late Ferenc Feher liked to
quote Max Weber, according to whom it would take one hundred
years after the October Revolution for socialists to again acquire an
honorable name. How many years have to pass after the collapse of the
SED-Stasi
bestiarium
(Feher's term for the Communist experiment) that
had masqueraded as the inheritor of Schiller, Hegel, Marx, Mehring,
Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and the noblest German humanist traditions?
Whereas in the other countries the former leaders have largely been
beneficiaries of a philosophy of forgiveness (which, of course is not tan–
tamount to forgetfulness), in the former GDR the de-Stasification and
de-Communization apparently have continued unabated. This obviously
is different from most of the other former Soviet-style societies. The last
foreign minister of Communist Hungary, Gyula Horn (a reconstructed
Marxist), is currently his country's prime minister. In Romania none of
the former Politburo members who endorsed Ceausescu's order to shoot
against the Timisoara and Bucharest demonstrators is still in prison. In
Bulgaria, after post-Communist party leader Andrei Lukanov was impris–
oned on charges of corruption, the Bulgarian Socialist Party won the
elections and its leader, thirty-five-year-old Zhan Videnov has become
Europe's youngest premier. The former party boss Todor Zhivkov en–
joys a luxurious version of house arrest and proudly defends the record of
his thirty years of dictatorship. Even the Czech lustration laws, perhaps
the most drastic in the whole region, could not fully preempt the resur–
rection of the former Communists. An unrepentant Leninist, Miroslav
Stepan, the former Prague party boss involved in the November 1989
anti-student repression, is now creating his own wing of the Communist
Party, adamantly critical of the market economy and open society.
I want to be understood: there is no ironclad determinism that
would make this phenomenon an inescapable trend, and by no means do
I see the post-Communists' return (in different forms and with different
impacts) as a mere restoration of the
status quo ante .
The Leninist party–
state has been forever abolished. But what remains, and takes a certain
ironical revenge on the current generation, is the Leninist (not only
