HOW CAN GERMANY DEFUSE ITS NEIGHBORS' FEARS?
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upper hand.
In
other words, we can ask ourselves whether the ethnic
animosities and even hatred, as well as the collectivist aspirations that also
have invaded the once safely secluded West may accelerate an already la–
tent crisis in the liberal societies and cause serious damage to the self–
confidence of democratic polities.
On these particularly complex and disturbing issues, the question is,
what to do with the former elites? What are the borders between justice
and vengeance? How does one now discuss the issue of guilt and respon–
sibility, especially regarding the crimes of the fifties? Most of the witnesses
are either dead or have long since forgotten the details of those events.
The Germans have been engaged in their
Sonderweg .
The initial civic
revolution turned into national reunification, diligently explored by
Timothy Garton Ash. And the need to invent new political institutions
and patterns of attitudes was supplanted by the adjustment to the existing
ones, imported from the West without too much soul-searching. To dis–
cuss whether other avenues could have been taken that were foolishly
and selfishly ignored by Kohl has become a tempting but futile exercise.
The fact remains that the GDR was problematic from all viewpoints
(national, political, ethical), regardless of a certain fascination the West
German intelligentsia may have nourished. As Reiner Kunze, the former
dissident writer, agrees, "many intellectuals in Germany just didn't want
to face one embarrassing reality: namely, our second sinful descent into
totalitarianism in this century.. . . There are those who are invincibly
immune to reality - especially if it's a matter of saving their ideology
and their utopia intact." What kind of society, then, was the GDR?
It
was, after the Nazi revolution, the second attempt to create an
ideological state on German territory.
It
was rooted in the legend of a
class-divided nation: progressive versus reactionary, anti-Nazi versus "state
monopoly capitalism." At the same time, for many denizens of that
country, fictitious as it was, ideology became a reality. Whatever one
may think of people like Christa Wolf or Stephan Heym, they decided
to live in that country and fight for the liberalization of the existing
system.
In
other words, for them, as for many of their readers, the GDR
had acquired an identity and therefore had a future. Not surprisingly,
therefore, the denial of any value or dignity to the people's past
experience, the erasure of institutional memory gave rise to humiliation
and anger. The arrogant Western treatment has been particularly resented
in the areas of culture, education, justice, and the military, where
complete and often indiscriminate purges led to the elimination of most
of those who had been active (directly or indirectly) in the symbolic
reproduction of the old system. This is the result of the very different
