HOW CAN GERMANY DEFUSE ITS NEIGHBORS' FEARS?
613
thought. The Frankfurt School had long been attacked as a bourgeois
infiltration within the revolutionary ideology. At the same time, the
ideal if not the real GDR responded to the hopes and anguishes of a
large segment of the German radical intelligentsia. The GDR, I suggest,
succeeded in creating its own political culture, with a perpetual tension
between the ideal and the real symbolic patterns, and between the offi–
cial creed and the subterranean alternative leftist and liberal aspirations.
Quite frequently, the critique of the existing socialism by dissidents was
undertaken in the name of the ideals advocated by Freudo-Marxist or
Luxemburgist radicals. For many reasons, including biographical ones (as
in the case ofJiirgen Fuchs and Wolf), there was a strong belief that the
GDR represented the chance to experiment with a non-capitalist and
non-Leninist version of social justice. That Honecker and his clique were
not able to live up to this hope was obvious, but the idea was to try it
(or to invent it) against them and against all odds. Dissidents criticized
the existing GDR in the name of an ideal one, not on behalf of pan–
German or liberal bourgeois values.
Like most dissident movements, the GDR opposition was rooted in
hopelessness: its goal was the creation of the post-Communist order.
Dissent was, for all practical purposes, the presence of an absence, a
specter of the impossible anti-politics. But this was a creative despair, one
that refused to acquiesce to the scornful logic of the
nomenklatura
and
offered a romantic escape from the bureaucratic, oppressive ennui,
through engagement in civic activism. Dissent was a way to assert one's
dignity and inner freedom, not simply quixotic reverie.
In no other country has dealing with historical memory become
such a thorough-going activity. The Gauck Commission was the most
serious attempt to investigate the scope and impact of the secret police.
It explored, methodically and unabatedly, the rules, the names, the influ–
ence on human minds and behaviors associated with the
Stasi .
Some ar–
gue that this commission had the characteristics of a victors' operation.
The former GDR was thus seen as a territory brutalized by an alien
force, thereby ignoring the strong identification between certain groups
in that country and their imposed, but nevertheless real
Lebenswelt.
Sec–
ond, the general indictment of the GDR experience tended to share in
the general illusion that there was nothing worth remembering or pre–
serving. Has the "solidarity of the culpable" (a term proposed by Czech
sociologist Jirina Siklova) totally obliterated the memory of the au–
tonomous search for a democratic polity, against blind regimentation,
moral conformity, and Prussian-style militarism? We are too far from the
initial moment of November 1989, perhaps the only victorious revolu-
