FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
535
compelling force, the collective condition of millions, and to do so in
such a way that the resulting account makes sense and rings true, is per–
haps the most challenging exercise possible in any of the human or be–
havioral sciences.
Before narrowing the broad theme of my own topic, the political
use made of the past to constrain political choice in the present, down
to concrete cases, I should explain, to those unfamiliar with German po–
litical language, the curious subtitle of my remarks, "Lessons from the
Stone Age." A
Steinzeit
or stone age is a time of predictability and te–
dium, a time and place of fixed boundaries, with the added connotation
of self-satisfaction. After the upheaval of 1989 and the reunification of
1990, many Germans began thinking of their lives in the old FRG, as it
existed before 1989, in terms of such a stone age. Life, if not always ex–
citing, was predictable, the Iron Curtain was permanent, and everyone's
penSlOn was secure.
I could go on here to explain how illusory, even in retrospect, such
a
Steinz eit
description is: the 1980s after all, was the era of the peace
movement and the battle of the Euromissiles. Some of us who watched,
but did not join, the march on Bonn in October 1983 against the pro–
posed missile deployments by NATO were convinced, rightly or
wrongly, that the stakes of that battle were the freedom of thought and
action of Western Europeans who did not want the type of society ex–
emplified by the GDR to expand to the Atlantic. And in that battle, the
marchers were on the other side.
To finish off the
Steinzeit
metaphor: the 1970s, remember, was the
decade of terrorism, hijackings, and energy crises; the 1960s, of student
demonstrations, emergency laws, the
Spiegel
affair, and the Berlin Wall;
the 1950s, of the economic miracle which, if nothing else, was certainly
not an era of quiet restfulness. My point in mentioning the stone age is
twofold: first, to remind you that it included a lot of history, both of
the small kind known as personal or family experience and the large kirid
known as international relations; and, second, that somewhere between
those two poles occurred the long-drawn-out, repetitive, and all too
often utterly misconceived and misunderstood drama known in German
as
Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,
inadequately translated as "overcoming" or
"coming to terms with the past." I would like in my talk to explain
some of what I think this drama was really about; I want to describe
and, if possible, decode a couple of significant episodes in it; and I want,
finally, to ask if it's really all over now, if the "past" has been come to
terms with, or if we are doomed to permanent repetition, Beckett-like,
of the same inane sequences performed by actors who remember neither
