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PARTISAN REVIEW
Nazi regime were opened and enabled historians in the forties and the
fifties to begin writing the history of that government, which could not
have been done if those files had not been accessible.
Christian Fleck: I
want to say only that it's a problematic situation
when you open files of secret services, of a dictatorship indiscriminately.
It's a different case, of course, to open them to scientists and historians.
To my knowledge there are a lot of mistakes in the
Stasi
files. There are
a lot of articles and newspapers and magazines which are really crazy.
But opening these files to historians and scholars is, I think, a reasonable
way to cope with the past.
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you.
Gaspar Tamas: I
have a critical comment and a question for Dr.
Brede. Today, there was a lot of justified talk against trivializion, and
relativizing what shouldn't be relativized and trivialized. I found your
presentation very stimulating and interesting, except for what you said
about Eastern Germany being annexed by West Germany (of course I've
been in Germany a bit, I know what you mean) . I would have accepted
this remark if you didn't say at the same time that the German Demo–
cratic Republic was founded on a cluster of values such as solidarity, jus–
tice, morality, and so on. Well, if the fact of occupation can be used
metaphorically in a subtle way about German reunification, I think we
should perhaps remember that the socialist state on German soil wasn't
born in Baden-Wiirtenberg or in Bavaria, but on the territory occupied
by the Red Army. I think this, not socialist ideas that indeed came to be
shared by a great number of people, is the basic fact about East Ger–
many. I know that these ideals remain for many East Germans, but I
think we cannot forget this fundamental fact.
Karola Brede: I
understood what you said. I used the term
" annexation" metaphorically. I did not say that the GDR was founded
on certain values.
It
was based on a regime with socialist ideas. I made
this argument because without it one couldn't understand the actual
social conflicts when Germans from the West and Germans from the East
meet. These values of solidarity and justice that were of a humanistic
nature somehow have been implanted in the motivations of the people
over there. They contribute to their life goals and to what makes sense
in their lives. So you can't just ignore this aspect of the GDR as a
socialist system. This happens quite often. It was part of this morning's
