HOW CAN WE "RECONCILE" COMMUNIST AND NAZI LEGACIES?
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in the manner in which East German political leaders examined the Nazi
past.
It
was the oft-repeated claim of the East German Communist gov–
ernment that it, unlike the West German government, had broken with
the bad continuities in German history. The Communists claimed to
stand for the good and the other Germany, and the always defeated but
never completely extinguished spirit of humanism, socialism. During and
after the era of Nazism, as
Fran~ois
Furet has recendy pointed out in
Le
passe d'une illusion,
an important work on twentieth-century Com-mu–
nism in Europe, the Communists placed themselves in the camp of the
democratic forces arrayed against fascism. In East Berlin after 1945, anti–
fascism offered the central legitimation for the imposition of a new dic–
tatorship, that is, to prevent the return of Nazism in a country whose
people had fought for the Nazis to the bitter end. As soon became ap–
parent, the Communists also stood in another continuity of German
history, nationalism, and some of its long-standing traditions of anti–
Semitism.
The anti-Semitism of the Communist regime differed profoundly
from the Nazis extermination ideology and practice but overlapped with
old, base, and persistent associations of the Jews with capitalism and na–
tional betrayal. If, as critics such as Theodor Adorno argued at the time,
Cold War anti-Communism in West Germany unintentionally evoked
elements of the political constellation of the Nazi attack on the Soviet
Union, so the Soviet and East German assault on cosmopolitanism from
1949 to 1956 also revived old German resentments of the West and the
Jews. By winter 1952-53 it was clear that a second German dictatorship,
though proclaiming itself to be the repository of anti-fascist virtue,
would pursue policies inimical to the interests of the few remaining Jews
within East Germany and to the state of Israel as well.
Since the publication of Marx's youthful essay on the Jewish ques–
tion, the identification of Jews with capitalism had remained a compo–
nent of the Marxist tradition. To be sure, it vied with a contrasting left–
ist tradition of opposition to anti-Semitism but it never fully disappeared,
even in the years of Communist anti-fascism after the 1920s. Within the
German Communist emigration during the Nazi era, debate over the
Jewish question and the unfolding Nazi persecution of European Jewry
took different forms in different places, especially in the primary poles of
Communist exile politics, Moscow and Mexico City. The German
Communists in Mexico City had the advantage of distance from
Moscow and the need to address the concerns of Jewish refugees in
Mexico City. The result was that the fullest discussion of the Jewish
