Session Four:
How Can the New Germany Defuse
Its Neigbbors' Fears?
Patrick Kelly:
I am Associate Professor of History at Adelphi Univer–
sity, and I want to welcome you to this morning's sesssion of our con–
ference, which promises to be as interesting as yesterday's discussions. First
we will hear from V1adimir Tismaneanu, whose presentation will be on
"Between Melancholy and Anger: Memories.of German Re-volutions."
He is on the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, and he
is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Post-Communist
Societies there. He is the author of
Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe
from Stalin to Havel .
He will be followed by Ljiljana Smajlovic, who will
speak on "A Former Yugoslav's Perception of the New Germany." A
prominent political journalist and foreign affairs editor of Belgrade's
leading independent weekly, she is currently a Fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson Center. We will conclude with Marta Halpert's views of "A
Burdened Legacy: Austrian Identity Between Economic Embrace and
Effective Emancipation." She writes for
Newsweek, Neue Ziiricher Zeitung,
Die Weltwoche,
and
Der Standard,
among other publications.
Vladimir Tism aneanu:
Like other countries that broke with Leninism
in 1989, united Germany has encountered enormous difficulties in master–
ing the past. Demythologizations often have coincided with devastating
attacks on memories which many individuals held dear. The whole legit–
imation myth of the GDR as an antifascist state foundered under the
overwhelming and ultimately depressing evidence that it had been noth–
ing but a police-controlled universe based on domination, surveillance,
and moral dereliction. This, in tum, created frustration among Western
intellectuals who had long resented or at least questioned the "anti–
Communist legitimation myth" intensely exploited by the elite of the
FRG during the Cold War. With the demise of the GDR, united Ger–
many has had to redefine its own
raison d'etre
beyond the exhausted
ideological claims to antifascism and anti-Communism. For many Wes–
tern critical intellectuals the fixation on the
Stasi
legacy has played into
the hands of the neoconservative circles and entailed the danger of
exonerating, in the words of Habermas, "die zweite Vergangenheit, the
Nazi Vergangenheit" ("the second past, the Nazi past"). One- dimen–
sional focus on
Stasi
terror can thus lead to equalizing comparisons be–
tween the first and the second dictatorships.
The problem of political (or corrective) justice has plagued transi-
