MARK KURLANSKY
571
East Germans recall, not irrationally, that anti-Communism, not
Communism, has always been the Nazis' brother ideology.
It
was one
of Hitler's most effective propaganda tactics. Germans who supported
Hitler said they were fighting Communism. Germans who distrusted the
Nazis tended to associate them with Communists, probably because
Communists had always been presented as the embodiment of evil. Vic–
tor Klemperer, a Dresden Jew, wrote in his diary in February
I934
that
friends who disliked the Nazis wanted Hitler to remain secure so that
the Nazis would not resort to Communism. He wrote, "The impression
is growing that the government is sliding toward Communism." That
was after less than a year of Nazism. By his death in
I960,
he would
learn that Nazism and Communism were very different forms of dicta–
torship.
It
was the Cold War, the imperative of fighting Communism, that
created West Germany and ended the Allies' process of "denazifica–
tion," the war crimes trials that were to purge Nazis from German
society. Some who might have been tried or at least disgraced were
saved by the Cold War and went on to important positions in govern–
ment and business. The East German government often reported on
this, showing their people how the fascists thrived in the other system.
Anti-anti-Communism, of course, was the East German form of Cold
War propaganda. While living under an increasingly arbitrary secret
police, neighbors forced to spy on their friends, the oppressed East
German could focus on the lingering fascist legacy in West Germany.
They could endure their own government's oppression and failures by
focusing on a sense of mission-building the new antifascist Germany.
Meanwhile, in West Germany, any embarrassment from the past
could soon be brushed aside with a stand against the Communists. In
I999,
this was seen one more time when former Chancellor Helmut
Kohl was caught having received huge quantities of illegal campaign
contributions. His initial response was to claim he had needed the
money to fight the incredible strength of the Communist Party in the
East.
Today East and West Germans are left with this irreconcilable differ–
ence. To East Germans, Communism was not an evil ideology compa–
rable to Nazism, but a worthy dream led astray by ruthless, evil
leadership. Brigit Stoof, a young Dresdener with hair dyed electric cop–
per, and rectangular glasses frames, said of her fellow East Germans,
"People who are over fifty are asked to accept that all their dreams were
nothing." East Germans do not miss the secret police but they do miss
the sense of a mission.
