From the beginning of the 1950s, annual ceremonies were held in Dresden, where in February 1945 American and British air raids had destroyed most of the city and had killed twenty-five thousand people. In the spirit of the Cold War, the bombing was explained as proof of the aggressiveness of the Western Allies promoting their fascist-imperialist interests. Susanne Vees-Gulani (2008) argues that by portraying bombing as a fascist act, East Germany equated the destruction of Dresden with the crimes committed under the Nazi regime and strengthened the idea of East Germans as victims.
There was a stern official silencing of all violence attributed to the Soviet Army. The soldiers of the Red Army were presented as having come to East Germany as communist heroes, friends, and liberators of the people. German expellees (Vertriebene) from the East were labeled more neutrally as “resettlers” (Umsiedler). In their speeches GDR politicians completely denied the fact that the Red Army had often forced those “resettlers” to leave their homes at the end of the war. Similarly, they did not mention the rape of German women and girls (Niven 2006b). These were not minor issues: around 4 million people had been “resettled” in East Germany after the war (Moeller 1996), and most of the estimated 1.9 million rapes were attributed to the Red Army (Radebold 2008). In my interviews with East Germans, the “communist brothers” were frequently referred to with cynicism and palpable anger.
Connerton (2008, 60) would probably label both the rejection of all responsibility for the rise and crimes of the Hitler regime and the official silencing of the violence of the Soviet Army as examples of “repressive erasures.” While the government of the GDR selected certain things to be remembered, others were edited out of the master historical narrative, as was the case in the West. Although in the Federal Republic questions of how to “master the past” (Herf 1997) continued to be the topic of public debates and the attitudes toward the Third Reich and the Holocaust changed quite radically from the late 1960s, in East Germany the interpretations of National Socialism and World War II remained stable. The decades from the mid-1950s until the collapse of the GDR in 1989 are described as a time of “calcification” (“Versteinerung”; Moller 2003, 50) of the antifascist culture of commemoration.
However, in contrast to the official culture of commemoration relayed by politicians and the state media, a kind of “counter-memory movement” (Moller 2003, 55) emerged in East German literature. Widely read books like Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of childhood, 1976) or Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (Jakob the Liar, 1969) challenged the official party line and asked critical questions about the true relationship between the population and its support for National Socialism.5
“We Did Not Have Any Nazis Here”: History Lessons in the 1970s and 1980s, East German Style
The East German state centrally managed and controlled the education system. From 1963 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Margot Honecker, the wife of Erich Honecker—chair of the SED Central Committee and head of state—was the minister for education. School curricula were uniform across the country. All students were expected to learn the same content. Only one history book was used up to year ten across the state, and it was revised regularly every eight years (Borries 2004). Political socialization was an integral part of education and of at least equal importance as the transmission of factual knowledge.6 It is therefore not surprising that what my East German interviewees remembered from their history classes mirrored the official narrative. Students learned about the “imperialists” who had started the war, the communist resistance against Hitler, and the “liberation from fascist rule” by the “communist heroes.” Karoline, born in 1967, explained: “We were told that it had all been very terrible, but now it was over. The Russians were our friends, they had saved us, and now everything was fine. It did not impress me much, but it did have something comforting. It was good that things had turned out this way.”
Children and teenagers in the East also learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, and their teachers strongly condemned the Nazi crimes. Although they were as shocked by the images as their Western counterparts, many reported feeling distant from the crimes committed by their forebears. On the one hand, this distance arose because history was often taught only in broad and abstract ideological terms without any personal stories to which the students could relate. On the other hand, children in the GDR were brought up in the consciousness that they were the heirs of those heroic antifascist Germans, who had stood on the “right side of history.” Christiane, born in 1966, remembered: “We watched those Russian war movies, where the Germans were always the bad guys, but that had nothing to do with me of course, because I was in the East.”
Analyzing the content of school history books in both German states, Borries (2004) revealed that in the GDR the war took up around fifty pages—many more than in the West. Here, the focus was on the fight between the “imperialists” and the “socialists” and Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. The exploitation and genocide committed against the Russian people were described in grueling detail. The main responsibility, however, it was argued, lay with the Nazi regime, the upper class, and the capitalists, and not with the German population or the common soldiers. As a consequence, my East German interviewees did not absorb the same sense of shame and responsibility in relation to the war and Holocaust. Children going to school in the East were often under the impression that all the Nazis had fled to live in the West. It did not occur to them that their grandparents might have supported the Nazi Party. The East German Kriegsenkel I met seemed to carry less collective guilt as a result. “We knew that the Germans had started the war,” Cornelia, born in 1964, said, “but the communists were the good guys of course, they were against the Nazis, and they had neither started nor continued the war, and so the question of guilt simply did not exist.” For her, and for many others who grew up on the other side of the wall, those issues only came to consciousness after 1989.
While not feeling morally responsible, Cornelia was still emotionally affected by the Holocaust. More routinely than their West German counterparts, East German schoolchildren visited concentration camps on school excursions or for working bees to learn about those who had died in the antifascist struggle, a struggle that the younger generation was enlisted to continue. Cornelia recalled how as a relatively young child she had visited the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps and had watched documentaries about the Holocaust. As for many other teenagers, East and West, the experience was overwhelming, and the teachers did not provide any emotional support or space for discussion. Cornelia felt left alone with “all this horror and all these images.”
Yet history lessons, documentaries, and official speeches were not the only sources of information about the past. Although it was illegal, many East Germans watched West German TV programs at home and consequently had access to differing views on the history of World War II. However, I still had the impression that most of the people I spoke to at the time accepted the GDR interpretation of past events. Other research comes to different conclusions. In 1987, a group of researchers from an East German institute in Leipzig anonymously questioned around two thousand East Germans (roughly the same age as my interviewees) about their views on National Socialism and World War II. They found that some of the responses strikingly contradicted the state-sanctioned narrative promoted by the schools. The team believed that the political education of the GDR had been ineffective. Its content had not been internalized, nor did it have much credibility in the eyes of young people (Moller 2003, 85–87).
Martin, born in 1966, fits with these findings, but he was the exception in my group. History lessons at school were “too stupid, too black and white”