Burdens of the Double Past

...Instead of bringing disturbing pasts to consciousness, they demand the marshaling of pasts that can be affirmed...

...the practitioners of hermeneutics evoked the power of the classical models...

...They are the expression of the rupture between perpetrators and victims...

...I consider this opposition of . . . communicative hushingup and self-destructive moralizing to be a false polarity—for the following reasons: (1) First of all, I doubt whether there exists any option at all between cover-up and self-criticism...

...4) Until now we have been discussing differentiations between the two dictatorships, the two processes of coming to terms with the past, and the two postwar histories...

...Constant reflection, they say, weakens the traditions from which the political self-image of a nation must nourish itself...

...the historicists wanted to recognize what was their own in the mirror of the other...

...The actual coming to terms with GDR history is taking place before the background of denazification...

...The expression "coming to terms with the past" derives from the title of an essay, written in 1959, in which Theodor Adorno advocated a public discussion of the period of National Socialism...

...However, the goal of a democratic transformation of consciousness should stand in the foreground...

...A similar controversy was sparked after 1989 by the question of whether the East German secret police files should be made public...

...The fourth subquestion is here omitted—EDS.] 1. What significance does this coming to terms with the past possess for the stability of the democratic order and its social values...

...Certainly, an amnesty or the secrecy of documents can be decreed, but a suppression of dissonant memories, even if it were functional, cannot be logically arranged...

...Of course, the harsh illumination of this second past must not allow the remembrance of the first to pale...

...elisions are clearly marked...

...This consensus provides a common basis on which differentiation between right and left becomes possible...

...On the one hand, the entirely different starting positions of 1945 and 1989 rule out conducting "destasification" [Stasi was the East German secret police] according to the model of denazification...

...Unlike questions of justice, which are decided by a neutral third party, questions that affect collective identity demand answers from the perspective of the first-person plural...

...But the moderns, who with their historically sharpened consciousness were more interested in the particular and unique, also wanted to learn something positive from history...

...Naturally, the policies of the various West German governments, the reaction of the West German population to the national division and to the fate of their East German compatriots, the contacts and lack of contacts between the two sides, the role of the media and the intellectuals, and so on, are of great interest for the coming to terms with the interdependencies of both postwar histories...

...This goal of political justice is mainly attained through the means of criminal law and compensation by civil law...

...Awkward truths are hard to control...

...At least this much we can grasp from the often false use of historiography...

...On the other hand, FALL • 1994 • 515 in the meantime the standards of criticism have changed...

...Translated by SIDNEY ROSENFELD and STELLA P. ROSENFELD...

...Without a historical, consciously formed vision of this kind, patriotic ties deriving from and relating to the Constitution cannot come about...

...But we must also differentiate between the normative viewpoints from which the past is judged...

...The meaning of the mass crimes of National Socialism was only comprehended gradually...

...This is another reason why those East German compatriots, who feel hurt by a process of unification that was demeaning in many respects, are meanwhile turning to the past...

...for them history was something like a treasure vault of illustrative events worthy of emulation...

...3. How can political education impart knowledge about the two German dictatorships, and how can awareness of the threat to free democracies be kept alive...

...3) A third difficulty results from the asymmetrical division of the inherited burdens...

...Allow me to call four difficulties to mind...

...on the other hand, it leaves behind the wish for a change in mentality among the population that will lead to and stabilize democratic conditions...

...Because this question possesses a normative character, I will not assume the role of a scientific expert, but rather will view myself as an intellectual participating in a public discussion...

...In so doing, they also learn, within the prevailing national context, to comprehend the republic and its Constitution as an attainment...

...They are clinging to old identities instead of drawing self-assurance from their own contribution to democracy...

...In August, Rose Laub Coser, who was present at the creation of Dissent and had been engaged ever since in the work of the magazine as editor, contributor, and active participant in our internal political debates, died in Wellfleet, Mass...

...In June, Ferenc Feller, an editor since 1990 and an important figure in the Central European intellectual emigration, died in Budapest...

...The Germans in East and West only share the first past...

...An increased sensitivity toward the overpowered victims has [belatedly] stirred bad memories in other countries too—memories of the destruction of Indian native cultures, of the bloody suppression of the revolt in Vendee, the Armenian genocide, the dispossession and destruction of the kulaks, and so on...

...q FALL • 1994 • 517 however selectively it was described, was incorporated into the founding idea of the Federal Republic, today the historic accomplishment of the civil rights movement [of East Germany] is slipping from national memory...

...For this, by the way, the history of the Federal Republic of Germany offers an example...

...Now, the commission ought to contemplate a danger that has arisen for the political- culture of the expanded Federal Republic from the unintended consequences of an unfortunate method of national unification...

...The population of the former GDR no longer has at its disposal a public sphere of its own, uninfluenced by the media of western Germany...

...Rather . . . we can only learn from a history that we regard as a critical authority...

...However, since for good reason narrow limits are placed on legal enforcement, many cases that entail political and moral responsibility elude its jurisdiction...

...These constitutional principles can only take root in the hearts of the citizens once they have had good experiences with democratic institutions and have accustomed themselves to conditions of political freedom...

...Because the attempt to come to grips with the National Socialist period only took place superficially in the East of Germany, and in the West only with considerable delay, there now exists the readiness to make up with greater energy for what was neglected after 1945...

...The burden of the National Socialist past is overlain by the legacy of a brief Stalinist and a longer authoritarian, postStalinist past...

...Legal charges and moral reproaches are directed by one party against the other...

...Ever since, we have been witness to a controversy over the advantages and disadvantages of dealing intellectually with this past, including its darkest aspects...

...Incidentally, this applies not only to us...

...The National Socialist period is unmistakably marked by the officially proclaimed, bureaucratically carried out exclusion of an internal enemy defined according to ascriptive characteristics—and the total extermination of this enemy by industrial means...

...We print here a substantial part of the testimony given in May of this year by the political philosopher Jurgen Habermas at a public hearing of a Commission of Inquiry of the German Parliament on "the history and consequences of the SED dictatorship" (SED is the German acronym for Socialist Unity party, the Communist party that ruled East Germany...

...They participate in the history of the GDR in different ways: The one side is caught up in it body and soul as both perpetrators and victims...

...1) The comparison of the two dictatorships demands of the historians who inform us about their differences and similarities, but also of us citizens, the readiness to distance ourselves from our own political preconceptions...

...What unites the citizens of a society shaped by social, cultural, and philosophical [weltanschaulich] pluralism are first of all the abstract principles of an artificial republican order, created through the medium of law...

...Because the very discussion of such a founding] was anxiously warded off, the cry "We are the people" has remained without a lasting echo...

...The scheme of left and right, which one ought not to dismiss hastily, makes itself felt in a disturbing way precisely when one compares the two dictatorships...

...While [after 1945] the resistance movement of 20 July, In Memoriam The Dissent community suffered two serious losses these past months...

...It does not apply to a nation of national comrades [Volksgenossen] united by their ethnic origin, but rather to a nation of citizens united by equal rights...

...They relate to the redressing of injustices that were committed and to individually assignable guilt...

...This succession of two dictatorships can serve as an instructive illumination of totalitarian commonalities and direct one's attention to the structural dispossession of citizens who were robbed of their social and legal autonomy...

...It is unable to conduct the discourse that will lead to self-understanding in regard to its second past within its own four walls...

...3) Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, it should be noted finally that the demand to come to terms with this past implies no blind trust in the dynamic of consciousness...

...The joining of the former GDR [German Democratic Republic] to the Federal Republic did not change the legal succession at all, but it did cause some changes in the political-historical circumstances of inheritance...

...Those who oppose the process fear the destabilizing effect of such historical pedagogy...

...In saying this, I am not only thinking of differences that result from the contradictory content of their ideologies, from the entirely different kind of political criminality, from the differing life span of the regimes and the corresponding degree of normalization of daily living conditions...

...Questions of justice can be of a legal or a moral nature...

...but in its affirmative versions it is misleading...

...For with this final hearing, the commission itself has joined that public process of "coming to terms with the history of the two German dictatorships" that we have chosen as our subject...

...But we have become skeptical of the premise that underlies all three versions: that we learn something from history only if it has something affirmative to tell us...

...2. What does the legacy of two dictatorships mean for German culture today and in the future...

...These can be stimulated, but not brought about by formal means...

...The questions that are discussed in common by the members of a collective, aimed at gaining ethical-political self-understanding, have a different character...

...The Federal Republic has not only become the successor of the German Reich according to international law, but it has also assumed political responsibility for the consequences of the Third Reich...

...he two previous hearings were concerned with the interpretation of facts...

...EDs...

...If one regards this picture as a negative, there emerges the counterimage of a legal system that guarantees all citizens equal private and public autonomy, abolishes the amalgamation of powers, and erects barriers against state injustice...

...The warding off of painful experiences is not a function of the will and consciousness...

...The left must not be blind to the specific commonalities of totalitarian regimes and must apply the same standard to both sides...

...The philosophers of history searched for reason in history...

...This demands special restraint from us in the West, who through no merit of our own escaped the specific entanglements of state socialism...

...Such cases are then left up to political proceedings . . . or informal public discussions (for example, the conflict of civil rights campaigners or exiled writers with the representatives and informers of the old regime...

...at any time they can destroy the veil of an illusory or merely uncomfortably skewed self-image...

...Habermas used this opportunity to present his ideas on "constitutional patriotism," civil rights, and the need for a complex and open engagement with German history...

...The proceedings initiated thereby aim at reconciliation: the 516 • DISSENT intersubjective acknowledgment of verdicts pronounced in the light of valid norms is intended to restore an order that was violated...

...Mutual recognition must not be restricted to the members of a homogeneous people defending themselves against external and internal enemies, as Carl Schmitt thought and his followers still maintain today...

...A precipitous leveling of these differences will only lead to the error of backward-looking appeals to the false continuities of tradition...

...The final discussion treats a question of another nature: How are we to . . . foster a political culture that will stabilize the democratic constitutional state...

...We will carry memorial essays on both of them in future issues...

...In turn, the right must not level out the differences or play them down...

...This horrible fact makes us conscious of the normative core of the democratic constitutional state: symmetrical relationships of recognition that guarantee equal respect to all...

...In principle, the changeover was desirable, but it was carried out in a comparatively more rigorous manner...

...You have divided the question of the importance of this process for the continued existence of democracy into four subquestions, to which I will respond in order...

...It should have been possible for it to attain a fitting symbolic representation in the founding of a new republic...

...The "double past" places unusually great demands on one's perceptiveness and ability to differentiate, on one's power of judgment, tolerance, and self-criticism...

...2) Furthermore, the notion is misleading that the political order of a modern polity could rest on a background consensus the functioning of which came about in a wholly natural way, a background consensus that goes unquestioned...

...This applies in equal measure to the collective fates of peoples and to individual life stories...

...The material worked up by the Commission of Inquiry serves both purposes...

...However, these separate histories were also constitutive of different contexts of experience...

...This perspective also brings into view pathologies of a common life, the formative susceptibilities of an everyday normality gone wrong—but not the individually accountable actions that from the standpoint of political justice separate the incriminated and the guiltless from one another...

...For us such ties are connected, for example, with pride in a successful civil rights movement, but also with the dates 1848 and 1871, with the cruelty of two world wars, the bitterness of two dictatorships, and the horror at a human catastrophe— that is, with untold sacrifices, from which no meaning can be gained except that of a denial of every ultimate claim by the state...

...Coming to terms with a politically incriminating past, for which all participants, even the opposition, bear responsibility, finds its main focus in consciousness-altering processes that lead to self-understanding...

...History as "teacher" is an old idea...

...We have edited the translation for American readers...

...But only by way of the normative debate over the National Socialist past, demanded in the sixties, did this trust in the system transform itself into a constitutional loyalty anchored in the convictions of a liberal political culture...

...Today for the first time, an antitotalitarian consensus can be formed that merits the name because it is not selective...

...With their anthropological view of history, the ancients were interested in what endures within what is ever changing...

...This may be easier for younger and future generations than for us, the elders...

...We find ourselves in a dilemma: if today, with the good intention of making up for the errors of a problematic "attempt to master the past" we apply standards other than those of the time, we are violating the principle of equal treatment...

...The premise is hardly convincing, for in other areas, too, we tend to learn from negative experiences, from disappointments, that we attempt to avoid in the future...

...Only if political socialization does not take place under conditions of radical suspicion against internal enemies can liberal and democratic convictions forgo the midwifery of anticommunism or antifacism...

...Amid the favorable constellations of the early postwar period, among a population spared from crises, something like an economically and socially based "trust in the system" FALL • 1994 • 513 had formed...

...While those on the "right" tend to deny differences [between the two], those on the "left" are mainly intent on recognizing them...

...When I survey the list of topics on which the parliamentary Commission of Inquiry has sought expert opinions—the combining of party and state machinery, the comprehensive organization of national security, justice and the penal system, the militarization of society, the methods of compulsory collectivization, the role of party factions and mass organizations, the media as an instrument of power, the reorganization of the educational system, psychosocial repression affecting daily life, and 514 • DISSENT so on—there emerges the picture of a panoptic state, which not only directly subverted public life . . . but also its foundation, civil society and the private sphere...

...For the citizens of the Federal Republic, therefore, the decisive lesson of 1989 and 1990 does not consist in the restoration of a nation-state, nor in the entry of their compatriots into a prospering society regulated by civil law, but rather in the gaining of civil rights and the elimination of a totalitarian regime...

...the other side influenced developments in the GDR at most from without, whether through "inter-German" or through "international" relationships...

...If we do not wish a return to the old stale, oppressive 'German climate, we must see to it that the very gradual civilizing of the Federal Republic does not vanish behind artificially constructed symmetries between the two partial states...

...Only if we admit to the asymmetrical circumstances of inheritance in East and West, only if we do not define the process of coming to terms with the past as a seamless undertaking, will we create no illusions for ourselves about the obstacles that must be overcome along this path...

...I am also thinking of the fact that future generations will be held liable in a different manner for National Socialism, which originated in their own country and was supported by broad consent, than for an authoritarian socialism imposed by force that was no more than accepted by the population...

...2) A second difficulty is connected with another aspect of the "double past...

...This paradoxical form of a not entirely unwarranted unfairness can be seen above all in the personal hardships caused by a changeover among the elite (for example, in the purge of the [East German] universities...

...On the one hand, a dictatorial regime leaves behind the need for satisfaction, for the creation of political justice, to the degree that this is possible...

...For the needs of their own legitimation both regimes availed themselves of ideas that on the one hand go back to the nineteenth century, but on the other hand still govern the present...