Ein schwieriger Anspruch:
Der Kommunismus als Bestandteil der Europäischen Erinnerung
Charles S. Maier
Berliner Tagung 23-25 Februar 2017
Blinde Flecken in der Geschichtsbetrachtung? Kommunismus im 20. Jahrhundert
I have been asked to speak on the “Konjunkturen der Kommuismusdebatte und der
Kommunismuskritik” within a panel that the organizers and Anna Kaminsky have
called “Erinnerungskultur,” or what I have translated simply as a culture of memory.
This is an important issue, above all in countries that lived under Communist
regimes (the original one of which came to power a hundred years ago) or had
strong communist parties, such as France and Italy.
I will attempt three tasks in this short paper – first to describe some of the stages of
the debates about Communism; then, second, to place them within the idea of
memory culture; and finally and very briefly to ask what the future of this memory
culture might be in the new constellation of politics that has been emerging in these
very months, both in Europe and the United States.
Let me start with a memory of my own from Paris. In 1970 the film-maker CostaGravas produced “L’Aveu” in France (“The Confession”) – a fictionalized version of
the trial of Artur London, one of the defendants, who escaped the death sentence, in
the 1952 Czech “show trial” of Rudolf Slansky, which was one of the grotesque
travesties of justice that marked the early days of Sovietization of Eastern Europe. I
saw the film in Paris, and what struck me was for how many of the young French
viewers the story of the Czech and Hungarian purges came as a revelation. I later
talked about the phenomenon with Tony Judt, the wonderful American historian of
postwar Europe and French intellectuals, and we both were struck by the capacity
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of the French intelligentsia to forget these dark episodes, in effect their ability to
produce the “weisse Flecken,” that became a hallmark of apologists for Communism.
It was not that the French had been ignorant of these grim events. In 1947-48 the
French had gotten concerned about the Communist takeovers in Eastern Europe
and were reading Arthur Koestler’s newly published “Darkness at Noon.” But JeanPaul Sartre, most notably, had condemned the publicity and the revelations of
Stalinist repression. From the 1920s until the 1980s, the supposed necessity of
defending the socialist homeland justified for many staying silent about Soviet
crimes. The real dangers of Nazi German aggression also provided an excuse – read
Eric Hobsbawm’s memoirs for substantiation – for averting one’s eyes from the
injustices of Soviet rule. For the next twenty years, until the Soviets suppressed the
Prague Spring in 1968, the memory of this dark chapter had been erased. The nonCommunist Left simply came to terms with Communism. It was not easy for
apologists on the Left to recognize that being a Communist in the West was not a
conventional political commitment or vote. It meant accepting the Moscow party
line, subordinating one’s own hesitations (whether over the purges in the 1930s, the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, suppressing the Hungarian revolt of 1956
and even the intervention in Czechoslovakia – though that was harder) before the
claims of Moscow that it alone could rightly interpret history. In some cases it even
meant engaging in espionage and certainly reporting on fellow comrades.
Despite all this, many on the Left believed that vigorous anti-communism was
apparently more shameful than justifying Stalinism, and that certainly those who
supported the United States effort to contain Communism – in America they were
called “NATO intellectuals” or professional anti-communists-- deserved their anger
and opposition. But here is where the complexity of the issue arises. The issue of
anti-communism came to be instrumentalized in the service of a domestic political
agenda --- whether in France and Italy to reinforce Christian Democrats and the
Right, or in America to discredit the Democratic Party and often the intellectuals
who had supported the Soviet alliance in the Second World War. I have no time
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here to go into all the intricacies of these alignments – the McCarthyite groups, the
pro-Chinese Nationalists, but the effect was that anticommunism was brandished
not primarily to oppose the Soviets (there was broad consensus on this view) but to
bludgeon the Democratic Party. In West Germany and Britain anti-communism
could be manipulated less. The Labour Party and the Social Democrats were clearly
anti-Communist; no one sought to excuse what was taking place behind the Iron
Curtain, there were no strong Communist parties at home.
Only with the emergence of individual dissenters and groups in the 1970s and
1980s did this silence give way once again, as it had in 1948 and in 1968. Andrei
Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, in the Soviet Union, Charter 77 in
Czechoslovakia, the KOR and Solidarnosc in 1980-81, Rudolf Havemann and others
in East Germany demonstrated that there was an alternative. Only then and through
1989-90 did the Western Left start to realize that the dissenters not only spoke for
morality, but had a political chance to shake and bring down the system. Of course,
the Soviet Union, whose power had anchored Communist rule in Eastern Europe,
was falling into deep crisis – economic and moral – and was soon to be governed by
Mikhail Gorbachev, who decided that coercion would not rescue Communist Party
rule, even though he did not envisage that he would end up dismantling it entirely.
The collapse of Communist regimes in Europe and the transformation of the
Communist Parties brought a sea change – but left the historical stakes still
adversarial. Many former Communists in Italy and France, many former loyal
citizens of the GDR understood that they were, so to speak, politically shipwrecked.
They welcomed the chance to join the broad center of politics, and they resented the
close scrutiny that their past activities might receive. In effect, they wanted a
political and historiographical amnesty. On the other hand, those who had often
been strong anti-communists did not welcome new efforts to “historicize” the
communist regimes they had long and often courageously opposed. “Tout
comprendre, c’est tout pardoner” was their implicit objection: studying Communist
“society,” could obscure the evils of Communist “politics.” They wanted retribution
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or at least a clear-sighted judgment and not understanding or reconciliation. In
France, similar divisions persisted, often around the issue of Communism’s crimes.
The Black Book of Communism documented the millions of deaths that the 75-year
record had left behind. Its critics complained that this was hardly an effort at
historical understanding, but rather a courtroom prosecution. The Left is usually
uncomfortable with such accounts even when they do not contest their findings. As
a historian I confess to being uncomfortable, but I think this discomfort must be
interrogated and confronted. One can contest the numbers – but the point is that
the history of Communism must have a two-sided character: Communism as utopia,
or at least as a shared utopia that enlisted many generous impulses, especially in the
wake of fascism, alternates with Communism as totalitarian system.
This was the situation that I encountered in both Italy and Germany in the 1990s
and even after. In Italy, the academic “Left” – now often grouped in the postcommunist parties – still confronted the anti-communist historians, but over the
issues of fascism and the Resistance. Former anti-communists critiqued the
Resistance and the anti-fascism of the Left as well as its softness on communism at
home. Renzo De Felice, the biographer of Mussolini, wrote increasingly empathetic
discussions of the dictator and increasingly critical accounts of the Resistance and
Resistance culture. In newly unified Germany, the interpreters of the GDR at the
Potsdam Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, when I was affiliated with it in the
mid 1990s, confronted the critics of the GDR, who sought to document its
infringements of human rights. The Stasi, above all, became their first piece of
evidence; the Wall their major artifact.
In retrospect I think that the opposition arose because historians were focusing on
different manifestations of a complex history that they wanted to reduce to one
essential characteristic. The debate on what to call the GDR was revealing: was it a
state built on injustice, ein Unrechtsstaat? Was it one of two German dictatorships –
die zweite deutsche Diktatur --the emphasis being on German authoritarian
continuities? Was it just a local manifestation of Communist rule? In any case,
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those who wanted to document the abuses of human rights or the arbitrariness of
rule were examining how communists ruled. The “historicizers,” – my major English
language example would be Mary Fulbrook – wanted to understand how GDR
citizens experienced life everyday; she focused on the society not the regime and
found, naturally enough, that in the 40 year history of the regime, in which two
generations had come of age, many had found fulfilling lives, private and public.
Interpretations of 1989 itself have prolonged these political stances or attitudes –
Einstellungen to use the German word. After the transformations of 1989 to 1991,
many in the West who had made their peace with the division of Europe and
believed it was a permanent condition of political life were reluctant to recognize
the essential role that outright opposition, organization, and courage to take to the
streets, had played in the downfall of the Communist regimes in the East. They used
terms such as “implosion,” to minimize the agency from below. Their opponents
used “revolution.” I believe that “implosion” minimizes the human agency and
bravery that the citizens of 1989 demonstrated and can live with revolution, but we
must recognize that the conditions which allowed revolution were systemic and
decisive.
As a general condition one can say that the opposition between those historians for
whom documenting the evils of communism was the paramount
Erkenntnisinteresse, and those for whom understanding the way people lived within
its constraints has abated. This conference, if I can grasp it rightly from the program
represents a step in overcoming the distinctions. The historiographical path to such
an overcoming –perhaps one can talk of reconciliation – has often involved
laborious monographic research on topics where everyday life met the constraints
of the regime, whether in factories (Andrew Port), or literary academies,
monographs on private life (Paul Betts) , extensive interview projects (Niethammer,
Wierling), etc. – some, I’m happy to say, from my students.
Still, these careful monographs, are not sufficient, I fear, to satisfy those who fear
that the historical memory of communist rule will not be preserved. and who argue
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that it is the duty of post-communist and non-communist societies to keep it alive in
the manner, say, in which the memory of fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust are
kept alive through monuments, holidays, and civic education. They want
memorialization, not monographic exploration. And this brings me to my second
question: the memory of the GDR and of the communist regimes as constituent of a
memory culture.
We might start by asking what is a “memory culture.” There is now a massive
literature on the topic and such related concepts such as Maurice Halbwachs’s
“collective memory.” Jan and Aleida Assman in Germany, Pierre Nora in France have
worked to clarify the concepts. Essentially they describe the orientation of
particular communities toward their past, as they memorialize it through
monuments, places, and shared historical narrative. I don’t want to labor the
subtleties of the concept in my own brief intervention. It is not exactly an agreedon historical narrative – it is at once both less precise and more encompassing. It
builds on a shared pool of personal experiences, but the valuation of those
experiences can be varied. I think that the idea of a memory culture can be
differentiated from the important concept of “collective memory” in that it focuses
less on the content of memory, less on what is being recalled, than on the
community’s striving to remember or to memorialize. A memory culture entails a
determination not to forget and not to obscure. Those of us who participate in such
a culture believe it is existentially important and valuable.
Historians have a particular relationship to cultures of memory. On the one hand,
they are motivated by them to reconstruct the past. But the historian must go
beyond just memory. A memory culture prompts the historian to attempt a
narrative, to research facts, and to propose interpretations. Nonetheless, the
historian should not fall victim to the belief that memory cultures are either stable
or hegemonic. The idea of collective memory or the charm of a lieu de mémoire
hardly means that a single emotional claim triumphs in a collective body. Memory
cultures can remain in conflict as long as they remain vivid. And memory cultures
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can be intensely political. Consider Polish society today: its memory culture with
respect to the fate of Polish Jews, but also the nature of Polish nationhood, has been
an intensely contested one, perhaps since the Kielcse pogrom of 1946, certainly
since the debate over Jan Grosz’s book, Neighbors, and currently over the role of the
new Gdansk museum of the Second World War. Japanese memory culture, often
criticized as an apologia for World War II, was the product of a Liberal-Democratic
Party hegemony that the United States was happy to support. Only as that political
constellation weakened could a more encompassing view of Japan’s responsibilities
emerge. West German memory culture likewise became far more open to the
country’s historical role in the Second World War as CDU ascendancy yielded to a
new political era in the late 1950s and 1960s.
In these battles there are sometimes winners and losers. That means that
proponents of a particular memory culture seek to recruit adherents, and
sometimes to exclude adversaries. When it comes to cultures of memory, there are
different ways of losing, however. A particular memory culture can be dismissed as
too one-sided, or it can be suppressed by a political regime, but it can also just fade
into oblivion. A memory culture fights against oblivion, it embodies an effort to
keep vivid meaningful experiences. But it is often hard to justify why it should be
valuable to those outside the culture.
It seems to me that the memory culture of Communism has faced major obstacles in
recent decades and faces a new one today. The first obstacle is that it has involved
an implicit contest with the memory culture of European fascism and National
Socialism – an implicit rivalry between the crimes of Stalinism in particular and
those of the Nazis. As Christoph Cornelissen has written, “Insbesondere aus den
Ländern Ostmitteleuropas ist immer wieder der mahnende Appell zu hören, den
Opfern des sowjetisch geführten Kommunismus im öffentlichen Gedenken einen
ebenso würdigen Platz einzuräumen wie den Opfern der NS-Diktatur und Besatzungsherrschaft. The desire to preserve a memory culture for Communism is
implicitly a demand to claim historical parity for its victims alongside those of
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Nazism and fascism. This competition is not just about respective body counts
although that controversy has played a sometimes grotesque role. It has also
involved an effort to make sure that the Communist regimes be painted in
sufficiently dark colors: as Jacques Rupnik argued in Transit 22 about Czech
historiography in 2001: we don’t need just more denunciations of the
“verbrecherische Natur des kommunistischen Totalitarismus,” or even documentary
collections but well founded and long-term history of how a highly developed
country could become the most rigid of the East European regimes.
I suggested in the same issue of Transit that the memory culture of communism was
bound to weaken with respect to that of Nazism, in part because it produced no
Holocaust on an international level (even if there were local genocidal policies as in
Ukraine). The Holocaust has been given canonic status as a European failing to be
continually overcome; it thereby keeps the collective memory of Nazism and of
collaboration alive. The Holocaust is memorialized by non-Jewish Europeans as a
reminder of their own failure to act, whereas the demand for a Communist “culture
of memory,” is a plea to recognize victimhood that implies no self-reproach.
Communism remains a regime imposed by a foreign power and a party. It memory
demands no recognition of collective complicity. It is thus harder to impose.
In any case, when we think about competitive memory, have we not passed
implictly from the idea of a culture of memory to a strategy of memory, eine
Erinnerungsstrategie? I would propose that it is unsatisfactory to base any memory
culture on a competitive strategy. For the whole idea of a memory culture is to find
a common bond of memories: as President Abraham Lincoln said in his first
inaugural address: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. The
mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to
every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus
of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature.” Alas, Lincoln was wrong: competitive memories and civil war prevailed.
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Let me conclude with a thought on memory in the age of Trump. Memory cultures,
and historical memory, more generally are in grave peril these days. It will be hard
to retain a memory culture of Communism when the major architect of the Western
order, the United States, now has a leader who wants to “make a deal” with the
leader of a Russian state determined to recover as much national power at home
and abroad as possible. When, just as seriously, his regime rests on the denial of
historical facts and demagogy. The wave of populism that afflicts all our countries is
likely also to diminish the inherited revulsion of fascism, rather the opposite. But
those who have an interest in the memory of what Communism represented will not
gain if the memory culture of anti-fascism is effaced. Disrespect for the victims of
fascism – or relativizing the evils of fascism and Nazism – will not enhance the
respect for the victims of communism. Ultimately both systems depended on a
denial of historical truth.
But finally: a heretical thought. Perhaps we should not be too distressed if memory
fades. It can, after all, become obsessive. As I once wrote, it can distract us from
thinking productively about the future to obsessing over past grievances. Nietzsche
and Max Weber both warned that there could be too great a fixation on memory,
especially the memory of victimhood. Recall Siegfried Lenz’s novel of 1978:
Heimatsmuseum. Lenz tells the story of refugees from Prussian Masuria, who have
fled to Schlewig in 1945 and worked to build a museum for all the artifacts they
could rescue from their former homeland. But finally upon completion of the work
the narrator burns the memory museum he has taken such pains to build – the
fetishes are destroyed, but memory can revive: “…hatte ich nur den Wunsch, die
gesammelten Zeugen unserer Vergangenheit in Sicherheit zu bringen, in eine
endgültige, unwiderrufliche Sicherheit aus der sie zwar nie wieder zum Vorschein
kommen würden, wo sich aber auch niemand mehr ihrer bemachtigen könnte, um
sie für sich selbst sprechen zu lassen….Die gehüteten Befunde sind zerfallen, die
Spuren gelöscht. Die Vergangenheit hat zurückbekommen, was ihr gehört und was
sie uns nur vorübergehend lieh. Schon aber regt sich das Gedächtnis, schon sucht
und sammelt Erinnerung in der unsicheren Stille des Niemandslands.”