Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

Myth and memory in post-war Europe 173
disastrous. After an initially aggressive pursuit of denazification, the
communists reversed their strategy and announced to the East Germans
that their own history was unsullied. Meanwhile significant numbers of
low-ranking Nazis pursued their careers in police and bureaucracy under
the new regime. East Germans, all too knowledgeable about their real past
and the initially violent way in which the Russian had extracted revenge
for it, were now invited to sit back in officially mandated approval while
the essential characteristics of the Nazi state apparatus were reconstructed
before their eyes. The consequences of what Peter Schneider has called
the ‘double zombification’ of East Germany are now clear to all. 18
The silence which fell across eastern Europe was unbroken for forty
years. The revolts of 1956 and the reforms of 1968 did not crack this
frozen past; on the contrary, the memory of them, and the fact that it could
not be acknowledged except mendaciously, added to the strata of public
mythology. In private many people of course scorned the official version
of the past; but having only their personal or communal recollection to put
in its place and pass on to their children, they contributed inadvertently
to the double crisis of history which now afflicts eastern Europe. On
the one hand cynicism and mistrust pervade all social, cultural and even
personal exchanges, so that the construction of civil society, much less
civil memory, is very, very difficult. On the other hand there are multiple
memories and historical myths, each of which has learned to think of itself
as legitimate simply by virtue of being private and unofficial. Where these
private or tribal versions come together, they form powerful counterhistories
of a mutually antagonistic and divisive nature.
After 1989, there have been certain chronically intertwined themes
which have been reshaping and further distorting the Eastern European
past. The first is guilt over the communist era itself. No matter how
many times people proclaim that ‘they’ did it to ‘us’, the fact is that very
few people could or did object to communist power (in some places,
notably Czechoslovakia, it was even initially welcomed in free elections
by a large minority of the electorate). It was in the nature of ‘real existing
socialism’ in Eastern Europe that it enforced the most humiliating, venal
kinds of collaboration as a condition for rendering daily life tolerable. And
most people, sooner or later, collaborated: intellectuals, priests, parents,
managers, workers, shoppers, doctors and so on. It is not for any real or
imagined crimes that people feel a sort of shame at having lived in and
under communism, it is for their daily lies and infinite tiny compromises.
Until the coming of Solidarity this pattern was unbroken, and even the
uniform heroic picture of Polish resistance in the eighties is not without
18 Peter Schneider, The German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1991).