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

Germany and the Holocaust since 1945 193
efforts of the German communist exiles in wartime Moscow shed important
and intriguing insights into the connection between memory and
dictatorship. Spokesmen of the National Committee for a Free Germany,
such as Wilhelm Pieck, along with Ulbricht the leading figure of the
German communist exile in Moscow, and the writer Erich Weinert, urged
German soldiers and citizens to turn against the Nazi political leaders
and generals. As these repeated and increasingly desperate pleas failed to
result in a German revolution against Nazism, a tone of bitterness and
rage against the German people is unmistakable in the exiles’ statements.
For these returning exiles memory of the Nazi past and its crimes, and
of the absence of an anti-Nazi German revolt reinforced their already
powerful communist-bred suspicions of liberal democracy. As one can
see from their ‘Appeal to the German People’ in June 1945, their memory
of the past included memory of their past rejection by the German people.
Despite public declarations of support for a democratic, anti-fascist
government in the early post-war months and years, their texts contain
abundant evidence of fear and distrust of their fellow Germans. The more
they remembered their own past persecution by the Nazi regime and its
popular support in German society, as well as its attack on the homeland
of revolution, the more they were inclined to impose another dictatorship
on this dangerous people. Both past ideological commitments and
the power of the Soviet Union placed the story of Soviet suffering and
victory at the centre of orthodox Communist memory.
A minority view among the communists found expression in Western,
specifically in Mexican exile. In wartime Mexico City the Jewish question
moved from the periphery to the centre of the struggle against Nazism.
Paul Merker (1894–1969) was it leading exponent. The Doctors’ Plot in
Moscow in 1953, and the Slansky trial in Prague in 1952 have entered
into the major narratives of post-war European history. 12 Before 1989 the
Merker affair and the anti-cosmopolitan and anti-Jewish purge of 1949 to
1956 in East Germany were either forgotten or remained largely unknown
outside the circles of quietly dissenting historians in the former East
Germany, Jewish émigrés from East Germany, and East German experts
in West Germany. 13 Documents from the recently opened archives of
12 On the Jews, communism and antisemitism after 1945 in Europe see François Fejto, Les
Juifs et l’Antisemitisme dans les Pays Communistes (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960); German
edition, Judentum und Kommunismus in Osteuropa (Vienna, Frankfurt/Main and Zurich:
Europa Verlag, 1967). On the Jewish question and East German communists see the
essays by Olaf Groehler and Mario Kessler in Jürgen Kocka (ed.), Historische DDR-
Forschung: Aufsätze und Studien (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994).
13 On the Merker case see Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Warten auf Gerechtigkeit: Kommunistische
Säuberungen und Rehabilitierungen, Bericht und Dokumentation (Cologne:
Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1971); Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Politik und Justiz in der