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

Germany and the Holocaust since 1945 201
tradition and a reading of German national identity reinforced one another
to marginalise Jewish concerns.
Merker was imprisoned in East Berlin from December 1952 to January
1956. During that time he was interrogated by agents of the Stasi
and by Soviet NKVD (secret police) agents. His Stasi file comprises over
a thousand typed and handwritten pages. 35 In an eerie echo of the famous
question of the US House of Representatives Un-American Activities
Committee, he was repeatedly asked if he had been or ‘was a
member of Jewish-Zionist organisations’. 36 According to the conversations
Merker had with his cell-mate, who was a Stasi informant during
the early months of his imprisonment in winter and spring 1953, the
NKVD and Stasi agents threatened to kill him, and made threats against
his family. They told him that his 1942 article, ‘Antisemitism and Us’,
showed that he was a ‘Judenknecht’, that is, a ‘servant of the Jews’. They
ridiculed him as ‘the king of the Jews’, as one who ‘had been bought by the
Jews’ and whose intention was to ‘sell the DDR off to the Jews’. 37 Again
and again they probed into his contact with and assistance from Jews,
both communists and non-communists, during the French and Mexican
emigration for further evidence of his participation in an espionage
conspiracy.
Merker was tried in the East German Supreme Court in March 1955.
The trial remained a secret until the collapse of the DDR in 1989 and
the opening of access to the archives of the Oberste Gericht, which had
been transferred to the Stasi archives. On 30 March 1955 the judges of the
East German Supreme Court sentenced Merker to eight years in prison. 38
The court’s verdict 39 closely followed the political indictment Matern had
voiced in December 1952. The court explained Merker’s engagement on
35 For the Merker file see BStU MfS Archiv No. 192/56, Untersuchungsvorgang über Paul
Merker No. 294/52, Band I–III; and BStU, pp. 000156–000410.
36 See ‘Vernehmungsprotokoll des Häftlings, Merker, Paul Friedrich’ (3 March 1953),
BStU MfS Archiv Nr. 192/56 Untersuchungsvorgang Nr. 294/52 Paul Merker, Band II,
p. 000122.
37 Paul Merker, ‘An die Zentrale Kontrollkommission des ZK. der SED: Stellungnahme
zur Judenfrage’, (1 June 1956), Paul Merker NL 102/27, SAPMO-BA, ZPA, 1. Most
of this important statement is reprinted in the orginal German with other documents
from the Merker case in Jeffrey Herf, ‘Dokument 3: An Paul Merker, “An die
Zentrale Kontrollkommission des ZK. der SED”, in “Dokumentation: Antisemitismus
in der SED: Geheime Dokumente zum Fall Paul Merker aus SED- und MfS-Archiven” ’,
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 42, 4 (Oct. 1994), 635–67.
38 The records of the political trials in the East German Oberste Gericht were placed
in the Stasi files. For the court’s judgment in Merker’s case, see ‘Oberste Gericht der
Deutschen Demokratischen Republik I. Strafsenat I Zst. (I) 1/55: Im Namen des Volkes
in der Strafsache gegen den Kellner Paul Merker’ (March 29–30, 1955), BStU M.f.S,
Untersuchungsvorgang Nr. 294/52 Band III, Archiv Nr. 192/56, pp. 000138–000152.
39 Reprinted in the original German in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (autumn 1994).