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

Treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe 277
in Germany (SED being the initials of the East German communist
party). Hundreds of witnesses were heard, expert reports commissioned,
proceedings covered in the media. We now have a report of 15,378 pages.
There are problems with this report. The language is often ponderous.
Some of the historical judgements represent compromises between the
West German political parties, worried about their own pasts. Yet as documentation
it is invaluable. For students of the East German dictatorship
this may yet be what the records of the Nuremberg trials are for the student
of the Third Reich.
In Poland and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the national commissions
of enquiry have concentrated on major crises in the history of the communist
state: Solidarity and the Prague Spring respectively. In each case, the
focus has been on the Soviet connection: who ‘invited’ the Red Army to
invade Czechoslovakia in August 1968?Who was responsible for martial
law in Poland in 1981?In Hungary, too, official enquires have concentrated
on the 1956 revolution, and the Soviet invasion that crushed it.
So instead of exploring what Poles did to Poles, Czechs and Slovaks to
Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians to Hungarians, each nation dwells on
the wrongs done to it by the Soviet Union. Instead of quietly reflecting,
as Havel suggested, on the personal responsibility which each and everyone
had for sustaining the communist regime, people unite in righteous
indignation at the traitors who invited the Russians in.
Any explanation for the absence of wider truth commissions must be
speculative. I would speculate that part of the explanation, at least, lies
in this combination of the historically defensible but also comfortable
conviction that the dictatorship was ultimately imposed from outside and,
on the other hand, the uneasy knowledge that almost everyone had done
something to sustain the dictatorial system.
Another kind of history lesson is less formal and ritualistic, but requires
permissive state action. This is to open the archives of the preceding
regime to scholars, journalists, writers, filmmakers – and then
to let a hundred documentaries bloom. Yet again, Germany has gone
furthest, much helped by the fact that the East German state ceased
to exist on 3 October 1990. Virtually all the archives of the former
DDR are open, and provide a marvellous treasure-trove for the study
of a communist state. I say ‘virtually all’ because a notable exception is
the archive of the East German foreign ministry, in which are held most
of the records of the often sycophantic conversations that West German
politicians conducted with East German leaders. In opening the archives,
West German politicians have thus fearlessly spared nobody – except
themselves.
It has also helped that Germany has such a strong tradition of writing
contemporary history. The research department of the Gauck Authority,