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

Treating a difficult past in post-communist Europe 281
and crudely effective, but deeply flawed by procedural injustice. The
German ‘gaucking’ has been procedurally more just: careful, individual,
appealable. But it has often been perverted by media abuse and has
suffered from elephantiasis. Did postmen and train-drivers really need to
be gaucked?Again we come back to the question of who is doing it: for
would the West Germans ever have done this to themselves?
Yet Poland has shown the price of not purging. The Hungarians, with
their nice habit of taking the German model and then improving on it,
came up with a defensible refinement: careful individual scrutiny, confined
strictly to those in senior positions in public life. But this was seven
years late. Now Poland has finally followed suit, with a law that is probably
the most scrupulous of them all.
I personally believe the third path, that of history lessons, is the most
promising. Much of the comparative literature comes to a similar conclusion
for other countries: what is somewhat biblically called ‘truth-telling’
is both the most desirable and the most feasible way to grapple with a
difficult past. This is what West Germany did best in relation to Nazism,
at least from the 1960s on. What united Germany has done in this regard
since 1990 has been exemplary: the parliamentary commission, the
open archives, the unique opportunity for a very personal history lesson
given by access to the Stasi files. Some of this has been done elsewhere in
central Europe, but nothing like as much. I have suggested an explanation
for why Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia did not have comparable
national commissions of enquiry, but an explanation is not the same as a
good reason.
This endorsement of the third path does, of course, assign a very special
place to contemporary historians. In fact I do think that if you ask ‘who is
best equipped to do justice to the past?’ the answer is, or at least should be,
historians. But this is also a heavy responsibility. Truth is a big word, so
often abused in central Europe during the short, rotten twentieth century
that people there have grown wary of it – and perhaps not so often heard
even in our own universities. Studying the legacy of a dictatorship, one
is vividly reminded how difficult it is to establish any historical truth.
In particular, across such a change of regime, you discover how deeply
unreliable is any retrospective testimony. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s
words, people ‘have a grand memory for forgetting’.
Yet studying this subject also strengthens one’s allergy to some of the
bottomless, ludicrous frivolities of post-modernist historiography. Carelessly
used, the records of a state that worked by organised lying, and
especially the poisonous, intrusive files of a secret police, can ruin lives.
Memory in this sense of knowledge of the past can also be a form of pernicious
power. To use the files properly tests the critical skills that historians