Abstract
The collapse of the GDR and German reunification made a vast mass of information about the culture, politics and society of the East German state available for the first time. It transformed what had been a niche area in modern German studies into the most intensively researched period of German history. At the same time the political and personal sensitivity of much that was revealed after 1990 generated intense debates about the status of the new material as evidence. Sara Jones’s fascinating study is concerned with the memories of the Stasi, ‘first-person narratives of personally experienced events and … about how they are produced in different media forms’ (p. 1).
Jones begins by providing a clear overview of the main ‘events’ in memory construction since 1990. The opening of the Stasi files from 1990 immediately generated problems that led to the creation of the Office of the Federal Commissioner for the Files of the State Security Service of the Former GDR under Joachim Gauck in 1991. The Stasi records law remains controversial, however, variously criticized as being too lax or too severe, or simply inadequate to expose, let alone deal with, the true extent of human rights abuses before 1989. A second source of new knowledge during the 1990s was the series of trials of ‘perpetrators’, though this process too was criticized for concentrating on minnows while the big fish were allowed to swim free, often under Article 315 of the Unification Treaty which guaranteed no punishment for things which had not actually been illegal under GDR law. A series of parliamentary commissions of enquiry in 1992–8 further swelled the volume of available evidence without reaching any clear conclusions. Meanwhile, difficult economic conditions and rising unemployment in the early 1990s helped generate a defiant East German response to the flood of revelation in the form of Ostalgie and the strident assertion of an East German identity. Finally, in 2005–6, the Sabrow Commission proposed the creation of a Historical Network dedicated to the ‘Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship’, which promptly unleashed another major debate about how the GDR past should be handled.
Each of these ‘events’ generated more evidence and often conflicting perspectives. Central to all of them was the testimony of witnesses: victims, (alleged) perpetrators, ordinary citizens, writers and commentators. Authenticity lent authority; in every ‘event’ the protagonists sought to enlist the authoritative authentic voice. Yet, as Jones demonstrates with great skill and sensitivity, the result was a cacophony rather than a symphony.
Successive chapters present literary autobiographies, the voices of the Stasi officers themselves as well as those of their victims. In two chapters Jones also examines the way that memories are embedded in memorial museums. She focuses here on the museums located in former Stasi remand centres, including the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen in Berlin and the remand centre associated with the notorious Bautzen prison. Particular attention is devoted not only to the care taken to ensure authenticity by preserving these sites, in so far as possible, in the condition in which the Stasi left them in 1989, but also to the way their history is presented in guided tours conducted by former inmates. In Hohenschönhausen cupboard doors hang open, telephone receivers trail down from desks, and former inmates recount their own experiences of being held in the basement cells and of being ‘processed’ for interrogation in the corridors and offices above. Many East German visitors react by saying they had no idea that such things were happening in their midst; former guards and administrators angrily deny that such things did happen. Jones’s final chapter is devoted to documentary films which leave the viewer in no doubt.
Where are we now? In 2008 Jan Assmann made the distinction between communicative and cultural memory: on the one hand, individual, lived experience, transmitted for perhaps 80–200 years comprising three or four interacting generations; on the other hand, an absolute past with social and political functions, mediated in texts or other ‘performances’, enduring for the foreseeable future. Like all theoretical distinctions, this one too is rather remote from reality. In relation to the issue of memories of the Stasi, it perhaps means no more than that we are still in the realm of contemporary history, in which authentic witness is often contested or juxtaposed to contrary experience. Twenty-five years after unification, we are still very far away from any kind of consensus. No historian would be surprised if that state of affairs did not endure. Sara Jones has provided a thought-provoking analysis of the way the past gradually emerges out of the mass of myriad individual experiences and then becomes contested history.