Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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СКАЧАТЬ Soviet artist Nikolai Tompsky was typical of those which had sprouted all over the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945 – enormous, oppressive, heroic, and detested symbols of Soviet oppression. These statues were amongst the first things to be vandalized or torn down in the aftermath of the revolutions in central Europe – except in East Berlin. Indeed, Berlin’s Lenin became a rallying point for those keen to salvage the reputation of the ex-GDR. For this noisy minority Lenin no longer represented tyranny but was the ‘symbol of history’ which ‘reflected GDR traditions’ and whose removal would be an ‘affront to the Ossis’. One group calling itself the Initiative politische Denkmäler advocated the preservation of all monuments, while members of the Green Party and the PDS introduced a resolution in the municipal parliament calling for the destruction of the old Victory Column in the Tiergarten if Lenin was taken down. This glib comparison between the monument honouring Bismarck’s unification of Germany and a statue of a man responsible for the murder of millions of people was simply staggering. East Berlin earned the dubious distinction of being the only non-CIS capital which actually wanted to preserve the symbol of its enslavement. In the end a suitable compromise was reached. The statue was taken apart piece by piece and laid to rest in a Berlin gravel pit, but it was not destroyed.

      The controversy over Lenin was a mere taste of what was to come. The next statue to be championed was the enormous Ernst Thälmann in Prenzlauer Berg, complete with flag and clenched fist and a heater in the nose to prevent snow from piling up in winter. This time the arguments for its preservation came directly from the misleading pages of official GDR history textbooks.

      Ernst Thälmann was one of the great heroes of the GDR. Every school child learned that he was chairman of the German Communist Party between 1925 and 1933; every museum of modern history recounted how he was arrested and killed by the Nazis, and how he was the very model of an ‘anti-Fascist resistance fighter’. There is no doubt that Thälmann suffered terribly under the Nazis and for that he deserves universal sympathy. But East Germans had not been taught the other side of his story.

      Ernst Thälmann was also the man responsible for the forced Stalinization of the German Communist Party in the 1920s. It was he who brought the KPD under Moscow’s direct control, it was he who supervised the eviction of all its opponents, and it was he who on Stalin’s direct orders broke all links with the Social Democrats – who were labelled ‘Social Fascists’ – in 1928. Thälmann then did something which alone might have provoked the removal of his statue. Rather than join with the moderate left, whom he still saw as the ‘greatest threat to the revolution’, he actually allied himself with the Nazis who were, in his words, ‘merely an extreme form of the doomed bourgeois order’; he even put Hitler’s popularity down to his sexual appeal to German women. Thälmann proceeded to lead a relentless attack on the legitimate Weimar government, one minute standing up in the Reichstag along with Hermann Göring and others to harangue its leaders, the next co-operating with the Nazis in the transport strike of November 1932. In short, Thälmann was directly involved in bringing to power the very people who would destroy him. He is no German hero. The statue is not merely an ugly remnant of Soviet-German Communism; it supports a deliberately doctored version of history and glorifies a man who helped to destroy the Weimar democracy. Nevertheless, thanks to pressure from the Ostalgia movement, it will remain in place in the new German capital.⁶²

      It would be absurd to remove everything created by the GDR during its forty-year history and in March 1992 the Berlin government established an independent commission, largely made up of ex-East Germans, to study such monuments and to recommend what should be done with them. From the beginning the body faced noisy protests from those who now objected to the removal of any piece of the ‘GDR heritage’ no matter how appalling its symbolism, but it has nevertheless made wise and informed decisions. Most structures are to be retained out of historical interest – there is little harm in the large wall murals of workers and peasants, the paintings of tractors in the fields, the statues of long-forgotten Communist artists or writers clutching their paintbrushes along with tool kits and sheaves of wheat.⁶³ The Marx – Engels statue erected in 1985 near the Alexanderplatz is seen by most easterners as inoffensive and will stay, and the Soviet war memorials by the Brandenburg Gate, at Schönholz and at Treptow Park which contain mass graves of the thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle for Berlin are rightly being protected.⁶⁴ Some controversial figures, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, are to keep their street signs although the GDR ‘hero’ Georgi Dimitroff was removed because, irrespective of his performance at the Reichstag Trial, he was Stalin’s representative in Bulgaria and was responsible for the forced Sovietization of that country. Streets named after ex – Communist leaders from Wilhelm Pieck to Ho Chi Minh have also been changed. The guidelines are simple: those monuments which were built by the regime, which were meant overtly to glorify it, and which would still be considered a rallying point for those who hanker after the old GDR are to be removed – Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Ulbricht included. It is not appropriate simply to equate East Germany with the Nazi regime, but to have retained Pieck or Dimitroff would have been rather like keeping heroic statues of Göring or the Horst – Wessel-Strasse after 1945 merely out of ‘historical interest’. The Allies were right to blow the enormous swastikas off old Nazi buildings even if they retained the structures themselves.

      The conflicts over official GDR monuments are merely one manifestation of the deep divisions which exist not only between different groups of eastern Germans, but also between the two halves of the city. Berlin will have to deal with many scars left over from the GDR regime – not least the ‘Wall in the Head’ phenomenon, in which the physical divisions are destroyed but the spiritual ones remain – in addition to the totally different approaches to culture, education and history experienced by two groups of Germans for half a century.⁶⁵ But more important than debates over the Thälmann statue or the Palast der Republik is the question of how the most reprehensible aspects of the GDR should be remembered in the new Germany.

      Many East Germans were stunned in 1989 to discover the extent to which they had been controlled, manipulated and impoverished by their own regime. The anger and sense of resentment amongst ordinary people grew as they began to uncover the truth about those who had created and maintained this grim system for so long, and the tens of thousands who had willingly cooperated by spying on friends, neighbours and colleagues. As the Wall was dismantled activists broke into the Stasi headquarters and began to examine the documents there and as the extent of spying was revealed it became painfully clear that Berliners had not lost their eagerness – so evident during the Nazi period – to inform on one another in the ‘interest of state security’. The revelations about the Stasi prompted the unprecedented opening of the files to all those people who appear in them and in 1991 a law was passed regulating their use. Today the records, which fill five miles of shelves, are kept in the former archive for the Ministry for State Security in the Normannenstrasse – known locally as the Gauck Authority after the East German clergyman who heads it.⁶⁶ By 1997 over 1 million people had applied to read their personal files while nearly 2 million employers had asked for the vetting or ‘Gaucking’ of potential colleagues to see if they had collaborated with the Stasi. There have no doubt been painful revelations, unfair dismissals and abuses of the information contained in the files but exposure of the past was essential. Not only have the victims been able to find out the truth about what was done to them; those who made the conscious decision to spy in order to further their careers or obtain a car or travel abroad have also been unmasked. The opening of the files has helped to lay bare the terrible human cost of this deceit.

      The Stasi files alone represent a powerful counter – argument to those Ostalgia advocates now trying to present the GDR as a harmless, bureaucratic and rather dull state. The files also record how security personnel committed brutal murders and imprisoned people without trial; it is now known that nearly 1 per cent of the population of the GDR, at least 100,000 people, died at the hands of the state.⁶⁷ According to one former prisoner, Gunter Toepfer, people are now referring to the GDR as a place with plenty of kindergarten places and cheap train fares; it was in fact ‘a state which accepted death and extermination. Yet there has been a de facto amnesty.’ And, as David Rose СКАЧАТЬ