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

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СКАЧАТЬ torture, and medical experiments on children’.⁶⁸ Some courageous individuals like Harald Strunz have tried to help those who suffered under the regime; after being imprisoned by the East German government Strunz set up the League of Victims of Stalinism to help those who had been falsely accused of crimes. Gauck himself insists that rather than taking the easy path of nostalgia East Germans must confront difficult truths: ‘There can be no peace without confronting the past with honesty and maturity.’⁶⁹ Many Berliners argue that the Stasi headquarters should be kept open; that the Stasi security prison at Hohenschönhausen – the former meat factory where helpless prisoners were tortured in the dank ‘U – boat’ cells – should be turned into a museum; and that the remnants of the Wall – now all but gone from the city centre – should be preserved so that future generations can see what this incredible structure actually looked like.⁷⁰

      Their task may prove difficult. None of the torturers who worked at Hohenschönhausen Prison has been brought to justice; indeed one former prisoner recently came across his erstwhile tormenter while trying to buy an insurance policy in western Berlin. In a 1994 opinion poll 57 per cent of former East Germans advocated closing the Stasi files.⁷¹ At the end of 1997 the federal police unit or Zerv, which is made up of 270 detectives charged with investigating Stasi crimes, shut down. On 1 January 1998 the statute of limitations comes into force, making it impossible to bring prosecutions for any offence except murder committed in the old East Germany. Manfred Kittlaus, Zeiv’s chief, has said that after that date ‘The majority of human rights violations will be beyond the law. The perpetrators will soon be free to walk down Unter den Linden with impunity.’⁷² Many decent eastern Germans who resisted the regime felt betrayed when such brilliant self – publicists as Markus Wolf, who ruined innocent lives by recruiting women as ‘honey trap spies’, or Erich Mielke, who ordered the torture of civilians for having ‘dangerous’ religious beliefs, or Margot Honecker, who had the babies of politically ‘dubious’ parents stolen and given to good military couples, or Erich Honecker, who built the Wall, were all allowed to go free. Many believed that these people should have been brought to justice; once again, they felt, the spirit of the law in Germany had been trampled by the letter of the law. (It was some consolation that on 25 August 1997 Erich Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.) One way to integrate those who suffered under the Communist regime is to continue to fight the siren voices of those trying to rewrite its history, while supporting people like Gauck who reveal the truth about the oppressive nature of East Germany.⁷³

      It is not surprising that the GDR was a grim place. How could it be otherwise, given that it was the product of the two most evil dictatorships in European history: the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was a vassal of the Soviet Union, but it also retained many of the worst features of the previous regime. The crimes committed by the GDR were not remotely of the same magnitude as those committed by the Nazis, but the two regimes were joined by history and there were frightening continuities between them, not least that they employed similar propaganda methods and block warden systems to police entire districts of Berlin.⁷⁴ Despite, or rather because of the Nazi legacy East Germans learned virtually nothing about the Third Reich; hence they feel no responsibility for it, and are for the most part still unaware of the links between Nazism and the regime under which they lived. This history should be documented in the new capital city, for understanding the Nazi period is one of the keys to understanding what happened in East Berlin under the GDR. But the need to face the Nazi past goes much deeper than that. The legacy of the years 1933 to 1945 still presents enormous problems for Berlin as a whole, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the way in which its citizens face the past will help to shape both the future of the capital and the very identity of the new Germany. And the rest of the world will be watching.

      In an article written in July 1997 the British historian Andrew Roberts commented that in the preceding week he had come across a number of references both to Nazi Germany and the Second World War: the Swiss Bankers Association had published a list of accounts thought to contain gold belonging to Nazi victims; there were calls for Monaco and the Vatican to ‘come clean about the extent of their wartime financial relations with the Nazis’; there was a ‘row at Harvard over whether the new chair in Holocaust studies should be filled by Daniel Goldhagen, the controversial author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners; while in Germany Volker Rühe swore to prosecute the soldiers of the 571 Mountain Combat Battalion who ‘made a video nasty of explicit viciousness and depravity during training which disgusted many Germans and evoked memories of war-time atrocities’; the Nuremberg city council was criticized for giving an honorary citizenship to Karl Diehl, aged ninety, whose company had used slave labour to build concentration camps and produce armaments in the war; and the sacking of Amnon Barzel, the Israeli curator of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, was denounced by the board of Berlin’s Jewish community as ‘bearing a tragic comparison with the dark times between 1933 and 1938’. As Roberts put it, ‘For those who thought that the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of VE-Day somehow might have drawn a line under the Second World War, the events of last week must have been a grave disappointment. They prove how the scars of Hitler’s war are far from healed, and that the echoes of 1939–45 will stay with us long after the last veteran has gone off to join his comrades.’ Roberts was right – the Second World War is not going to go away.⁷⁵

      In purely physical terms it is impossible to escape the evidence of Nazism in Berlin, the more so now that the Wall has been removed, exposing and drawing attention to artefacts long hidden or forgotten. Reminders of this history are everywhere: in the tunnels which planners must take account of when developing new buildings; in the segments of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry which, contrary to popular belief, was not completely destroyed and is still in use; in the huge column of concrete hidden behind a few scrubby bushes, all that is left of Speer’s attempt to test the foundations of the huge dome for Germania; in the East – West Axis, now the Strasse des 17 Juni, still lit by Speer’s prominent streetlamps. The reconstruction of Berlin is throwing up long-lost reminders of the conflict: on 15 September 1994 one of 15,000 war-time bombs exploded at a construction site killing three people and blowing a huge hole in the side of a building; the remains of Goebbels’ bunker and Hitler’s Chancellery bunker have been exposed, and construction workers frequently come across the skeletons of those who died in the Battle for Berlin.⁷⁶ This is one German city in which the Aufarbeitung der Geschichte, the working through of history, cannot be put aside. Questions about how to ‘come to terms with’ the Nazi past permeate virtually every aspect of the city’s new role, including its suitability as the new German capital.

      The history of Nazi criminality has been a source of controversy in Germany since 1945. Attempts to address the involvement of ordinary Germans in the form of the Allied Fragebogen – the de-Nazification procedure – or in the Nuremberg Trials were quickly forgotten after the war as most Germans tried to drew a veil over their past in the Stunde Null or Zero Hour of 1945. The advent of the Cold War was a boon to all those keen to hide their involvement in the old regime; moreover, both the western Allies and the Soviets made extensive use of NSDAP members in the rebuilding of their respective Germanys. Historiography was written to reflect the new Cold War world. Russia’s captive East Germans were taught a highly fictitious version of history which included the bizarre notion that all Hitlerfascisten had moved to the west in 1945 and that all those who remained were innocent of any involvement in the Third Reich. West Germans did produce some interesting work, particularly Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe, which hinted at the historical roots of Nazism, but most popular histories encouraged the view that the entire period had been an aberration during which the nation had been led to ruin by the demonic Hitler – a view which conveniently allowed most people to forget their own support of the regime. Most West Germans looked to the future and poured their energy into the Wirtschaftswunder – the economic miracle. The East Germans continued to peddle their ludicrous version of history right up until 1989. But this was not possible in the west.

      The world of the 1950s was preoccupied with the Cold War and there was little discussion of Nazi crime in general and the mass murder of European Jews in particular; СКАЧАТЬ