by Tony Judt
And then there were dilemmas peculiar to the internal history of Communism itself. Should those responsible for inviting Russian tanks in to crush the 1956 Hungarian revolution or suppress the Prague Spring of 1968 be arraigned for these crimes? In the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolutions many thought they should. But some of their victims were former Communist leaders. Who deserved the attention of posterity: obscure Slovak or Hungarian peasants thrown off their property, or the Communist apparatchiks who ejected them but who themselves fell victim a few years later? Which victims—which memories—should have priority? Who was to say?
The fall of Communism thus brought in its wake a torrent of bitter memories. Heated debates over what to do with secret police files were only one dimension of the affair (see Chapter 21). The real problem was the temptation to overcome the memory of Communism by inverting it. What had once been official truth was now discredited root and branch—becoming, as it were, officially false. But this sort of taboo-breaking carries its own risks. Before 1989 every anti-Communist had been tarred with the ‘Fascist’ brush. But if ‘anti-Fascism’ had been just another Communist lie, it was very tempting now to look with retrospective sympathy and even favour upon all hitherto discredited anti-Communists, Fascists included. Nationalist writers of the nineteen-thirties returned to fashion. Post-Communist parliaments in a number of countries passed motions praising Marshal Antonescu of Romania or his counterparts elsewhere in the Balkans and central Europe. Execrated until very recently as nationalists, Fascists and Nazi collaborators, they would now have statues raised in honour of their wartime heroism (the Romanian parliament even accorded Antonescu one minute’s silence).
Other taboos fell along with the discredited rhetoric of anti-Fascism. The role of the Red Army and the Soviet Union could now be discussed in a different light. The newly liberated Baltic states demanded that Moscow acknowledge the illegality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Stalin’s unilateral destruction of their independence. The Poles, having at last (in April 1995) secured Russian acknowledgement that the 23,000 Polish officers murdered in Katyn forest were indeed killed by the NKVD and not the Wehrmacht, demanded full access to the Russian archives for Polish investigators. As of May 2005 neither request seemed likely to meet with Russian acquiescence and the memories continued to rankle.417
The Russians, however, had memories of their own. Seen from the satellite countries, the Soviet version of recent history was palpably false; but for many Russians themselves it contained more than a grain of truth. World War Two was a ‘Great Patriotic War’; Soviet soldiers and civilians were, in absolute numbers, its greatest victims; the Red Army did liberate vast swathes of eastern Europe from the horrors of German rule; and the defeat of Hitler was a source of unalloyed satisfaction and relief for most Soviet citizens—and others besides. After 1989, many in Russia were genuinely taken aback at the apparent ingratitude of erstwhile fraternal nations, who had been released in 1945 from the German yoke thanks to the sacrifices of Soviet arms.
But for all that, Russian memory was divided. Indeed, that division took institutional form, with two civil organizations coming into existence to promote critical but diametrically opposed accounts of the country’s Communist past. Memorial was founded in 1987 by liberal dissidents with the goal of obtaining and publishing the truth about Soviet history. Its members’ particular concerns were with human-rights abuse and the importance of acknowledging what had been done in the past in order to forestall its recurrence in the future. Pamiat’, formed two years earlier, also sought to recover and honour the past (its name means ‘memory’ in Russian) but there the resemblance ceases. The founders of Pamiat’, anti-Communist dissidents but far from liberal, wanted to offer an improved version of the Russian past: sanitized of Soviet ‘lies’ but also free of other influences foreign to Russia’s heritage, above all that of ‘Zionists’. Within a few years Pamiat’ had branched out into nationalist politics, wielding Russia’s neglected and ‘abused’ history as a weapon with which to ward off ‘cosmopolitan’ challenges and interlopers.
The politics of aggrieved memories—however much these differed in detail and even contradicted one another—constituted the last remaining bond between the former Soviet heartland and its imperial holdings. There was a shared resentment at the international community’s under-appreciation for their past sufferings and losses. What of the victims of the Gulag? Why had they not been compensated and memorialized like the victims and survivors of Nazi oppression? What of the millions for whom wartime Nazi oppression became postwar Communist oppression with no discernible caesura? Why did the West pay so little attention?
The desire to flatten out the Communist past and indict it en bloc—to read everything from Lenin to Gorbachev as an uninflected tale of dictatorship and crime, a seamless narrative of regimes and repressions imposed by outsiders or perpetrated in the people’s name by unrepresentative authorities—carried other risks. In the first place it was bad history, eliminating from the record the genuine enthusiasms and engagements of earlier decades. Secondly, the new orthodoxy had contemporary political implications. If Czechs—or Croats or Hungarians or anyone else—had played no active part in the dark side of their own recent past; if eastern European history since 1939—or, in the Russian case, from 1917 to 1991—was exclusively the work of others, then the whole era became a sort of parenthesis in the national story: comparable to the place assigned to Vichy in post-war French consciousness, but covering a vastly longer period and an even grimmer archive of bad memories. And the consequences would be similar: in 1992, Czechoslovak authorities banned a BBC documentary film about the 1942 assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich from the Karlovy Vary film festival, because it showed ‘unacceptable’ footage of Czechs demonstrating support for the wartime Nazi regime.
With this post-Communist re-ordering of memory in eastern Europe, the taboo on comparing Communism with Nazism began to crumble. Indeed politicians and scholars started to insist upon such comparisons. In the West this juxtaposition remained controversial. Direct comparison between Hitler and Stalin was not the issue: few now disputed the monstrous quality of both dictators. But the suggestion that Communism itself—before and after Stalin—should be placed in the same category as Fascism or Nazism carried uncomfortable implications for the West’s own past, and not only in Germany. To many western European intellectuals, Communism was a failed variant of a common progressive heritage. But to their central and east European counterparts it was an all too successful local application of the criminal pathologies of twentieth-century authoritarianism and should be remembered thus. Europe might be united, but European memory remained deeply asymmetrical.
The Western solution to the problem of Europe’s troublesome memories has been to fix them, quite literally, in stone. By the opening years of the twenty-first century, plaques, memorials and museums to the victims of Nazism had surfaced all across western Europe, from Stockholm to Brussels. In some cases, as we have seen, they were amended or ‘corrected’ versions of existing sites; but many were new. Some aspired to an overtly pedagogical function: the Holocaust Memorial which opened in Paris in January 2005 combined two existing sites, the ‘Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr’ and a ‘Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation’. Complete with a stone wall engraved with the names of 76,000 Jews deported from France to Nazi death camps, it echoed both the US Vietnam Memorial and—on a much reduced scale—the ambitions of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, or Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The overwhelming majority of such installations were indeed devoted—in part or whole—to the memory of the Holocaust: the most impressive of them all was opened in Berlin on May 10th 2005.
The explicit message of the latest round of memorials contrasts sharply with the ambiguity and prevarication of an earlier generation of lapidary commemorations. The Berlin memorial, occupying a conspicuous 19,000-square metre site adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, is the most explicit of them all: far from
commemorating ecumenically the ‘victims of Nazism’ it is, quite avowedly, a ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’.418 In Austria, young conscientious objectorscould now choose to replace military service with a period in the state-financed Gedenkdienst (‘Commemorative Service’, established in 1991), working at major Holocaust institutions as interns and guides. There can be little doubt that Western Europeans—Germans above all—now have ample opportunity to confront the full horror of their recent past. As the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reminded his audience on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, ‘the memory of the war and the genocide are part of our life. Nothing will change that: these memories are part of our identity’.
Elsewhere, however, shadows remain. In Poland, where a newly established Institute of National Memory has striven hard to encourage serious scholarly investigation into controversial historical subjects, official contrition for Poland’s own treatment of its Jewish minority has aroused vociferous objections. These are depressingly exemplified in the reaction of Nobel Peace Prize winner and Solidarity hero Lech Wałesa to the publication in 2000 of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Neighbours , an influential study by an American historian of a wartime massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours: ‘Gross’, Wałesa complained in a radio interview, was out to sow discord between Poles and Jews. He was a ‘mediocre writer . . . a Jew who tries to make money’.
The difficulty of incorporating the destruction of the Jews into contemporary memory in post-Communist Europe is tellingly illustrated by the experience of Hungary. In 2001 the government of Viktor Orbán inaugurated a Holocaust Memorial Day, to be commemorated annually on April 16th (the anniversary of the establishment in 1944 of a ghetto in wartime Budapest). Three years later Orbán’s successor as prime minister, Péter Medgyessy, opened a Holocaust Memorial Centre in a Budapest house once used to intern Jews. But much of the time this Holocaust Centre stands nearly empty, its exhibits and fact sheets seen by a thin trickle of visitors—many of them foreign. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Hungarians have flocked to the Terrorhaza.
The Terrorhaza (‘House of Terror’), as its name suggests, is a museum of horrors. It tells the story of state violence, torture, repression and dictatorship in Hungary from 1944 to 1989. The dates are significant. As presented to the thousands of schoolchildren and others who pass through its gloomy, Tussaud-like reproduction of the police cells, torture equipment and interrogation chambers that were once housed there (the House of Terror is in the headquarters of the former Security Police), the Terrorhaza’s version of Hungarian history draws no distinction between the thugs of Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross party, who held power there from October 1944 to April 1945, and the Communist regime that was installed after the war. However, the Arrow Cross men—and the extermination of 600,000 Hungarian Jews to which they actively contributed—are represented by just three rooms. The rest of the very large building is devoted to a copiously illustrated and decidedly partisan catalogue of the crimes of Communism.
The not particularly subliminal message here is that Communism and Fascism are equivalent. Except that they are not: the presentation and content of the Budapest Terrorhaza makes it quite clear that, in the eyes of the museum’s curators, Communism not only lasted longer but did far more harm than its Nazi predecessor. For many Hungarians of an older generation, this is all the more plausible for conforming to their own experience. And the message has been confirmed by post-Communist Hungarian legislation banning public display of all representations of the country’s undemocratic past: not just the swastika or the Arrow Cross symbol but also the hitherto ubiquitous red star and its accompanying hammer and sickle. Rather than evaluate the distinctions between the regimes represented by these symbols, Hungary—in the words of Prime Minister Orbán at the opening of the Budapest House of Terror on February 24th 2002—has simply ‘slammed the door on the sick twentieth century’.
But that door is not so easy to close. Hungary, like the rest of central and eastern Europe, is still caught in the backdraft.419 The same Baltic states which have urged upon Moscow the duty to acknowledge its mistreatment of them have been decidedly slow to interrogate their own responsibilities: since winning their independence neither Estonia nor Latvia nor Lithuania has prosecuted a single case against the surviving war criminals in their midst. In Romania—despite former President Iliescu’s acknowledgement of his country’s participation in the Holocaust—the ‘Memorial of the Victims of Communism and anticommunist Resistance’ inaugurated at Sighet in 1997 (and supported by the Council of Europe) commemorated assorted inter-war and wartime Iron Guard activists and other Romanian fascists and anti-semites now recycled as martyrs to Communist persecution.
In support of their insistence upon ‘equivalence’, commentators in eastern Europe can point to the cult of the ‘victim’ in contemporary Western political culture. We are moving from winners’ history to victims’ history, they observe. Very well, then let us be consistent. Even if Nazism and Communism were utterly different in intent—even if, in Raymond Aron’s formulation, ‘there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous, and one which can be given a monstrous interpretation’—that was scant consolation to their victims. Human suffering should not be calibrated according to the goals of the perpetrators. In this way of reasoning, for those being punished or killed there, a Communist camp is no better or worse than a Nazi camp.
Similarly, the emphasis upon ‘rights’ (and restitution for their abuse) in modern international jurisprudence and political rhetoric has furnished an argument for those who feel that their sufferings and losses have passed unrecognized—and uncompensated. Some conservatives in Germany, taking their cue from international condemnation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, have re-opened the claims of German communities expelled from their lands at the end of the Second World War. Why, they ask, was theirs a lesser form of victimhood? Surely what Stalin did to the Poles—or, more recently, what Miloševič did to the Albanians—was no different in kind from what Czechoslovakia’s President Beneš did to the Sudeten Germans after World War Two? By the early years of the new century there was talk in respectable circles of establishing in Berlin yet another memorial: a ‘Center Against Expulsions’, a museum devoted to all victims of ethnic cleansing.
This latest twist, with its suggestion that all forms of collective victimhood are essentially comparable, even interchangeable, and should thus be accorded equal remembrance, aroused a spirited rebuttal from Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when he signed a petition in 2003 opposing the proposed Center. ‘What sort of remembrance! Did they suffer that much? Because they lost their houses? Of course it is sad when you are being forced to leave your house and abandon your land. But the Jews lost their houses and all of their relatives. Expulsions are about suffering, but there is so much suffering in this world. Sick people suffer, and nobody builds monuments to honour them’ ( Tygodnik Powszechny, August 17th 2003).
Edelman’s reaction is a timely reminder of the risks we run by indulging to excess the cult of commemoration—and of displacing perpetrators with victims as the focus of attention. On the one hand there is no limit in principle to the memories and experiences worthy of recall. On the other hand, to memorialize the past in edifices and museums is also a way to contain and even neglect it—leaving the responsibility of memory to others. So long as there were men and women around who really did remember, from personal experience, this did not perhaps matter. But now, as the 81-year-old Jorge Semprún reminded his fellow survivors at the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald on April 10th 2005, ‘the cycle of active memory is closing’.
Even if Europe could somehow cling indefinitely to a living memory of past crimes—which is what the memorials and museums are designed, however inadequately, to achieve—there would be little point. Memory is inherently contentious and partisan: one man’s acknowledgement is another’s omission. And it is a poor guid
e to the past. The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory: institutionalised public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. The first could not endure—but nor will the second. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is the necessary condition for civic health.
To say this is not to advocate amnesia. A nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it. Until the French understood Vichy as it was—and not as they had chosen to misremember it—they could not put it aside and move on. The same is true of Poles in their convoluted recollection of the Jews who once lived in their midst. The same will be true of Spain, too, which for twenty years following its transition to democracy drew a tacit veil across the painful memory of the civil war. Public discussion of that war and its outcome is only now getting under way.420 Only after Germans had appreciated and digested the enormity of their Nazi past—a sixty-year cycle of denial, education, debate and consensus—could they begin to live with it: i.e. put it behind them.