When I went on to talk to the friends, informers, and officers who figured in my life, I discovered further veils, wrinkles, and tricks of memory. One informer, whom the Stasi gave the code name “Michaela,” firmly denied ever having been an “IM,” the Stasi abbreviation for “unofficial collaborator.” But her informer’s file, which I subsequently saw, contained handwritten reports signed with the codename. She asked me, with a remnant of Marxist vocabulary, to “try to explain the subjective as well as objective conditions” when I wrote about her. “But,” she added despairingly, “probably that’s impossible. Even I can’t really remember now.” Another informer, an Englishman code-named “Smith,” told me he had tried to talk to the Stasi only about general social and political conditions. In a tragicomic piece of retrospective rationalization, he “recalled” that by talking to the secret police—and, he fondly hoped, through them to the party leaders—he was trying to substitute for the missing “civil society.” But his informer’s file is full of detailed information on individual people.
As I traveled around with my bag of poisoned madeleines, I saw how people’s memories—of events, of each other, of themselves—changed instantly, and then changed and changed again as the revelations sank in. There was no way back, now, to their previous memory of that person or that event. We say “X or Y jogged my memory” and usually mean simply “X or Y reminded me.” But these “jogs” actually change the memory itself, like a digitized picture transformed in a computer: darkening that shadow, lightening this face. Except that, here, the process is involuntary. We are not the operators at the keyboard of memory.
So what we are dealing with, when we try to write history, is nothing less than an infinity of individual memories of any person or event. For these memories are changing all the time. There is, in all normal times, the slow fading that we call forgetting. But there are also the sudden changes that come with a dramatic change of external circumstances, like 1989, or with some new discovery, such as a file. L. P. Hartley famously wrote that “the past is a foreign country.” But the past is much more than another country. It is another universe. The historian is a traveler through endless worlds of individual memory.
As a result, I have become even more skeptical than I was before about the value of any retrospective evidence. Yet that is what most historical evidence is. Most recorded history is the history of memories. What are described as contemporary, primary sources were usually recorded by an individual some time after the event, even if the interval between action and recording was only a few hours, minutes, or even seconds. We know from our own lives that people can have quite different recollections of a conversation or meeting the morning after. (Earlier this year, the leaders of the EU couldn’t agree what they had agreed on in the last hours of the Amsterdam summit.) For a sobering experience, try comparing ten different newspaper reports of the same event.
The great exceptions to this rule are the tape recorder (overt or covert) and the camera. To be sure, these can lie too. Anyone who has watched a radio editor cutting and splicing a tape will never again believe what they hear. The new digital technology seems to create almost limitless possibilities of photographic manipulation. Still, properly used, they bring us an important step closer to Ranke’s “how it really was.” The television camera can lie, but at least it does not do what all human recorders do: both forget and involuntarily reremember. That is one reason why the best television documentaries are outstanding works of contemporary history. The television footage gives you not just the words but the body language that often belies the words, the facial expressions, the atmosphere, and telling detail that you can otherwise experience only as a participant or an eyewitness.
For the historian, the lesson is not just about the weakness of human memory but about its fecundity, its infinite creativeness, its ability—no, its elemental compulsion—endlessly to rearrange the past in constantly shifting patterns. Usually, the resulting patterns are more comforting to our self-esteem, pride, or vanity, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer observed. But not always. Sometimes memory tortures people with remorse or guilt more than the circumstances really justify. The awful irony, explored harrowingly by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, his film about the Holocaust, is that most often it is the victims who are cursed by memory, while the perpetrators are blessed by forgetting. Especially if the perpetrators were what the Germans call Schreibtischtäter, “desk murderers,” bureaucratic coordinators of evil, like some of the chilling figures in Lanzmann’s film. “That camp,” said one—“what was its name? It was in the Oppeln district…. I’ve got it: Auschwitz!” Memory, this champion trickster, is thus the great adversary for anyone who tries to establish what really happened, whether as historian, journalist, or writer. Martha Gellhorn has written very movingly about this, in relation to her own memories of war, concluding, “What is the use in having lived so long, travelled so widely, listened and looked so hard, if at the end you don’t know what you know?” But there is another set of questions about bad memories faced by all people and countries who have been through terrible experiences: hijacking, imprisonment, torture or—for the collective—occupation, war, dictatorship, genocide. These questions are not about how to reconstruct the past but about what is best for the individual, society, nation, or state now and in the future.
And that is the subject of the next essay, “Trials, Purges, and History Lessons”; see p. 256.
CHRONOLOGY
1997
1 OCTOBER SFOR troops in Bosnia take control of Bosnian Serb radio and television transmitters.
15 OCTOBER. Franjo Tudjman is elected president of Croatia for the third time.
19 OCTOBER. Milo Djukanovic is elected president of Montenegro.
27 OCTOBER. British chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown says Britain will not join EMU in January 1999 and sets five economic tests for eventual membership.
OCTOBER. Major demonstrations by Albanian students in Kosovo.
10 NOVEMBER. Jerzy Buzek of the Solidarity Electoral Alliance becomes prime minister of Poland, with Bronisław Geremek, of the Freedom Union, as foreign minister.
28 NOVEMBER. The Kosovo Liberation Army publicly announces its existence at the funeral of a Kosovar Albanian schoolteacher hilled by Serb police.
26-29 NOVEMBER. Prague. Time for a brief visit to Václav Havel, convalescing from serious illness at Masaryk’s presidential country house of Lány He has a glass of beer on the table—“my medicine.” But one thing seems to be acting as even better medicine: the news of the imminent downfall of the other Václav, prime minister Klaus.
30 NOVEMBER Czech prime minister Václav Klaus resigns, after more than five years in office.
1 DECEMBER Britain is refused permission to attend meetings of the planned council for coordinating the economic policies of European states participating in monetary union—the “Euro-X.”
11 DECEMBER. Weimar. My favorite town in all of Germany. But now it’s a building site, with giant cranes towering over its houses and heavy lorries thundering through its quiet, cobbled streets. Why? Because it’s to be “cultural capital of Europe” in 1999. I fear the delicate balance of its peculiar spirit, at once provincial and cosmopolitan, “small yet great,” maybe upset forever—in the name of culture.
12-13 DECEMBER. An E U summit in Luxembourg agrees to open negotiations with six new applicants: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, and Cyprus—and to consider five others—Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Latvia—in a second wave.
1998
20 JANUARY Václav Havel is reelected for a second and final five-year term as Czech president.
21-24 JANUARY. Milan. I ask an acquaintance if there is a chance of hearing the Nobel Prize—winning anarchist playwright Dario Fo. Well, she says, as a matter of fact he’s speaking at Milan University this evening. It’s a ceremony to commemorate the death of a student killed by police twenty-five years ago. She says she has to be there anyway.
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sp; The large lecture room is packed. Dario Fo is amusing, loquacious, and insufferably pleased with himself. Much more interesting is the reason for my acquaintance being here. It turns out that her cousin was a left-wing student leader in the protests we are commemorating. Then he changed tack completely and went into business. He became the right-hand man of a senior industrialist who was deeply implicated in Italy’s massive tangentopoli bribery and corruption scandal. In fact, her cousin was the man who actually gave the politicians the money. Now he is in prison. But he has been let out on bail for a couple of days, partly to attend this event. That’s why she’s here—to say hello to him and give him, as it were, moral support. The room is dotted with his cousins and friends.
Later, over dinner, my interpreter tells me that her father is a goldsmith. When the scandal broke, he suddenly found that most of his best clients were no longer coming. His business collapsed.
Ordinary lives, touched and changed by the tangentopoli. The human underside of great events.
TRIALS PURGES, AND HISTORY LESSONS
THE QUESTION OF WHAT NATIONS SHOULD DO ABOUT A DIFFICULT PAST is one of the great subjects of our time. Countries across the world have faced this problem: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, Spain after Franco, Greece after the colonels, Ethiopia, Cambodia, all the postcommunist states of Central and Eastern Europe today. There is already a vast literature on it, mostly written by political scientists, lawyers, and human-rights activists rather than historians and mainly looking at treating the past as an element in “transitions” from dictatorship to—it is hoped—consolidated democracy. The material for another library is even now being prepared in South Africa, Rwanda, Bosnia, and The Hague.
Yet what exactly are we talking about? There is no single word for it in the English language. German, however, has two long ones in regular use: Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewältigung. These may be translated as “treating” the past, “working over” the past, “confronting” it, “coping, dealing, or coming to terms with” it—even “overcoming” the past. The variety of possible translations indicates the complexity of the matter at hand. Of course, the absence of a word in a language does not necessarily indicate the absence of the thing it describes. But the presence of not just one but two German terms does indicate that this is something of a German speciality.
To be sure, many rivers flow into this ocean, and everyone comes to the subject in his or her own particular way. The lawyer and human-rights activist Aryeh Neier, for example, traces what he calls the “movement for accountability” back to Argentina in the early 1980s, and there is no doubt that a major impulse did come from Latin America, with its various models of a “truth commission.” In the years since then there have already been close to twenty truth commissions, although not all were called that.1 Yet Germany is the only country (so far) to have tried it not once but twice: after Nazism and after communism.
I have come to this subject through the curious experience of reading my own Stasi file and, more generally, through watching how the countries I know best, in Central Europe, have coped—or not coped—with the communist legacy. Here I shall concentrate on the Central European experience over the eight years since the end of communism. In particular, I want to compare the very special case of Germany with those of its east central European neighbors.
In doing so, I pose four basic questions: whether to remember and treat the past at all, in any of the diverse available ways, or simply to try to forget and look to the future; when to address it, if it is to be addressed; who should do it; and, last but not least, how?
1
The answer given to the first question—Whether?—in Germany since 1989 has been unequivocal: “Of course we must remember! Of course we must confront the history of the communist dictatorship in Germany in every possible way!” And Germany has set a new standard of comprehensiveness in the attempt.
The arguments made for tackling the past like this are moral, psychological, and political. Interestingly, the moral imperative, the commandment to remember, is often quoted in Germany in forms that come from the Jewish tradition: “To remember is the secret of redemption.” Then there is the psychological notion, spelled out in an influential book by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, that it is bad for nations, as it is for individual people, to suppress the memories of sad or evil things in their past and good for them to go through the hard work of mourning, Trauerarbeit. Above all, there is the political idea that this will help to prevent a recurrence of the evil. How many times has one heard repeated in Germany George Santayana’s remark that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it?
You can see at once why it is regarded in Germany as politically incorrect, to say the least, to question this received wisdom. After the Holocaust, how dare anyone talk of forgetting? Yet the basic premise has in fact been rejected in many other times and places. Historically, the advocates of forgetting are numerous and weighty. Just two days after the murder of Caesar, Cicero declared in the Roman senate that all memory of the murderous discord should be consigned to eternal oblivion: “oblivione sempiterna delendam.” European peace treaties, from one between Lothar, Ludwig of Germany, and Charles of France in 851 to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, called specifically for an act of forgetting. So did the French constitutions of 1814 and 1830. The English Civil War ended with an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion.
Even since 1945, there have been many examples in Europe of a policy of forgetting. The postwar French republic was built, after the first frenzy of the épuration, upon a more or less conscious policy of supplanting the painful memory of collaboration in Vichy and occupied France with de Gaulle’s unifying national myth of a single, eternally resistant, fighting France. In fact, much of postwar Western European democracy was constructed on a foundation of forgetting: Think of Italy, or of Kurt Waldheim’s Austria—happily restyled, with the help of the Allies, as the innocent victim of Nazi aggression. Think, too, of West Germany in the 1950s, where determined efforts were made to forget the Nazi past.
The examples don’t stop there. The transition to democracy in Spain after 1975 involved a conscious strategy of not looking back, not confronting or “treating” the past. The writer Jorgé Semprun speaks of “a collective and willed amnesia.” To be sure, there was an initial explosion of interest in recent history, but there were no trials of Francoist leaders, no purges, no truth commissions. On the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the prime minister, Felipe González, issued a statement saying that the civil war was “finally history” and “no longer present and alive in the reality of the country.”
What is more, we find something similar in Poland after the end of communism. Poland’s first noncommunist prime minister in more than forty years, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, declared in his opening statement to parliament, “We draw a thick line [gruba linia] under the past.” He has since repeatedly insisted that all he meant by this was what he went on to say in the next sentence: that his government should be held responsible only for what it would do itself. Yet the phrase “thick line,” often quoted in the slightly different form “gruba kreska,” rapidly became proverbial and was understood to stand for a whole “Spanish” approach to the difficult past. While this was unfair to the original context in which Mazowiecki first used the phrase, it was not unfair as a shorthand characterization of the general attitude of Mazowiecki and his colleagues.
As I well remember from conversations at that time, their general attitude was: let bygones be bygones; no trials, no recriminations; look to the future, to democracy and “Europe,” as Spain had done. Partly this was because Poland in 1989 had a negotiated revolution, and representatives of the old regime were still in high places—including the government itself. Partly it was because by 1990 they simply could not imagine the postcommunist party being voted back into power in free elections. So there seemed to be no pressing political need to remind people of the horrors of the communist past
, and many, many more urgent things to do—such as transforming the economy with the so-called Balcerowicz Plan. Yet it also reflected a deeper philosophy—one that Mazowiecki, a liberal Catholic and veteran Solidarity adviser, shared with many from the former opposition movements in Central Europe.
In Germany, it was the former East German dissidents who pressed for a radical and comprehensive reckoning. Elsewhere in East Central Europe it was the dissidents—those who had suffered most directly under the old regime—who were often most ready to draw that “thick line” under the past. Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia was a classic example, and his policy in his first year as president, like that of Mazowiecki, could be described as one of preemptive forgiveness. The Hungarian case was rather different. Here the conservative government of József Antall, composed of people who had not been in the front line of opposition to communism, indulged in a vivid rhetoric of reckoning—but their purgative words were not matched by purgative deeds. The sharpest contrast, as so often, was between Germany and Poland.
2
This brings me to my second basic question: When? For there is an intermediate position that says, “Yes, but not yet.” An intellectual argument for this is the neo-Rankean one made against any attempt to write the history of the very recent past: We don’t have sufficient distance from the events to understand their meaning; we are emotionally involved, and the sources are not fully available. Better wait thirty years for the relevant official papers to be available in the archives. In postcommunist Central Europe, however, the last part of the argument is circular, since those who say “The sources are not available” are often the same people who are keeping the archives shut.
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