History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Hungary passed a lustration law in 1997, and this is slowly being implemented. There, a commission vets senior figures in public life, but exposes them publicly only if they refuse to resign quietly. Shortly thereafter, the prime minister, Gyula Horn, admitted that he had been negatively assessed in the terms of the law, both on account of his service in the militia assembled to help crush the 1956 revolution and because, as foreign minister, he had been the recipient of secret-police information. However, he declined to resign and said he now regards the matter as closed. In both the Polish and the Hungarian cases, the circle of persons to be vetted is—wisely, in my view—drawn much more closely than in the German case.

  Some analysts have taken the argument for purges a step further. Where there was no lustration, they say, as in Poland and Hungary—and elsewhere in eastern and southeastern Europe—the postcommunist parties returned to power. Only where there was lustration, in Czechoslovakia and Germany, did this not occur. Yet to deduce causality from correlation is an old historian’s fallacy—cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. On closer examination, you find that in eastern Germany the postcommunist party has done very well in elections, and one reason for this is, precisely, resentment of what are seen as West German occupation purges and victors’ justice. In fact, the number of votes the postcommunist PDS received in eastern Germany at the last Bundestag election, in October 1994, is remarkably similar to the number of people who have been “gaucked”: about 1.7 million in each case. (Not that I would deduce causality from this correlation, but still.)

  One should by no means simply assume that the return to power of postcommunist parties with impeccably social-democratic programs has been bad for the consolidation of democracy. Yet it is true that, in Poland and Hungary, the new democracy has been shaken by issues arising from the lack of lustration, including the current activities of the security services. And the return to power not just of the postcommunist parties but of historically compromised persons within them has furnished the populist, nationalist right with arguments against the working of the new parliamentary democracy altogether. “If such people are elected, there must be something wrong with elections.”

  FINALLY, there are what I call “history lessons.” These can be of several kinds: state or independent, public or private. The classic model of a state, public history lesson is that of the “truth commission,” first developed in Latin America and currently being used in South Africa. As José Zalaquett, one of the fathers of the Chilean truth commission, has noted, the point is not only to find out as much as possible of the truth about the past dictatorship but also to see that this truth be “officially proclaimed and publicly exposed.” Not just knowledge but acknowledgment is the goal. In truth commissions, there is a strong element of political theater. They are a kind of public morality play. Archbishop Tutu has shown himself well aware of this. He leads others in weeping as the survivors tell their tales of suffering and the secret policemen confess their brutality. The object is not judicial punishment: In South Africa, full confession leads not to trial but to amnesty. It is formally to establish the truth, insofar as it can ever be established; if possible, to achieve a collective catharsis, very much as Aristotle envisaged catharsis in a Greek tragedy; and then to move on. In South Africa, as in Chile, the commission’s aims are both “Truth” and “Reconciliation.” The hope is to move through the one to the other.2

  You might think that this model would be particularly well suited to the postcommunist world, where the regimes were kept in place less by direct coercion than by the everyday tissue of lies. But, again, only in Germany has it really been tried, and even there they somehow did not dare to use the word truth. Instead, the parliamentary commission, chaired by an East German former dissident priest, was cumbersomely called the “Enquete Commission in the German Bundestag [for the] ‘Treatment of the Past and Consequences of the SED-Dictatorship in Germany’” (SED being the initials of the East German communist party). Hundreds of witnesses were heard, expert reports were commissioned, proceedings were covered in the media. We now have a report of 15,378 pages—and a successor Enquete Commission is working on another. There are problems with this report. The language is often ponderous. Some of the historical judgments represent compromises among the West German political parties, worried about their own pasts. Yet, as documentation, it is invaluable. For students of the East German dictatorship, this may yet be what the records of the Nuremberg trials are for the student of the Third Reich.

  In Poland and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the national commissions of inquiry concentrated on major crises in the history of the communist state: Solidarity and the Prague Spring. In each case, the focus was on the Soviet connection. Who “invited” the Red Army to invade Czechoslovakia in August 1968? Who was responsible for martial law in Poland in 1981? In Hungary, too, official inquiries have concentrated on the 1956 revolution and the Soviet invasion that crushed it. So, instead of exploring what Poles did to Poles, Czechs and Slovaks to Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians to Hungarians, each nation dwells on the wrongs done to it by the Soviet Union. Instead of quietly reflecting, as Havel suggested, on the personal responsibility that each and everyone had for sustaining the communist regime, people unite in righteous indignation at the traitors who invited the Russians in.

  Any explanation for the absence of wider truth commissions must be speculative. Part of the explanation, at least, seems to lie in this combination of two elements: the historically defensible but also comfortable conviction that the dictatorship was ultimately imposed from outside and the uneasy knowledge that almost everyone had done something to sustain the dictatorial system.

  Another kind of history lesson is less formal and ritualistic but requires permissive state action. This is to open the archives of the preceding regime to scholars, journalists, writers, filmmakers—and then to let a hundred documentaries bloom. Yet again, Germany has gone farthest, much helped by the fact that the East German state ceased to exist on 3 October 1990. Virtually all the archives of the former GDR are open and provide a marvelous treasure trove for the study of a communist state. I say “virtually all” because a notable exception is the archive of the East German foreign ministry, in which are held most of the records of the often sycophantic conversations that West German politicians conducted with East German leaders. In opening the archives, West German politicians have thus fearlessly spared nobody—except themselves.

  It has also helped that Germany has such a strong tradition of writing contemporary history. The research department of the Gauck Authority, for example, is staffed partly by younger historians from the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, famous for its studies of Nazism. Theirs are strange careers: progressing smoothly from the study of one German dictatorship to another, while all the time living in a peaceful, prosperous German democracy. The results are impressive. Whereas a West German schoolchild in the 1950s could learn precious little about Nazi Germany, every German schoolchild today can already learn a great deal about the history of communist Germany. Whether they are interested is another question.

  Elsewhere in Central Europe, the opening of the archives has been more uneven, partly because of the political attitudes I have described, partly for simple lack of resources and trained personnel. Yet here, too, there have been some interesting publications based on the new archive material, and school textbooks have improved significantly. In Poland, there has been a lively intellectual and political debate about the nature, achievements, and (il)legitimacy of the Polish People’s Republic. In Prague, a new Institute for Contemporary History concerns itself with the history of Czechoslovakia from 1939 to 1992. In Hungary, a whole institute has been established solely to study the history of the 1956 revolution. It has roughly one staff member per day of the revolution.

  Beyond this, what Germany has uniquely pioneered is the systematic opening of the secret-police files, administered by the Gauck Authority, to everyone—whether spied upon or spying—who has a fil
e and still wants to know its contents. The power is in the hands of the individual citizen. You can choose to read your file or not to read it. The informers on your file are identified only by code names, but you can request formal confirmation of their true identities. Then you have to decide whether to confront them or not to confront them; to say something publicly, just to tell close friends, or to close it in your heart. This is the most deep and personal kind of history lesson.

  Maddeningly, the Gauck Authority’s statistics do not enable us to say exactly how many people have gone through this experience. But a reasonable estimate is that more than 400,000 people have seen their Stasi files, over 300,000 are still waiting to do so, and more than 350,000 have learned with relief—or was it with disappointment?—that they had no file. I can think of no remotely scientific way to assess this unique experiment. People have made terrible personal discoveries: The East German peace activist Vera Wollenberger, for example, found that her husband had been informing on her throughout their married life. Only they can say if it is better that they know.

  There has also been irresponsible, sensationalist media coverage—denouncing people as informers without any of the due caution about the sources or circumstances. In German, such exposure is revealingly called “outing.” Here is a structural problem of treating the past in societies with free and sensation-hungry media. Against this, however, one has to put the many cases in which people have emerged from the experience with gnawing suspicions laid to rest, enhanced understanding, and a more solid footing for their present lives.

  Elsewhere in Central Europe, the German experiment was at first strongly criticized and resisted, on the grounds that it would reopen old wounds and unjustly destroy reputations, and that the Polish or Hungarian secret-police records are much more unreliable than the German ones. (This last comment is made with a kind of inverted national pride.) Officers put innocent people down as informers or simply invented them—the so-called dead souls—in order to meet their assigned plan targets for the number of informers. Many files were later destroyed, others tampered with, and so on. So, instead, the secret-police files have remained in the hands of the current interior ministry or still active security service and have been used selectively by them and their political masters. Limited access has been given to just a few individual scholars.

  Yet, interestingly, this is now changing. Hungary has provided for individuals to request copies of their own files. The precedent is clearly the German one, although the Hungarian rules demand even more extensive “anonymization”—that is, blacking out of the names on the copies. The Hungarian Gauck Authority has a simple but rather sinister name: the Historical Office. In sanctioning this access, the Hungarian Constitutional Court drew heavily on the judgments of the German Constitutional Court, notably in using the interesting concept of “informational self-determination.” In plain English, I have a right to know what information the state has collected on me and, within limits, to determine what is done with it.

  The Czech Republic has passed a law that provides for people who were Czechoslovak citizens at any time between 1948 and 1990 to read their own files, under similar conditions. The first applications were accepted in June 1997. Thus far there has been remarkably little debate about individual cases, and few prominent former dissidents have applied to see their files. Perhaps this will change when sensational material is found and published, but at the moment one is told in Prague that there seems to be little public interest. There is a strong sense that the Czechs have already “been through all this” with the great lustration debate of the early 1990s.

  Poland is now following suit. The new post-Solidarity government has committed itself to making the secret-police files accessible to individual citizens. When I was there in mid-November 1997, a lively debate was going on about how best to do this. Frequent reference was made to the German experience. In the parliamentary debate on the government’s program, the Catholic nationalist leader of the Solidarity Electoral Alliance, Marian Krzaklewski, called for “lustration archive on the model of the Gauck Authority.”

  Altogether, it is remarkable to see how, in this of all areas, Germany has been not just a pioneer but also, in the end, something of a model for its eastern neighbors. Who would have imagined fifty years ago that, when it came to dealing with their own difficult past, the Poles would turn to the Germans for an example?

  5

  There are no easy generalizations and certainly no universal laws. So much depends on the character of the preceding regime and the nature of the transition. Even my first, basic question—Whether?—does not have a simple answer. The ancient case for forgetting is much stronger than it is comfortable for historians to recall. Successful democracies have been built on a conscious policy of forgetting—although at a cost, which often has not appeared until a generation later.

  In Central Europe after communism, Germany’s policy of a systematic, unprecedentedly comprehensive “treatment” of the past contrasted with Poland’s initial policy of drawing a “thick line” between the past and the present. But the Polish attempt to follow the Spanish example did not work as it had in Spain. Within a year, the issue of the communist past had come back to bedevil Polish politics, and continues to be used in a messy, partisan way, with ill-documented accusations being made about past collaboration with the communist authorities. My conclusion is that if it is to be done it should be done quickly, in an orderly, explicit, and legal way. This also has the great advantage of allowing people then to move on—not necessarily to forget, perhaps not even to forgive, but simply to go forward with that knowledge behind them.

  If the questions “Whether?” and “When?” are thus closely connected, so are the questions “Who?” and “How?” In Germany, the process has been made both easier and more difficult by West German participation: easier administratively; more difficult psychologically. Yet, doing it among themselves, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks have all too humanly been inclined to focus on the responsibilities of others rather than their own.

  There are places in the world where trials have been both necessary and effective. In Central Europe, trials have been—with a few important exceptions—of only questionable necessity and even more dubious efficacy. The attempt to use existing national laws has been contorted and selective and often ended in simple failure. It has hardly exemplified or strengthened the rule of law. This is one area in which the international component may be a real advantage.

  Difficult though it is, the least bad way forward must be to try to establish a firm international framework of law on “crimes against humanity” or “war crimes.” Building on the Hague tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda, we need to move toward the permanent international criminal court for which Aryeh Neier, Richard Goldstone, and others have eloquently argued—a court to which all dictators, everywhere, should know that they may one day have to answer. Meanwhile, the Hungarian path of writing the existing international law into domestic law is an interesting precedent. It was, however, confined to just one event, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, now more than forty years past, and its implementation has been plagued by all the problems of evidence that we know so well from the trials of Nazi criminals in recent decades.

  As for purges, there is probably no such thing as a good purge, even if it is politely called lustration. The Czechoslovak lustration was prompt and crudely effective but deeply flawed by procedural injustice. The German “gaucking” has been procedurally more just: careful, individual, appealable. But it has sometimes been perverted by media abuse, and it has suffered from elephantiasis. Did postmen and train drivers really need to be gaucked? Again we come back to the question of who is doing it, for would the West Germans ever have done this to themselves?

  Yet Poland has shown the price of not purging. The Hungarians, with their nice habit of taking the German model and then improving on it, came up with a defensible refinement: It applied careful individual scrutiny only to those seeking s
enior positions in public life. But this was seven years late. Now Poland has finally followed suit, with a law that is probably the most scrupulous of them all.

  I believe the third path—that of history lessons—has been the most promising in Central Europe. Much of the comparative literature comes to a similar conclusion for other countries: What is somewhat biblically called “truth-telling” is both the most desirable and the most feasible way to grapple with a difficult past. This is what West Germany did best in relation to Nazism, at least from the 1960s on. What united Germany has done in this regard since 1990 has been exemplary: the parliamentary commission, the open archives, the unique opportunity for a very personal history lesson given by access to the Stasi files.

  To advocate the third path does, of course, assign a very special place to contemporary historians. In fact, I do think that if you ask “Who is best equipped to do justice to the past?” the answer is, or at least should be, historians. But this is also a heavy responsibility. Truth is a big word, so often abused in Central Europe during the short, rotten twentieth century that people there have grown wary of it. Studying the legacy of a dictatorship, one is vividly reminded how difficult it is to establish any historical truth. In particular, across such a change of regime, you discover how deeply unreliable is any retrospective testimony.

  Yet studying this subject also strengthens one’s allergy to some of the bottomless, ludic frivolities of postmodernist historiography. For this is too serious a business. Carelessly used, the records of a state that worked by organized lying—and especially the poisonous, intrusive files of a secret police—can ruin lives. To interpret them properly tests the critical skills that historians apply routinely to a medieval charter or an eighteenth-century pamphlet. But, having worked intensively with such records and read much else based on them, I know that it can be done. It is not true, as is often claimed, that this material is so corrupted that one cannot write reliable history on the basis of it. The evidence has to be weighed with very special care. The text must be put in the historical context. Interpretation needs both intellectual distance and the essential imaginative sympathy with all the men and women involved—even the oppressors. But, with these old familiar disciplines, there is a truth that can be found. Not a single, absolute Truth with a capital T but still a real and important one.