Last week Marianne Birthler, head of the Stasi Document-Authority, released a 1972 directive from a Stasi officer which was supposed to the "smoking gun" many had been searching for: irrefutable proof that the East German SED ordered guards to kill anyone fleeing over the border. Der Spiegel has a photocopy of the 7-page directive – written in the most abominable, semi-literate "Stasi-speak" – on its Web site. The publication of this document has unleashed strong emotions; I have been following the developments with interest all week.
On the one hand, the document was considerably less important than what Frau Birthler first maintained. It was not typed on any official letterhead, and it was issued by a fairly low-level officer. Upon closer reading, it refers to the shooting of deserting guards and officers, not to the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Then Der Spiegel discovered that the "sensational" document had been displayed in the Authority’s museum for years, so there was nothing really new about it. The fact that Frau Birthler publicized the shoot-to-kill order on the anniversary date of the construction of the Berlin wall was viewed with a great deal of skepticism. Was she merely trying to preserve her job, and with that the relevance of the Authority? There are now calls to shut down the Authority altogether and transfer the Stasi files to the Federal Archive, where they can be open to the public.
Some in the German media have to used this affair to point out that Germany suffers from historical amnesia 18 years after the collapse of GDR.
Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader for Germany’s governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the Berliner Zeitung on Thursday that his party would take steps to raise awareness about eastern Germany’s communist past."We have worked enormously hard to deal with the past of the Third Reich’s terror system and continue to do so, but we’ve done much too little when it comes to dealing with the GDR dictatorship," he said. "When looking at the alarming lack of knowledge about the GDR past among the younger generation, we should use the current debate to clarify who was responsible."
Reinhard Jirgl, writing in the NZZ, compared the GDR to Nazi Germany, and wants those responsible at all levels to be put on trial:
"Not only are the perpetrators at all levels of responsibility comparable [with those in the Nuremburg Trials] but also their respective systems – the Nazi and the Stalinist systems, which are as alike as two brothers. Indeed, they must be compared with each other; otherwise we would lack important knowledge about the functioning of dictatorships. After all, no political system is innately immune against the return of such manifestations! And what’s more, a ‘murky’ form of justice such as that resulting from the Nuremberg Trials is still better than no justice at all. Yet the Stalinist criminals of the GDR regime have yet to receive the sentence they deserve."
Somewhere between 400 and 1000 East German citizens were killed crossing the border during the GDR’s existence. Does it really make sense to drag out comparisons with the Third Reich or Stalin’s terror regime where millions perished? Have we forgotten the realities of the Cold War just 18 years after its demise, where two powers were threatening with nuclear annihilation, and the East German border was the flashpoint? At least one German blogger has pointed out the hypocrisy of feigning outrage over the shoot-to-kill order, while cheering interior minister Schäuble’s call for targeted killing of suspected terrorists, or Germany’s involvement in the NATO forces in Afghanistan, where US bombings routinely result in the killings of dozens innocent civilians. Lutz Herden writes in Freitag that the problem is not so much historical amnesia, but the banality of historical understanding in the German media:
Das Bedrängende, ja Beängstigende ist die Erfahrung, dass Umgang mit Geschichte immer grobschlächtiger wird, immer mehr zur Glaubensfrage degradiert ist und sich jedem tieferen Verständnis historischer Zusammenhänge verschließt. Es mutet an wie eine postume Rache der DDR, dass die Beschäftigung mir ihr ohne ein beachtliches Maß an geistiger Banalität nicht mehr auskommt.
