Stated memory: East Germany and the Holocaust

Abstract

by Thomas C. Fox. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999. 177 pp. $55.00.As Germany agonizes over its latest wave of neo-Nazi violence, many fingers have been pointed at former East Germany. In ten years since reunification, a higher proportion of violent xenophobic attacks have taken place in former communist zone than in west. Unanswered questions have resurfaced: Did totalitarian East German state not only fail to destroy Nazi ideology, but actually ensure its survival? Is there a connection between today's right-wing skinheads and East German approach to Holocaust education?In his book, Stated Memory: East Germany and Holocaust, Thomas C. Fox goes a long way toward answering these questions. The book provides a concise and thorough overview, both in a technical and interpretative sense, of how Holocaust was seen in divided Germany from 1945 until today. The analysis, which calls upon other recent works such as Jeffrey Herf's 1997 book, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys, is both fascinating and depressing.Fox aims to show that East German state, with its highly controlled public sphere, attempted to reorganize, censor, and orchestrate Holocaust in a massive effort to utilize `Jewish question' for its own political ends.... Ultimately, author suggests that a new will have to be written by united Germany, overcoming lingering power of East Germany's self-staging as an antifascist state.This complicated topic is only beginning to be researched, but facets have proved tantalizing to historians, journalists, and social scientists. Much thought has been given to fact that East Germany's official relationship with Nazi history differed markedly from that in west. Fox's book is one among several recent works by non-German scholars confronting topic. Among others are Herf's book, as well as Tina Rosenberg's 1995 book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, and Ian Buruma's thought-provoking 1994 work, Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Vintage). Of these titles, Fox's is among most concise and scholarly, while others have advantage in style and accessibility to general reader.There is a pervasive belief among western historians that East Germany did not exorcise its Nazi ghosts as successfully as did west. Some in east have taken issue with such conclusions. But fact is that East German schoolbooks have been scrapped, teachers have been reeducated, and memorial sites revamped since reunification in 1990.In his book, Fox, Associate Professor of German and Chair of Department of Modern Languages and Classics at University of Alabama, examines three main vehicles for transmission of political message: historiography, concentration camp memorials, and literature and film. The stamp of socialist ideology may be seen in all three realms. Among Fox's conclusions are: that East Germany's state-organized discourse used Holocaust to promote an image of Socialist straggle against fascism; that foundation myth of anti-fascist straggle enabled some Jewish survivors to remain loyal to East German state; and that state used the language of traditional European anti-Semitism, whether through anti-Zionist propaganda, refusing to recognize genocide against Jews and to pay restitution to survivors, or persecution of Jewish citizens in 1950s.Mr. Fox does not excuse West Germany for its whitewashing of Nazi crimes in first two post-war decades. But he points out that, while East German system quickly became rigid and fixed, West German society gradually became more flexible and open. [I]t is possible to argue that, despite denial and ever-present resistance, West Germans indeed developed an important dialogue on subject of Holocaust, writes Fox.In west, guilt may have been minimized or denied in 50s and 60s, but in east guilt was shoved westward. …