Nearly 25 years after the collapse of the "Deutsche Demokratische Republik" some high-school history teachers are telling their students ""Es war nicht alles schlecht in der DDR". Dictatorships, they teach, are not so bad - as long as you "play by the rules".
Sound incredible? That is the experience of the writer Roman Grafe, who has been visiting high schools around Germany and telling students about the total repression of freedom in the former East Germany. Often, these talks elicit hostile reactions from the faculty. At the Comenius-Schule in Stendal a "history teacher" lashed out at Grafe:
"Ich habe mich wohlgefühlt in der DDR", .... Und Sie haben heute die DDR schlechtgemacht. Wenn man sich in Diktaturen an die Regeln hält, passiert einem nichts. Ich frage mich, warum Sie wieder hergekommen sind, wenn Sie Stendal nur schlechtmachen."
("Life was good in the GDR... And you come here today to denigrate the GDR. Nothing can happen to you in a dictatorship if you play by the rules. I really wonder why you came if you just want to say bad things about Stendal.")
At another school he was told by a "history teacher":
"Ich habe eine andere Meinung über die DDR als Sie. Ich habe direkt am Grenzzaun gewohnt, mich hat der Zaun nicht gestört. Wir konnten nach Ungarn und Bulgarien reisen, das hat uns genügt."
("I have different opinion than you about the GDR. I lived next to the border fence- it never once bothered me. We could travel to Hungary or Bulgaria- that was plenty for us.")
Comments like this are made openly to a vistor to the schools. But what are teachers telling their students when no outsiders are around? What are students learning about recent history? And could this Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old East Germany) result in hostility or plain indifference to democratic principles?
Remember West Germany 20 years after WW2: Justice, police, secret services, armed forces etc. etc. etc.... Unlike the infrastructure democracy wasn't rebuilt from scratch, it was imposed, but the regime change would have been impossible without those then quickly and often lightly denazified ranks, officials and experts of the former state. During WW2, police units from Hamburg for example murdered tens of thousands of people, has anyone been put on trial and found guilty? There was a wall of silence versus the "Nestbeschmutzer": Unter den Talaren der Muff von 1000 Jahren!
In the GDR, things were different and perhaps easier to adopt. One dictatorship was replaced just by another, they didn't even try denazification: Nazi Germany, that was West Germany, the former Nazi ranks then mercenaries on the US payroll. It was West Germany that has lost the war, East Germany has rather won it shoulder to shoulder with Russia's red army. The dictatorship had changed from brown to red, but for the ordinary people life didn't change dramatically. No questions, only orders, the beauty of militarized life.
The people in East Germany 'enjoyed' almost 60 years of dictatorship until 1989, much, much longer than the people in West Germany. We can't be surprised about some Ostalgia here and there. All in all, I suppose phenomena like these would be found in any post-dictatorship society on ths planet - unless any person found on the wrong side of history had been executed. But surely no democracy would arise from such a blood bath.
Posted by: koogleschreiber | April 10, 2014 at 10:54 PM
"I suppose phenomena like these would be found in any post-dictatorship society"
Poland, Spain, Brazil?
Seems to be particularly pronounced in east Germany.
Posted by: David | April 14, 2014 at 10:07 AM