Constructions of Victimhood Remembering the Victims of State Socialism in Germany

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT CONSTRUCTIONS OF VICTIMHOOD REMEMBERING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM IN GERMANY

David Clarke Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict

Series Editors Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Britt Baillie Centre for Urban Conficts Research University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and confict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and confict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, signifcations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and confict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conficted pasts. Dr. Ihab Saloul is associate professor of cultural studies, founder and research vice-director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM) at University of Amsterdam. Saloul’s interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, confict and trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East. Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture (AHM), and Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Confict and War at VU University Amsterdam. Van der Laarse’s research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence. Dr. Britt Baillie is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand and a founding member of the Centre for Urban Confict Studies at the University of Cambridge. Baillie’s interests include the politics of cultural heritage, urban heritage, religious heritage, living heritage, heritage as commons, and contested heritage.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638 David Clarke Constructions of Victimhood

Remembering the Victims of State Socialism in Germany David Clarke School of Modern Languages Cardiff University Cardiff, South Glamorgan, UK

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict ISBN 978-3-030-04803-7 ISBN 978-3-030-04804-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962746

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover illustration: Christian Beier/CBpictures/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath for funding research trips that were crucial to the completion of this book. Many current and former colleagues have offered their encouragement along the way, in particular Dr. Nina Parish, Professor Anna Bull, Professor Hanna Diamond and Professor Bill Niven. My thanks go also to interviewees and others in Germany who shared their experiences and expertise, as well as providing me with valuable access to archive material: Dr. Gerhard Sälter of the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer; Ingolf Notzke of Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau e.V.; Sylvia Wähling and Dr. Ralf Marten of Menschenrechtszentrum Cottbus e.V.; Stefanie Kröger of the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung); the staff of the library of the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. I am grateful to the publishers of the following earlier versions of material that appears in this book for their permission to re-use it here: “Compensating the Victims of Human Rights Abuses in the German Democratic Republic: The Struggle for Recognition,” German Politics 12 (1), 2012: 17–33. “Constructing Victimhood in Divided Germany: The Case of the Association of the Victims of Stalinism (1950–1989)”, Memory Studies. Online. 13 January 2017.

v vi Acknowledgements

“Understanding Controversies over Memorial Museums: The Case of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, Potsdam”, History and Memory 29 (1), 2017, 41–71. “Representing the Experience of Victims at the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum,” in Cultural Practices of Victimhood, edited by Martin Hoondert, Paul Mutsaers and William Arfman, 83–103 (London: Routledge, 2019). Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Malcolm Allison. He kept telling me to fnish this book, which is dedicated to him. Contents

1 Introduction: Thinking About the Victims of State Socialism 1 Considering Victimhood 1 Coming to Terms with the GDR 5 Reconsidering the Victims of the State Socialism 11 Policies for the Past 20 The Structure of the Book 24 Bibliography 26

2 Victimhood in the Politics of Memory and Transitional Justice 33 The Politics of Memory and Transitional Justice 33 Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and the Constructivist Paradigm 43 Victims and the Political System 52 Victimhood and Protest 57 Bibliography 65

3 Victims’ Organizations and the Construction of Victimhood 71 Organizations Between Politics and Protest 71 The Association of the Victims of Stalinism in the Cold War 79 The VOS in the Era of Détente 92

vii viii Contents

Challenges to the VOS 103 Social Democrats as Victims of State Socialism in the Cold War 112 Victims of State Socialism in the SPD in the Era of Ostpolitik 119 Social Democrat Victims of State Socialism and the Reunifcation Process 129 Victims of State Socialism in the SPD after 1998 134 Conclusion 136 Bibliography 139

4 Compensating the Victims of State Socialism 145 Compensation and Transitional Justice 145 Compensating the Victims of the Second World War in the 1950s 148 From the HHG to the “Victim Pension” 162 Compensating Young Victims of the SED Regime: Reframing Victimhood 181 Fighting for Compensation for Forced Labour 195 Conclusion 207 Bibliography 209

5 Memorial Museums for the Victims of State Socialism Controversies and Conficts 221 The Memorial Museum as an Instrument of Transitional Justice and Memory Politics 221 Museum Professionals, Historians and System of Science 224 Commemorating the Victims of the Berlin Wall 234 The Confict Between Victims’ Organizations and Museum Professionals at the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum in Potsdam 258 Victim-Led Memorialization at the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum 273 Conclusion 284 Bibliography 286

6 Conclusion: The Future of Victimhood 297 Bibliography 303

Index 305 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Thinking About the Victims of State Socialism

Considering Victimhood This is a book about constructions of victimhood. It intervenes in two felds of contemporary academic enquiry, in which the fgure of the victim is of central importance: the politics of memory and transitional justice. The centrality of the victim to these research areas, which both analyse the various means by which societies “come to terms” with diffcult pasts, also needs to be seen within a wider cultural context, in which victimhood has become a status both aspired to and often fercely contested. This is not to say that individuals in the contemporary world aspire to suffering, but rather that those who have suffered seek recognition of victim status (both individually and collectively) from the political system and from society more widely when pursuing their claims for justice. Joseph A. Amato argues that suffering has not always been read- ily convertible into a victim status that has such political potency. Particularly in the context of a pre-secular Europe, Christianity, he proposes, provided a framework within which individual hardship could be understood and accepted. Great amounts of suffering could be experienced by ordinary people without this necessarily being converted into a demand for political action. With the advent of secularized modernity, however, no one authority can give meaning to suffering. As we see with the coming of the First World War in particular, the alienating

© The Author(s) 2019 1 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_1 2 D. CLARKE functionality of the various social systems, whether they be political, military or economic, appears to create un-legitimated suffering which, for want of a meaning-giving authority either within or beyond society, demands redress (Amato 1990, pp. 43–72). The power of the victim role in terms of formulating such demands is evident from identity-based social movements of the latter half of the twentieth century, in which marginalized groups have sought to resist their persecution by converting their degraded status, which others had previously regarded as in itself a justifcation for discrimination, into an argument for fairer treatment on the basis of unjust victimization (Torpey 2005, p. 41). Particularly in the United States, ideological conservatives have fought hard to resist the power of such claims to victimhood, arguing forcefully that they represent unfounded demands from the undeserv- ing, directed against the normative majority, who in their turn become the victims of a kind of emotional blackmail from groups who are allegedly unwilling to take responsibility for their own destiny (Rothe 2011, p. 23). This is hardly a new argument, reactivating as it does the claims of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1996): for the philosopher, this elevation of the victim fgure in Christian religion is a conspiracy of the weak against the strong who oppress them. In the contemporary German-speaking countries, too, the perception that the adoption of victim status has increasingly become a vehicle for attracting “money and attention” is also evident (Breitenfellner 2013, p. 30).1 When the suffering addressed by the adoption or attribution of victim status is historical in nature, the fgure of the Holocaust victim often serves as a model, at least in the Western world. The duty to remember the Holocaust and its victims, both those who survived the horror and those who did not, increasingly became a focus of attention in Western Europe and the United States following the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. This trial gave prominence to survivor testimony above and beyond the need to establish the nature of Eichmann’s activities, ushering in what Annette Wieviorka has defned as the “era of witness” (2006, p. 56). In this new epoch, the Holocaust survivor offers a point of moral orientation for the contemporary world. By commemorating their suffering in various ways, societies not only attempt to address the continued traumatic suffering of the survivors and the bereaved, but also

1 All translation from the German are my own. 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 3 demonstrate their commitment to the lessons of that suffering in terms of the values of democracy and human rights. In a similar vein, Erica Bouris argues that the conception of victimhood that emerges from the context of the Holocaust is that of the “moral beacon” (2007, p. 32). In other words, these are subjects deemed not simply to bear witness to the horrors of the past, but whose suffering accords them the status of moral guides for those who come after. Despite the apparently overwhelming imperative to remember victims of egregious human rights abuses, whether in the Holocaust or in other cases, there are several reasons to be wary of this model. Firstly, as a number of commentators have observed, the act of conferring a purely moral and innocent status on victims of such abuses elides much of the historical reality of their experiences, when horrendous circumstances often confronted them with terrible choices that were necessary for survival, yet which left their own sense of morality comprised (Levi 1989, p. 59; Spelman 1997, p. 74; Enns 2012). Secondly, it has been argued, the elevation of the victims of historical injustice may allow those who have not suffered such harm to enter into a trivializing and highly emotional form of over-identifcation with the “pain of others” (Sontag 2004), rooted more in the individual or group psychological needs of those expressing such “mourning” than in any real understanding of the situation of those persecuted others (Jureit and Schneider 2010; Rothe 2011). Thirdly, where identifcation with victims of more distant atrocities is involved (for example in the prominence of Holocaust memory in the United States), such memory has been described by some scholars using Freud’s notion of “screen memory,” arguing that a concentration on sometimes distant traumatic events for which one cannot be held responsible can be a means of side-stepping engagement with more trou- bling local histories (Levi 2007, pp. 125–126). The division implicitly proposed above between claims to victimhood based on present suffering in the case of social issues, on the one hand, and historical claims to victimhood that seek redress in the present, on the other, is clearly also porous. In a post-Cold War political climate that has been characterized by the ascendancy of a neo-liberal consensus that seeks to “roll back” the state’s role in promoting social justice, an ascendancy that has been paralleled by the rise of concerns about historical memory, it is arguable that issues of historical justice have come to stand in for claims for social justice in the present that can no longer be so easily articulated (Thompson 2015, p. 46). 4 D. CLARKE

In summary, we can observe that, while remaining a key feature of contemporary Western culture, victimhood is defned and made signif- icant in a complex context, in which questions of morality, (collective) identity, justice and power are invoked. Against this background, it will be the key task of this study to consider from a theoretical point of view how it is possible to understand the meaning attached to the fgure of the victim in the more specifc contexts of memory politics and transitional justice. Both of these felds, whether in terms of their practice or in terms of their academic analysis, refer to the fgure of the victim in various ways, yet the ways in which they do so remain to be fully understood. In fact, although both theory and practice attribute a central role to victims, the various means by which such victimhood is constructed, and the consequences that follow from such constructions in terms of the formulation of policy for dealing with diffcult pasts, is very often passed over. The specifc historical context for exploring these issues will be Germany’s coming to terms with the fate of the victims of state socialism, both under the Soviet occupation of the territory that became the German Democratic Republic (GDR; also known as East Germany) in October 1949, and subsequently under the rule of the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) until 1990. Bracketing these historical periods together under the term “state socialism” is arguably problematic, given that the Soviet occupation and the early history of the GDR were qualitatively different historical periods in comparison, for example, with the post-Stalinist GDR of later decades, not least in terms of the differing forms of political repression that were common in those periods. However, in Germany today it is common for the victims of historical injustice under Soviet and SED rule to be treated if not as a single group, then as a series of groups who have important commonali- ties; whether by the institutions created to preserve the memory of their experiences, or by the compensation schemes that have been put in place to make good their suffering. Victims’ organizations, too, often encompass individuals from different phases in the development of East Germany from the Soviet occupation onwards, even if specifc groups do exist to focus on particular forms of historically more specifc suffering. Although in the German context it is not common to speak of all of these individuals as victims of “state socialism,” it is a practical term to use here as it encompasses basic shared features of all of the phases of communist rule in eastern Germany after the end of the Second World War. Here David Lane’s defnition of state socialism is a useful one: 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 5

a society distinguished by a state-centred, more-or-less centrally adminis- tered economy, controlled by a dominant communist party which seeks, on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and through the agency of the state, to mobilize the population to reach a classless society. (Lane 1996, p. 5)

To this I would only add that the “mobilization of the population” cited by Lane must also be understood here in the negative sense that those citizens who could not be co-opted into the state socialist project, or who were perceived as a threat to that project, were subject to various forms of repression from the period of the Soviet occupation until the demise of the SED regime; repression whose key aim was to maintain the communists’ hold on power. Although those forms of repression evolved over time, they were nevertheless always instruments in the service of the state socialist project as outlined in Lane’s defnition.

Coming to Terms with the GDR Following German unifcation, considerable resources were invested in the attempt to address the wrong-doing carried out in the name of the socialist experiment in East Germany. The frst post-revolution government of the GDR, still headed by a member of the ruling SED, had already begun to formulate measures to rehabilitate and compensate the GDR’s political prisoners and others who had been persecuted by the regime, and the frst democratically elected parliament (Volkskammer) and the last government of the GDR continued to develop these measures; which were, however, only partly incorporated into the Unifcation Treaty with the Federal Republic (Widmaier 1999, pp. 106–164). At the same time, initial steps were taken by GDR courts to prosecute offcials of the regime, for instance those who had been involved in rigging local elections of May 1989, who were charged under GDR law with corrup- tion and misuse of public offce (Marxen et al. 2007, p. 11). From the civil rights movement (Bürgerrechtsbewegung), which had provided one of the sparks that ignited the revolution against the rule of the SED, came the demand to investigate the human rights abuses that had characterized the GDR regime. The most important product of these demands, expressed most spectacularly in the occupation of Ministry for State Security (MfS) premises in Berlin and elsewhere to stop the destruction of secret records, was the establishment of an offce dedicated to allowing the public access to their personal fles: the 6 D. CLARKE

Agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records (Behörde des Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, or BStU). The establishment of the BStU, however, led to considerable debate about whether the exposing of informants who worked for the MfS and the right of individuals to see their fles might be harmful both to the individuals concerned and to the general social climate (Miller 1999, pp. 19–34). The early 1990s were characterized by a series of attacks on prominent fgures who had informed for the MfS at various points in their lives, and many came to see such attacks as a weapon with which primarily western commentators sought to delegitimize not just the GDR state, but socialist ideas in general (Sa’adah 1998, p. 101). Even though debates about the MfS and its informants tended to dominate the media, the fnal months of the GDR’s existence and the early years of unifcation were also characterized by a process of uncover- ing a whole range of aspects of GDR society and its history that the control of the SED had either kept hidden or elided from East Germany’s offcial account of history. This process of revelation included the publication of censored texts and the showing of censored flms, particularly those banned during the cultural freeze ushered in by the 11th Plenary Session of the SED’s Central Committee in December 1965. There was also open discussion of political persecution, such as the jailing of Walter Janka and other socialist intellectuals in the aftermath of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956, and a breaking of the taboo the SED had placed on discussing the Soviets’ internment of German citizens both in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, but also in labour camps in the Soviet Union itself (Klonovsky and von Flocken 1991). The early years of German unifcation were characterized by attempts to prosecute those who had run the socialist state, a project that was to become one of the most controversial strands of the unifed German state’s dealing with the GDR past. The main obstacle was the legal principle that nobody can be prosecuted for an action that was not criminal at the time they committed it, or nulla poena sine lege (“no penalty without a law”). As Paul Cooke points out, by acknowledging the legality of the GDR state in the Unifcation Treaty, the Federal Republic was forced to regard actions taken in the service of the SED regime as essentially legal, unless they would have represented a breach of the GDR law at the time (Cooke 2005, p. 30). Although prosecutors attempted to modify this principle via recourse to the so-called Radbruch formula, which 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 7 allows for the punishment of actions regarded as clearly in contraven- tion of human rights even if they are formally legal when committed, this approach was soon dropped in favour of prosecuting GDR offcials according to the laws of the now defunct East German state (McAdams 2001, pp. 32–33; Cooke 2005, pp. 31–33). Views on the success or otherwise of these judicial endeavours remain divided, but the large gap between the number of cases investigated, which James A. McAdams estimates at over 62,000 (2001, p. 2) and the small number of cases actually brought to court, numbering just over a thousand, left may Germans sceptical about whether the time and resources invested had been justifed (Borneman 1997, p. 100). In particular, former civil rights movement activists and victims of the regime felt that their cause had been betrayed. Bärbel Bohley, a prominent fgure in that movement, and later a champion of victims’ rights, famously declared that, while opponents of the GDR had demanded “justice,” all they got was “the rule of law” (Jahn 1992). By 2005 this judicial coming to terms with the GDR past was complete (Marxen et al. 2007, p. 3), yet it by no means represents the only approach by which the unifed Germany, and the German state in particular, still attempts to deal with the GDR’s legacy. Projects to provide public education about the GDR past and to attempt to form the nation’s collective memory of the Soviet occupation and state socialism in East Germany have been and remain an important area of state activity, channelled through a number of institutions, such as the Federal Centre for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung), its regional counterparts (Landesstellen für politische Bildung), and the state-subsidised Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur), founded in 1998 using capital confscated from SED organizations (Sack 2016, p. 82). The latter is particularly signifcant because it distributes funds to grass-roots organizations with an interest in the GDR, such as the civil society organization that runs a museum and archive in the former MfS headquarters in the Normannenstraße in Berlin (Baron 2000). In general, as Thomas Lindenberger has noted, this offcially sponsored memory culture has been characterized by its focus on power structures and ideology, political domination and repression, themes that are often juxtaposed with representations of opposition and resistance (Lindenberger 2001, p. 45). 8 D. CLARKE

Although it might appear that the post-unifcation German state has made considerable efforts to propagate an image of the GDR as an oppressive dictatorship, representatives of victims’ organizations nevertheless frequently express a sense of betrayal both by the political class and by their fellow citizens, who they regard as playing insuffcient attention to the victims’ plight. Writing in 2008 in Der Stacheldraht (Barbed Wire), the journal of the umbrella victims’ organization, the Union of Victims’ Organizations of Communist Dictatorship (Union der Opferverbände kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft, or UOKG), its then president Rainer Wagner summed up his members’ feelings as follows:

It is against the spirit of the times to openly refer to the bloody legacy of Marx, Engels and Lenin. … 20 years after the peaceful revolution of 1989, we unfortunately have to recognize that our resistance has only been superfcially integrated into the collective memory of the German people. (Wagner 2008)

It has indeed proved more diffcult than one might have expected to establish a negative image of the GDR in post-unifcation Germany, given that this was a state that, while it existed, enjoyed only limited legitimacy among its population, who were eager to overthrow both the government and the state itself as soon as historical circumstances allowed. A number of scholars have made the case that the phenomenon of Ostalgie, a misty-eyed or ironic celebration of all things GDR-related that focuses particularly on East Germany’s popular and consumer culture, can be read as “a kind of counter-memory” (Berdahl 1999, p. 202). In other words, such nostalgia for state socialism is understood as a reaction to what are perceived as western-inspired attempts to discredit the GDR (and its population) in toto, thereby failing to take into account the “normality” of the lives of many citizens, who found ways to accommodate themselves to the prevailing political conditions without necessarily supporting them (e.g. Cooke 2005; Naughton 2002, p. 19; Sierp 2009, p. 51). As Mary Fulbrook has argued, “[a] ctively sustaining the state, feeling one could live a ‘perfectly normal life’ within the GDR, and ultimately critiquing it and contributing to its downfall, were not … mutually incompatible” (Fulbrook 2005, p. 20). Furthermore, in the harsh economic climate of the early 1990s, as western-driven privatization of GDR industry and consequent deindustrialization proceeded apace, former GDR citizens 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 9 quickly began to miss the benefts of full employment, generous social provision and the various forms of state-sponsored sociality that the GDR had provided. The strategy of transitional justice adopted in the immediate aftermath of unifcation, whether it dealt with SED offcials, members of the security services, or with collaborators with the MfS, was notably focused on dealing with the perpetrators at every level of the system, from the Politburo to the ordinary border guard at the Berlin Wall. Among West German political elites, there was a clear perception that this rigorous approach to wrong-doing under the state socialist regime was an answer to the perceived failure of the post-war Federal Republic to properly punish those who had committed crimes under the National Socialist regime (Offe and Poppe 2006, p. 243). At the same time, however, some commentators, such as Daniela Dahn, warned that prosecutions of state offcials would only contribute to East Germans’ sense of being “colonized” by the Federal Republic, especially as it tended to obscure the fact that West Germany had itself deployed political prosecutions and administrative measures targeted at left-wingers and communists during its post-war history, albeit on a much smaller scale (Dahn 1998, pp. 132–148; Gössner 1994). Unsurprisingly, members of the SED elite who had to stand trial after unifcation were quick to mobilize such claims of victors’ justice (Siegerjustiz) (Ahonen 2011, p. 36). However, the evident failure to produce widespread judicial punishment or even consistent civil lustration of those who played important roles in the regime or informed for the hated MfS left many victims of the SED regime with a sense of injustice and, in many respects, material disadvantage in relation to those who had persecuted them. Conservative commentators have also pointed to the relative prosperity and infuence of former regime loyalists in the years since unifcation, and to the failings of transitional justice in dealing with perpetrators (e.g. Knabe 2007; Müller and Hartmann 2009). This dissatisfaction among conservatives with the failure to punish those responsible for perpetuating the SED regime was accompanied, in roughly the frst decade and a half after unifcation, by a tendency to warn of the danger of GDR socialization in terms of the alleged alienation of GDR citizens from the core values underpinning the political, economic and social status quo, in particular in terms of attitudes to personal freedom, self-reliance, individualism and democracy. The term “conservative” should not be understood exclusively in the 10 D. CLARKE party-political sense here, although many such voices have originated from Germany’s conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It should rather be understood in its literal sense, in that those who took up such positions were keen to defend what they regarded as the established values of the pre-unifcation Federal Republic, often now referred to as the “Bonn Republic,” as valid for unifed Germany as a whole. Conversely, cultural values associated with the GDR, such as an anti-individualist emphasis on collectivism, which featured heavily in the propaganda and offcial language of the SED regime, or the authoritarianism allegedly bred into GDR citizens by the GDR’s social institutions, such as its kindergartens and schools, were held to be incompatible with this consensus (Clarke 2002). This discourse on the GDR and its inhabitants developed in parallel with a return to the interpretative paradigm of “totalitarianism” among a number of conservative historians in the early to mid-1990s, a move echoed on the political level by the stance of Helmut Kohl’s government (Niven 2002, p. 58). Such currents had a strong infuence on the deliberations of the frst Parliamentary Investigation (Enquete-Kommission des Bundestags) set up in 1991 to provide something like an offcial state position on the GDR past (Cooke 2005, pp. 41–45). In its academic context, totalitarianism as a model for understanding both National Socialism and the GDR’s state socialism, which had had its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, attempts to analyse different forms of modern dictatorship by identifying common features of fascism and communism under the umbrella of totalitarianism or Gewaltherrschaft (despotism, or literally, rule by violence). In the context of post-unifcation politics, however, the return to such a paradigm has been seen by those on the left as part of a wider strategy of delegitimizing the GDR, which could spill over into a delegitimization of socialism per se, both by drawing parallels with National Socialism and stressing the oppression of the population and the lack of individual self-determination implied in the totalitarian model (e.g. Wippermann 2009). Coming to terms with the GDR following this approach, which still has a considerable infuence on conservative thinking, was therefore very much a way for Germany to put the GDR (and socialism) behind it as something from which nothing good could be salvaged; or an Abrechnung, to use the German term often mobilized in this context (Faulenbach 1999, p. 35). 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 11

Reconsidering the Victims of the State Socialism Such discourses were hardly likely to make former GDR citizens more receptive to the plight of those who had suffered persecution under state socialism, given the apparent instrumentalization of such victimhood by those who sought to emphasize the dictatorial aspects of GDR state and society in an undifferentiated way. To this extent, the perception among victims of the GDR regime that their past and present plight has been afforded insuffcient attention by their fellow citizens is not especially hard to explain. Nor is this lack of attention an entirely post-unifcation phenomenon. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, while the victims of the Soviet occupation and the subsequent SED regime were given a prominent place in the West German political culture of the Cold War, the development of détente between the two post-war states from the mid-1960s onwards had a profound effect on perceptions of those persecuted under state socialism. Many of these individuals who had escaped to the Federal Republic now felt that West Germans no longer recognized them as victims of political oppression deserving of sympathy and support. Among the hundreds of autobiographical accounts by victims, many express a sense of disappointment with the lack of interest and even hostility they experienced on resettling in the Federal Republic. So, for example, Eva-Maria Neumann, who attempted to fee the GDR in 1977, and who was arrested and imprisoned before being bought free by the Federal Republic, describes in her autobiography the attitude of West Germans to her continued activism against political oppression in the Eastern Bloc:

Our campaigns are regarded by many of those around us as a threat to the much-praised policy of détente. … Why are people here blind either to the dangers of the far right or to those of the far left? Can one not, must one not protest against right-wing and left-wing ideologies in the same way? … I am deeply disappointed. This is not how I imagined things would be. (Neumann 2007, p. 273)

Ellen Thiemann, writing about her own experience of arriving in the Federal Republic in the mid-1970s in a memoir originally published in 1984, reports on a sense of hostility against those who had fed the GDR, for example in this encounter with the representative of a housing association: 12 D. CLARKE

“People from the GDR always think they are going to get something for nothing!” Well, I’ve heard people talk like that before. I simply cannot understand why people here, who had the good fortune not to end up under Soviet occupation after the war, are so hostile towards people from the GDR. (Thiemann 2008, p. 309)

Not only have victims of state socialism failed to receive what they regard as proper recognition of their suffering from their fellow citizens, but scholarship has also had diffculties in accounting for and addressing their experiences. If we follow Fulbrook’s approach to GDR society, which entirely properly seeks to recognize a complex picture of accommodation, compromise and relative autonomy in the lives of GDR citizens, the very notion of victimhood becomes less clear-cut. From this perspective, is it not the case that everyone became complicit with such a system on some level, since not even those who resisted did so in every aspect of their lives? Yet, at the same time, all citizens were disadvantaged to some extent by the regime, even if this only amounted to their being required to parrot its offcial doctrines in certain situations or being unable to travel where they chose, so that all of those people who lived under state socialism could potentially claim victim status. As Jon Elster argues, referring to state socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe more generally

[u]nder “mature” communism, there was a genuine sense in which more or less everybody was at the same time victim and co-perpetrator. Roughly speaking, everybody knew that nobody believed in the tenets of the offcial ideology, and yet everybody was compelled to talk and behave as if they did. (Elster 2004, pp. 109–110)

Here Elster agrees, for example, with the perspective of Czech dissident (and later president) Václav Havel, who pointed to the general complicity of the subjects of state socialist regimes in their everyday interactions with power (Havel 1991). This assertion seems at frst glance to set the bar pretty high for recognition of victim status. However, what is more important is to note the implicit assumptions that underpin this judgement. Here, complicity apparently rules out the attribution of victimhood, drawing on a discourse of blameless or perfect victimhood that is only one (arguably fawed) way of constructing that category. This points to a central diffculty in discussing the victims of any political system that produces 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 13 widespread harm, a diffculty that hinges on the very notion of “construction.” While political systems may produce many kinds of harms (“victimization”), Tasmin Amanda Jacoby argues that this is not synonymous with “victimhood,” which is a socially constructed identity (Jacoby 2015, p. 513). In a similar vein, Vincent Druliolle defnes victimhood as

the identity, meaning and status of victims in society … [V]ictimhood is not given. Rather, it is historically and socially constructed, which of course does not mean that victims’ suffering is not “real.” The argument is simply that the status of victims in society is not directly related to the harm suffered. (Druliolle 2015, p. 319)

Not everyone who has suffered a harm under a dictatorship (or even a democratic regime) will consider themselves a victim, nor will they necessarily receive social recognition of that status, nor furthermore offcial recognition of their victimhood by the state. However, to assume the identity of victim is to stake a claim, whether through public activism or not, on some response from the wider society and from the state in particular. It is to stake a claim, in the case of the victims of former regimes, for the recognition of the legacy of that regime as a social problem, that is to say of a problem that demands remedy from state and society (Best 1990). Victims also seek offcial recognition from the state to bind it into obligations to create and promote such remedy, but state and society can only acknowledge victim identity and legal victim status by making a difference between individuals who have suffered in particular ways and the rest of the population, even though the rest of the population may also have suffered harms. In this way, as Christiane Wilke has observed, while a range of individuals may subjectively identify themselves as victims, victimhood increasingly becomes a legal status attributed to specifc groups by the state (Wilke 2007, p. 481). Clearly, a case could be made that there are harms affecting some individuals within a given society, in this case in contemporary Germany as a result of the legacies of persecution under Soviet occupation and in the GDR, which are in and of themselves deserving of special treatment. Claudia Card, for example, has devoted a considerable body of work to attempting, from the point of view of a moral philosopher, to draw distinctions between what she calls “atrocities” or “evils,” on the one hand, and the harm experienced by many people as a result of unjust societies, on the other. Card seeks to make that distinction in terms of the 14 D. CLARKE outcomes for victims, pointing out that some indignities or injustices “leave permanent or deeply disfguring scars” while others do not necessarily do so (Card 2002, p. 105). She proposes that, where harm is “intolerable” and makes a decent life impossible (or severely impairs that decent life), then it is appropriate to talk of a different class of injury:

Evils do intolerable (radical) harm. Harm becomes radical when it gravely, irreversibly, or irreparably jeopardizes access to the basics that are needed to make a life (or death) tolerable or decent, from the point of view of the person whose life (or death) it is. (Card 2010, p. 46)

In the case of the GDR, there are certainly those who defne themselves as victims of the SED regime who have suffered in ways that did not affect the generality of the population. These were individuals who were deemed to have inadequately adjusted themselves to the require- ment to participate in the regime, or who actively resisted it, and who were punished as a consequence. They were arrested, subjected to psychologically damaging interrogation techniques at the hands of the MfS, and imprisoned for attempting to exercise rights such as freedom of movement and freedom of speech. Although such rights were undoubtedly denied to others, only some individuals actively sought to exercise those rights and they suffered severe punishment, as well as social and economic disadvantage, as a consequence. What is more, psychologists working with those who identify themselves (and are often offcially recognized) as victims of the SED regime note that they frequently experience physical and psychological after-effects of their persecution that are not associated with the generality of the population. Discussing the situation of former political prisoners, for example, Kornelia Beer and Gregor Weißfog summarize as follows:

The global quality of life of former political prisoners is noticeably lower than for the general population. In general, a lower level of functioning and a greater number of reported symptoms can be observed. According to their own reports, those questioned by us felt themselves to be psy- chically less capable and less adequate in carrying out their daily roles. In addition, they experience reductions in their emotional functions, as well as in their cognitive and social functioning. (Beer and Weißfog 2011, p. 131) 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 15

More specifcally, therapists have noted a consistent set of symptoms among those persecuted in the GDR, such as a lack of self-worth, an over-sensitivity to perceived injustices, and an over-whelming sense of dissatisfaction and embitterment, which is not only the result of the persecution itself, but also of the perceived inadequacy of the redress they have experienced since German unifcation. This sense of injustice leads to a sense of double-victimization:

Those affected [fear] that their suffering could have all been for nothing. For many, the lack of or inadequacy of social recognition, which is often a source of complaint, seems to call into question the fact of their own suffering. They need external support in order not to end up in position in which they are the only source verifying their own suffering. (Trobisch-Lütge 2004, p. 25; cf. Trobisch-Lütge and Bomberg 2015, p. 37; Plogstedt 2014)

Apart from the mobilization of such symptomatology, it might also be possible to draw distinctions between victims and non-victims in the context of the GDR by making categorical differences between the kinds of harmful treatment that people were subject to. This move would acknowledge that the experience of victim of political oppression, in the GDR or elsewhere, can be understood in the context of certain societal norms. As with the victims of crime, there has to be a commonly accepted understanding of how citizens would normally be treated by the state and by other citizens, and victims themselves would have to be in a position to recognize themselves as having been treated in ways that demand restitution, for example through punishment of the offenders. While by the standards of international human rights it would be possible to claim that all GDR citizens were to some extent restricted in the exercise of fundamental freedoms, for example in so far as they were unable to travel to the Federal Republic or express themselves freely, the treatment of particular individuals, who were persecuted by means of imprisonment, politically motivated discrimination, interference of the MfS in their private lives, and so on, were subject to an unacceptable “violation of their society’s normative framework” (Jacoby 2015, p. 521). In terms of the psychological effects of such treatment, its traumatizing nature is linked precisely to this violation of normal expectations, which are “shattered” by the experience of persecution (Janoff-Bulman 1992). In this vein, the frst of the Federal Parliament’s commissions of enquiry into the GDR proposed to 16 D. CLARKE limit the status of victim of the SED regime to those who had been subject to dictatorial measures that went beyond everyday experience, and which were implemented for specifcally political reasons: what the commission’s report called diktatorische Willkür, or arbitrary and dictatorial measures (BT-Drs. 12/7820, p. 229). While the SED regime may have restricted or disregarded human rights on a wide scale in order to control the population, for instance by opening their post and listening to their telephone conversations, it reserved particular repressive measures for those it considered to be (potential) enemies of the system and, more importantly, a threat to the SED’s power within that system. That treatment was, furthermore, of a kind that would have been considered cruel or unjust by the social norms of the time: it is no accident that the regime sought to suppress details of its violence towards its own citizens, for example, by refusing to reveal to relatives of those killed at the border how their loved ones had died and refusing to let them see the bodies before these were cre- mated (Nooke 2011, p. 175). The SED regime was clearly aware that its treatment of those it considered a threat would not be considered acceptable by the mass of its own population. Further, as Leonore Ansorg (2005, p. 14) observes in relation to political prisoners in the GDR, the motives of the individual victim did not have to be consciously political, “rather it was the state that attributed political opposition to him.” In line with Ahnsorg’s judgement, Ansgar Borbe (2010, p. 12) reserves the term “victim” for those whose treatment at the hands of the GDR state and its institutions not only contravened dominant societal norms, but which was also motivated by the belief on the part of the state that such treatment would serve the political goal of securing the socialist system and SED power. The possible defnitional strategies outlined above offer various potentially plausible means of drawing distinctions between those who we might want to categorize as victims of state socialism in East Germany and others who experienced the dictatorship. However, even as we sym- pathize with those who suffered and continue to suffer special harms, both under state socialism and in its aftermath, it is necessary to recognize that such discursive constructions of the distinction between “ordinary” citizens and victims are precisely that: constructions. In opposition to such an approach, this study adopts a constructivist position, interrogating the conditions under which particular groups of individuals come to be regarded (and to regard themselves) as the victims 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 17 of state socialism, in the sense of acceding to an identity, and possibly also an offcially recognized status, which brings with it certain rights, for instance to compensation, representation of particular kinds in memorial museum projects, and so on. Clearly, it is impossible to abstract that claim for recognition of and compensation for those considered victims of the SED regime in post-unifcation Germany from the wider political connotations of the notion of victimhood in Germany’s post-war history. The genocide against Europe’s Jews has become a touchstone for such politics in post-1968 Western Europe, bolstering an entirely laudable agenda of anti-racism and liberal (or even social) democracy. From a left-liberal perspective, to emphasize the suffering caused by state socialism can look like an attempt to undermine the moral capital of the Holocaust and rehabilitate the kinds of ideology that caused it. This is particularly diffcult terrain when the victims in questions are Germans, some of whom were alive during the National Socialist period or were even members of the Nazi Party. Asserting that any severe abuse deserves the same prominence as any other ignores the ideological uses to which the very notions of human rights and victimhood have been put and which they continue to serve. As I will discuss further in Chapter 3, following the period of détente in the 1970s, the United States in particular sought in the 1980s to delegitimize the Soviet system with reference to its failure to guarantee freedom of speech and other rights (Moyn 2010, pp. 121–175). In the German context, the so-called Historians’ Debate (Historikerstreit) of the mid- 1980s was evidence of a conservative move to break free of the moral constraints that remembrance of the Holocaust had allegedly placed on the expression of national sentiment and the apparent moral advantage such remembrance gave to the left. By positioning Soviet communism as the original horror, to which National Socialism was allegedly a mere reaction, right-wing conservative intellectuals effectively instrumental- ized the notions of victimhood and suffering to their own agenda, insisting that the misery caused by the Soviet Union (to its own people and later to others) should not be distinguished from the crimes of National Socialist Germany (Schmitz 2006, pp. 96–99). Although the outcome of the Historians’ Debate can ultimately be said to have further secured Holocaust memory in German political culture, such revisionist projects were revived across Europe following the end of the Cold War, as conservative intellectuals and politicians called for a parallel commemoration of the Holocaust and the crimes 18 D. CLARKE of socialism, particularly in the context of EU-level memory discourses (Clarke 2014). The reception of the mammoth volume The Black Book of Communism, published by a team of French historians in 1997 and widely translated, exemplifes this trend. The analyses contained in this book present the crimes of communist-run states as an inevitable consequence of communist thought and make explicit parallels between the “racial genocide” of the National Socialists and the so-called “class genocide” of the communists (Rassen-Genozid and Klassen-Genozid in the German translation; Courtois et al. 1998, p. 21). However, the book also seeks to highlight the deforming effect of communist rule on civil society. For example, in a contribution to the expanded German edition, Ehrhart Neubert, a former GDR civil rights activist and a historian of opposition in East Germany, characterizes the SED’s rule in terms of a “liquidation” of individuality and a “de-politicization” of society, in which citizens had become incapable of “political thought and action” (Neubert 1998, p. 845). While the view that the Holocaust was a unique event in human history and thus deserving of special commemoration still largely holds sway in contemporary Germany (Beattie 2006, p. 162), some conservatives and others on the right clearly view this as a handicap for the expression of their political ideas, and Bill Niven (2002, pp. 45 and 56) has suggested that some victims of state socialism have allowed themselves to become complicit in such relativization of the Holocaust. Such concerns might arguably play into the reluctance that Anthony Glees has claimed to observe among Anglo-Saxon scholars to address human rights abuses under state socialist rule, both before and after German unifcation (Glees 1998). In this fraught and highly politicized context, it should be stated that this book does not seek to adopt a position of advocacy for any group of victims or for any one interpretation of the past. This may appear to be a ducking-out of the moral responsibility of partisanship on a terrain where much appears to be at stake. I have often found the testimony of victims deeply moving, just as I have equally been troubled by some of the historical interpretations that are put forward in the names of those victims. Nevertheless, it seems to me that any prescription of mine about how their experience should or should not be remembered, although morally self-gratifying for me, would not change the situation with regard to their place in the memory culture of the unifed Germany; nor do I pos- sess a position of superior insight into how that memory culture should be formed. More importantly still, such an approach would also leave 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 19 unquestioned a fundamental assumption implicit in any claim for the importance of one kind of memory of victimhood versus another. That is the assumption that, as a society, we need memory of victims to do moral work. Such a position would assume that it is necessary to achieve a “proper” memory of past suffering in order to express particular values and in order to produce desirable outcomes. Such a stance would equally leave unquestioned the situation of academic researchers in relation to any such fght for “proper” memory and better outcomes for the victims, an advocacy approach that has been a consistent feature of scholarship on the victims of the SED regime (Schweizer 1999; Siegmund 2003; Guckes 2008). This study will draw for its concrete examples on a number of mechanisms and strategies that have been employed to promote memory of abuses under Soviet occupation and in the GDR. However, what I hope to show is that the abandonment of an advocacy position allows me to analyse not how victims of the SED should be dealt with in contemporary German, but rather to understand how debates about specifc constructions of the signifcance of such victimhood feed into the formulation of policies of transitional justice and historical memory. The reader will note the plural use of the term “constructions” here. As will be set out in Chapter 2, this study proceeds from an avowedly constructivist position in relation to the function of victimhood in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice, which examines not how victimhood is constructed for society as a whole (if such a thing were possible), but rather analyses how competing constructions of victimhood are produced by the different social systems that contribute to the development of such politics. In passing, although by no means incidentally, I will note here that the fact that victims of state socialism draw comparisons with the situation of the victims of National Socialism in staking their claim to material and symbolic recognition need not necessarily be analysed in terms of moral condemnation, and indeed that we run the risk of miss- ing something important about victims’ own construction of victimhood when we do. There are doubtless individuals among the victims of state socialism who subscribe to conservative, right-wing and even far-right ideologies, and victims’ organizations have at times struggled since German unifcation with charges against members and offcials that they have expressed such views (Sachse 2012, pp. 58–59; Jander 2013). Leaving aside the plausible suggestion that some of these individuals may have become radicalized through their traumatizing treatment 20 D. CLARKE at the hands of the GDR state (Alisch 2014, pp. 148–150), it remains a leap of logic to assume that every time a victim of state socialism or an organization representing them makes reference to the treatment of victims of National Socialism or National Socialist crimes more widely, their purpose is to downplay or relativize the suffering of the victims of National Socialism. As Bettina Greiner has suggested, we need to recognize that victims of Soviet occupation and the SED regime communicate their sense of victimhood in a context in which, as already noted above, National Socialist persecution has become a model and a yardstick for remembering other crimes. References to National Socialism in victims’ discourse are arguably as much evidence of victims responding to widely circulated conceptions of victim status as they are evidence of unacceptable intent (Greiner 2006, p. 132; cf. Wüstenberg 2017, p. 237). Nevertheless, it will still be important to point out when such comparisons are historically tenuous, and when they may have unfortunate unintended consequences.

Policies for the Past In light of the discussion above, the central question explored in this book is not: “how should Germany remember state socialism in East Germany and its victims?”; but rather: “how is victimhood constructed by social systems engaged in the formulation and implementation of policies for transitional justice and historical memory in the aftermath of the East German dictatorship?” Secondarily, but no less importantly, I aim to analyse how the constructions of victimhood put forward by these social systems can be said to impact the kinds of policies that do get implemented, therefore having specifc effects on the outcomes for victims. While, on the face of it, the process of developing such policy is driven by moral imperatives, I will demonstrate the ways in which systemic factors drive certain kinds of what both Erik Meyer (2008) and Andrew Beattie (2011) call “policies for the past.” This will be set in the wider context of political debate about these policies (what Beattie and Meyer both call “the politics of the past”), but the focus of the research presented here is very much on outcomes in terms of policy implementation, not just directly by the state (“offcial memory” in Beattie’s terminology), but also by state-sponsored institutions and organizations (what he calls “state-mandated” memory). 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 21

So, the question is not: “are victims of the GDR adequately compensated for their suffering?”; but rather: “how is victimhood constructed in the creation of compensation schemes, and what effect does this construction have on the kinds of compensation offered?”; not: “have victims of the GDR regime been adequately commemorated in museums and memorials?”; but rather: “how do the various systems engaged in the creation of such sites conceive of the role and signifcance of victimhood, and how do such conceptions feed into the particular presentations of history that take place there?” Through such an approach, this study stakes out a territory at the intersection of the feld of enquiry that has become known as memory studies, on the one hand, and the study of transitional justice, on the other. However, my focus will be less on the analysis of any German “collective memory” of the Soviet occupation and the SED regime, and more on the policies that successive governments in the Federal Republic have adopted since the beginning of the Cold War to secure a particular memory of communist rule. Given the strong commitment of the political mainstream in Germany to implement adequate policies to honour the victims, it is notable that those policies have rarely satisfed the victims themselves, or at least not fully. The question therefore remains as to what factors shaped these outcomes, given the apparent will to address the victims’ needs. Therefore, with regard to the understandable frustration of victims of the Soviet occupation and the SED regime that their suffering does not currently play a central enough role in the collective memory of the united Germany, this study is concerned not with the social dynamics of memory that produce such an outcome, but with understanding how the state and its institutions come to formulate particular solutions in an attempt to infuence collective memory based on a particular construction of the social and political function of victimhood. In this respect, as will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, this study also contributes to the feld of study that has in recent decades come to be known as transitional justice, which seeks to understand dealing with the legacies of non-democratic pasts from a policy point of view. This focus on the state needs to be carefully explained and justifed. A number of examples to be analysed in this study do not concern themselves directly with the policies and actions of either governing politicians or state offcials. However, it is important to note that the commemoration of the suffering of the victims of the SED regime has been largely a state-funded or a state-subsidized undertaking. 22 D. CLARKE

The provision of compensation to victims of the SED regime, and indeed of the Soviet occupation that preceded it from 1945 to 1949, has long been a federal responsibility, as will be discussed in Chapter 4 of this study, although individual German regions (Länder) have occasionally provided hardship funds outside of the national provision. In addition, via the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, the federal state now provides funds for the running of victims’ associations, the production of their publications, research funding for academic work on the SED dictatorship, and therapy and coun- selling for victims (see Bundesregierung 2013 for an overview of these activities). In addition, through the mechanism of the Federal Memorial Concept (Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes), the federal government has since 1999 provided funding to memorial museum sites commemorating both the National Socialist and the SED dictatorships, where these are deemed to be of national importance, as co-funder with the individual German Länder in which those sites are located. As will be discussed in Chapter 5, the priorities and the framing of the Memorial Concept have been the subject of considerable controversy, not least in the eyes of victim groups, and especially because the use of such funds for the development of memorial museums has often been tied to the engagement of historians working as museum professionals at these sites, whose approaches victims have often criticized. Despite these diffculties, whether in matters of compensation or commemoration, victims of the SED regime have consistently turned towards the state and its institutions as a means of securing proper recognition for their past suffering. In light of the above, my understanding of what “policy” constitutes in the felds of memory politics and transitional justice will follow Claus Offe and Ulrike Poppe’s broad defnition, which encompasses Beattie’s “offcial” and “state-mandated” memory: “initiatives taken and strategies chosen or sponsored by state actors (governments, the judiciary, and special agencies constituted by law)” (Offe and Poppe 2006). Clearly, such policy is implicated in a broader “politics of the past,” defned in terms of “an active political infuencing of the interpretation of historical events in the service of various political projects” (Heß 2016, p. 103). This study does not simply focus on public policy on memory and the political debate that surrounds it, however. In terms of the role of the state and the political system in memory policy, it is also necessary to acknowledge that the status of victim is one that is constantly in need 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 23 of (re)defnition, and that victims themselves play an active part in this process, both shaping and shaped by the broader social and cultural context. As noted above, not everyone who might conceivably have suffered harm as a result of Soviet occupation or the SED regime is today classifed as a victim, and some categories of victim have a more central role in policies of compensation and commemoration than do others. As I will discuss in Chapter 3, victims, or at least the victims’ organizations that often represent their interests in relation to the political system and the state, fnd ways of talking about their victim status that allow them to present themselves as legitimate recipients of the symbolic and material resources provided. This is not to argue that victims only seek to adopt victim status for fnancial gain (a common and persistent prejudice that reaches back at least to the First World War; Fassin and Rechtman 2009, pp. 41–57), but rather to observe that victims must make their suffering meaningful for the state and for the political system if they are to have a hope of receiving the material and symbolic resources they very often badly need. The construction of a meaningful victimhood is therefore caught between a desire to express and make sense of one’s own suffering (Wilkinson 2005, p. 41), on the one hand, and the recognition that any victim identity must be politically viable (Jacoby 2015, p. 525), on the other. Policymaking in the area of memory and transitional justice can therefore be said both to address victims’ needs and to shape their perception of what it means to be a victim. Within the framework set out above, this study approaches the politics of memory and transitional justice in such a way as to demonstrate how high-sounding claims for historical justice translate into practical measures to make good that ideal. This is not a claim for objectivity as such, but rather for what German speakers call Wissenschaftlichkeit, and what English speakers would call (social) science. As Niklas Luhmann, whose theoretical insights will inform my analysis, notes, science is a system of communication that sets itself apart from everyday social communication and creates a set of theories and methodologies to make judgements, distinguishing between the true and the false, or rather between what is and is not the case (Luhmann 1992, p. 124). Following this reasoning, this book does not seek to participate in debates about how the victims of the GDR should be remembered, but rather seeks to fnd ways to analyse how communication about such victimhood takes place in the social and political context of contemporary Germany. 24 D. CLARKE

Whereas the participants in these debates have knowledge or beliefs that inform their perception of the situation and their communication about it, the purpose of this analysis is to understand how participants in these debates construct the world in which they take place through communication, not to participate in that communication myself.

The Structure of the Book In exploring constructions of victimhood, this study takes a selective approach, aimed at highlighting the interactions between three main systems implicated in the construction of victimhood and the formulation of policy that seeks to address that condition: the political system, the system of science and the system of protest. While drawing on a range of archival sources, this study is not a work of history as such. It makes no claim to comprehensive coverage of all the wrongs perpetrated during the Soviet occupation of Germany and under the SED regime, nor does it offer a discussion of all of the policies for memory and transitional justice implemented in response to those wrongs both before and after German unifcation. For example, restitution of property and criminal trials are not covered in detail, although these issues have been addressed in earlier scholarship (e.g. Quint 1997; Borneman 1997; McAdams 2001). Although the chosen case studies span the entire period from the late 1940s until the present day, they have been selected primarily because they help me to show interactions between these three systems, illumi- nating the process whereby victimhood is made meaningful and by which policies are formulated to address that demand to society as a whole that victimhood represents. Chapter 2 also sets out in more detail the relationship between the study, its theoretical project, and the felds of study on which it draws, namely memory studies and transitional justice. Chapter 3 concerns itself with the activism of victims’ groups before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unifcation of the two post-war German states in 1989/1990. Among the plethora of victims’ associations active at various points throughout this period, it analyses the positions formulated by two of the longest-lived and institutionally most stable associations: the broadly conservative Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus (Association of the Victims of Stalinism, or VOS) and the Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge in der SBZ/DDR (Working Group of Former Political Prisoners in the Soviet Zone of Occupation/the GDR), which was affliated to the Social Democratic Party of German (SPD). 1 INTRODUCTION: THINKING ABOUT THE VICTIMS … 25

This chapter draws on archival research to investigate the changing roles that these organizations proposed for the victims of state socialism who had fed to the Federal Republic, in terms of their utility and status in (West) German society. It also charts the modifcations that these positions underwent in response to the changing political climate throughout the various phases of the Cold War. In doing so, it focuses on the dealings of victims’ organizations with the state and with the political parties that offered them patronage. The central thesis of the chapter will be that victim activism consists to a large extent of maintaining communication about the nature of victimhood within the system of protest, a communication that intersects (sometimes uneasily) with the priorities the political system on which victims rely for infuence and status. Chapter 4 focuses on the renewed debate around compensation for the victims of state socialism both before after German unifcation. While the matter of such compensation had been deemed largely settled by the 1980s in the Federal Republic, a new impetus to address the suffering of victims in the frst democratically elected Volkskammer of the GDR shortly before unifcation, and the arrival on the scene of new victims’ organizations founded in the GDR itself brought about a reopening of the compensation question, leading to a series of legislative measures over the next decade and a half. This chapter will examine the interactions between the victims’ organizations, operating within the system of protest, and the political system to determine the factors that led to the particular kind of compensation scheme that was eventually (although incrementally) introduced. It will also investigate the ways in which, more recently, activists have sought to expand the boundaries of the status of victimhood in order to bring others (specifcally, those interned in the GDR’s punitive children’s homes) within the framework of the compensation legislation. The chapter ends with a consideration of attempts to highlight other abuses experienced by victims as deserving further compensation, specifcally in relation to the question of forced labour (Zwangsarbeit) by political prisoners in the GDR. Chapter 5 investigates the creation of memorial museums designed to commemorate the victims of the Soviet occupation and subsequent GDR regime. The chapter pays attention to the role of historians and museum professionals in the debates over the creation of such memorials and asks what is at stake when historians and victims fnd themselves in confict. The chapter works on a selective, yet comparative basis, highlighting debates in two different German regions, the city-state of Berlin 26 D. CLARKE and the state of Brandenburg. It argues that the specifc party-political constellations at work in these two contexts have had a signifcant impact on the development of memorial museum sites, but that the fnal outcomes in terms of how the policy to create individual museums played out in their overall conception and design were not uniform. This chapter’s thesis will be that memorial museum design is ultimately the outcome of a complex set of interactions between the political system (at both national and regional level), the system of science that determines the communication of historians and museum professionals, and the system of protest that frames the discourse of the victims’ associations.

Archival Source BT-Drs. Drucksache des Deutschen Bundetages. =

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Victimhood in the Politics of Memory and Transitional Justice

The Politics of Memory and Transitional Justice As already noted in my introduction, the present study is situated in a research context dominated by two paradigms, which have become known as the politics of memory (a subfeld of the broader discipline of memory studies) and transitional justice. These academic discourses are both the product of and a response to a historical juncture in which the suffering of victims is considered to bear important lessons for the present and future. Since the end of the Cold War, states and international actors (Clarke 2014) have come to rely on the commemoration of historical suffering and the proper treatment of the victims of past injustice as a guarantor of a human rights and democratization agenda that aspires to a global reach, placing their faith above all in the memory of the Holocaust as a framework for regulating human conduct and establishing international norms of civilized behaviour (Levy and Sznaider 2006). Where confict has taken place and abuses have been committed, there is now a consensus that some form of organized process of coming to terms with what has happened, focused on the needs of victims, is essential to the future health of society, especially in terms of prevent- ing future abuses. Indeed, since 2005 this principle has been enshrined in international norms by a United Nations resolution that offers guidelines for rehabilitation, compensation and commemoration of victims’ suffering that should be implemented to support the re-establishment of

© The Author(s) 2019 33 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_2 34 D. CLARKE democratic norms in transitional regimes (Shelton 2005; United Nations 2005). In short, we have come to attribute a “great ethical and trans- formative power” to the past (Assmann and Shortt 2012, p. 1). However, adopting a moral compass is not necessarily the same thing as being guided by one. The rise of Holocaust memory, for example, may underpin what French philosopher Alain Badiou (2012) has called our contemporary pre-occupation with ethics, yet the ethical positions that memory of the victims of terrible events from the past seems to guarantee are far from stable. Humanitarian intervention in potentially genocidal situations, for example, is highly contingent upon a range of political factors that, as Peter Novick (1999) has pointed out in the US case, easily over-ride the sentiments inspired by discourses of memory, without these apparently losing any validity in the wider culture. Equally, an almost universal recognition in the West of the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust as the ultimate consequence of centuries’ old traditions of racism does not stop racist attitudes fourishing in the present and does not stop politicians pandering to them, even as citizens solemnly participate in Holocaust commemorations or consume the latest novel or movie about those horrors. Even if the claim that awareness and commemoration of the victims of terrible crimes of the past makes societies behave predictably in more moral ways is tenuous, in recent decades we have nevertheless seen an increasing emphasis in Western democracies on the responsibility of the state for commemorating the crimes of the past and educating the populace about them, often incorporating certain aspects of international history (primarily the Holocaust) into that narrative. Commentators have noted a heightened awareness of generational shifts and the loss of frst- hand testimony these imply, a concern linked to the increased importance attached to witnesses to history in general, and to the Holocaust in particular (Langenbacher and Eigler 2005, p. 4; Winter 2010, pp. 55–56). Faced with this inevitable rupture, highly mediatized societies actively seek to develop appropriate forms of “cultural memory” (Assmann 1999) to preserve those experiences after the death of individual witnesses, so that the message of their testimony can continue to be heard. Although the state is not the only actor here, it is an important one, especially in terms of funding relevant projects, institutions and research. In a context in which, as mentioned above, the memories of victims’ experiences are credited with a special moral power for defending democracy and human rights, this commemoration becomes particularly 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 35 urgent, yet a belief in its power is paradoxically the product of a historical situation in which a high degree of consensus already exists around dominant social, economic and political models, despite the underlying tensions that threaten them. The mobilization of past suffering and the insistence on remedies for it, whether through transitional justice or the politics of memory, are normative in the sense of their implicit affrma- tion of the liberal capitalist democracy to which non-democratic regimes “transition” (Scott 2014, p. 163). This speaks of contemporary world in which alternatives to the current order are considered impossible or dangerous. As Samuel Moyn (2010) has pointed out, the rise of human rights discourse in the 1970s, so strongly tied to the defence of the rights of victims of non-democratic regimes, was largely the product of disillusionment with the promise of plans for utopian transformation, which had themselves caused suffering on a massive scale in the twentieth century. Human rights and respect for victims may not promise to transform the world, but they do offer a minimal utopia of humane treatment and justice available to all within the existing order. Whereas the discourse of modernity proposed historical progress away from a brutal past into a utopian future, the post-modern moment brings with it a loss of faith in such progressive master narratives, while at the same time presenting states and their citizens with a complex present that seems to resist understanding and control. In this light, Elena Esposito (2002, p. 8) has argued that it is hardly surprising that politicians and citizens alike look to the past for guidance on how to master such complexity. The past appears to provide orientation by offering us apparently clear lessons on the need to protect rights across the globe while simultaneously affrming a troubled liberal capitalist democracy, which is deemed to defend such rights. In this light, it seems plausible that making policy to commemorate victims might be an attractive option for national politicians who seek sources of legitimation in a context in which processes of globalization have increasingly weakened the link between power and representation, delegitimizing democratic systems as a whole (Blühdorn 2013, pp. 17–18). Commemoration of victims of historical abuses therefore potentially provides both a point of ethical orientation in the world and shores up the projected solidarity of the embattled “imagined community” (Anderson 1991) of the nation. Despite the shifting historical context, key elements of this scenario are far from novel. It is hardly controversial to claim that states and their political elites have always made use of the past to bolster their 36 D. CLARKE own legitimacy. It has often been observed that the existence of something we now call the nation state, in which a supposedly national people (Volk) occupies a national territory, shares in a national culture and identity, and is ruled over by a representative national government, is a fction that only the recourse to a particular kind of past could have helped to generate. Although institutions, modern communications and mass media can help a populace to imagine a national space, as Benedict Anderson (1991) has argued, the rise of ethnonationalism (Smith 1999) in the nineteenth century was equally accompanied by the rise of national historiography and the invention of a historical national culture and language, both of which needed to be “rediscovered” if necessary. The fgure of the victim played a signifcant role in such nationalist myth-making as a “traumatic embodiment of collective identity” (Giesen 2004, p. 10). Those who fell in the national cause, at the hands of enemy, demanded both commemoration and possible future imitation from their surviving compatriots. Today, and above all in the German case, such national memory cultures increasingly open themselves to the commemoration of victims of crimes committed in the name of the nation, creating a “negative memory” (Koselleck 2002) associated with feelings of guilt or shame. Nevertheless, by demonstrating its ability to “come to terms” with past crimes and honour their victims, such memory can still provide a positive point of orientation and identifcation for the national community (Welch and Wittlinger 2011). If modernity has gone hand in hand with the consolidation of the ethnonational state and national government, the present post-modern moment confronts states with many challenges that they cannot resolve alone and many forces from which they cannot shelter their populations, or which they believe they are powerless to control. In addition, Western democracies are now predominantly multicultural societies, containing substantial minorities for whom the old myths and memories of the nation may not resonate as strongly (Littler 2007; Pollack 2016, pp. 77–85). The promotion of a national memory clearly remains one means by which the state and the political system can attempt to simulate the existence of the national community that they can purport to represent. However, once remembering the past is attributed such an important function in securing the cohesion of the national community in the face of the forces that potentially erode it, the defnition of that memory is bound to become more highly politicized than before. When memory is recognized by politicians as constitutive of (national) society 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 37

(Reichel 1999, p. 21), memory becomes a policy area through which competing political forces seek to propagate their own conceptions of the national past, present and future. As Helmut König (2008, p. 109) has argued, memory has become a conscious object of political action and has, as a consequence, become an area of policy that “can be and is ferociously fought over”: it is, Aline Sierp notes (2014, p. 29), a political terrain on which “elites justify both their immediate political aims and their worldviews.” My analytical starting point will be to argue that victimhood as an identity, as a social role, and as a political demand is not simply given as the starting point for such policy in its attempts to fashion a particular kind of memory. The political system does not respond to victimhood claims by merely giving all those who seek acknowledgement of their victim status what they demand. Rather, such victimhood is constructed by the political system in the process of the formulation of policy, which serves fundamentally political needs. The political system does memory politics (and the politics of victimhood), just as it does other kinds of politics, and it therefore perceives victimhood in particular ways that it does not share with the other social systems I will be considering. Victimhood may be one object of memory politics (and its related policies for memory) but that object is constructed by the political system on its own terms. While public policy designed to address historical victimhood and thereby foster specifc forms of collective memory is commonplace, not only in Germany but in contemporary states more widely, such policy takes on a particular resonance in the context of democratic transition. Since the early 1980s, scholars have shown a growing interest in such transitions, understood normatively as a development from a non-democratic regime (of whatever kind) towards a liberal democratic regime (Herz 1982). They have sought to understand how such transitions, which appeared in a “wave” from the Portuguese revolution of 1974 to the end of Apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s (Huntingdon 1991), might be understood in terms of their causes and contexts, but also in terms of the strategies adopted by new regimes for dealing with the various legacies of non-democratic rule. From around the mid-1990s, the study of transition as a political phenomenon was increasingly supplemented with the study of transitional justice (cf. Kritz 1995a; Teitel 2000), which seeks to understand how transitional regimes may implement measures not simply designed to repair past events, but which also seek to change society for the future (Webber 2012, p. 103). 38 D. CLARKE

Such measures are generally considered as those being implemented within a specifc (although never clearly specifed) “transitional” time-frame (Williams and Nagy 2012, pp. 20–21), with a number of (sometimes competing) goals. Transitional justice potentially has an important function in instilling confdence in the new regime, which demonstrates its ability to deliver on rights and the rule of law and thus prevent possible future state abuses. This new confdence can be achieved by providing justice to those who suffered under the previous regime and by punishing the perpetrators of abuses (Kritz 1995b, pp. xix–xx). More broadly, it has been argued that transitional justice helps to rein- force or reinstate norms and values that were violated by the previous regime when it acted against its victims, re-establishing a sense of what Pablo De Greiff (2012, pp. 46 and 57) refers to as “civic trust” and promoting democratic attitudes within the population. Victims of the antecedent regime are often regarded as central to this process, in that their previously marginalized or degraded social status is to be enhanced by a new sense of empathy with their plight, which may involve enshrining their story of suffering at the heart of the national historical narrative (Barkan and Bećirbašić 2015, p. 95; De Greiff 2012, p. 42). These change-oriented goals are balanced, however, by the need to promote peace and stability in the post-transition society. Advocates and analysts of transitional justice recognize that negative emotions, such as resentment or a desire for revenge, may be present both among the victims of the previous regime and among its supporters (Mihai 2016, pp. 3–4), and that reconciliation between different groups within the population, and between the state and some groups of citizens, may be necessary in order to ensure a successful, peaceful and durable transition (De Greiff 2012, pp. 49–50). This tension between justice and peace, which is arguably less pertinent to the politics of memory discussed above, raises diffcult questions about how much justice can be achieved without potentially provoking a destabilizing reaction from supporters of the previous regime (Bendomar 1995, pp. 32–33; Lekha Sriram 2004). This dilemma points to an important bifurcation in approaches to the study of transitional justice. On the one hand, scholars in this feld have sought to examine, from a normative point of view, whether measures of transitional justice are effective in securing the goals outlined above. This scholarship seeks to identify which measures can be implemented in a given transition to achieve the most politically and ethically satisfying outcomes in terms of recognizing the victims, punishing the perpetrators 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 39 of past injustice, and instilling democratic values in the wider population. On the other hand, from the earliest studies conducted on the process of transition, researchers have recognized that the implementation of specifc measures is contingent upon a number of factors, for example: the nature of the regime being replaced, the nature of the transition itself, the involvement of external actors, the continued strength of deposed elites, and so on. The debate around transitional justice is therefore caught between an assessment of what ought to be done for victims and an assessment of what it is possible to do for them in any given circumstance. The transition from state socialism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to liberal capitalist democracy in a reunifed Germany has been analysed by scholars in terms of its relationship to the paradigm of transitional justice (Kritz 1995c; Müller 2001; Offe and Poppe 2006; Espindola 2015). Many of the measures now associated with strategies of transitional justice can indeed be found in the East German case: as noted in the introduction to this study, trials of those responsible for specifc abuses were carried out to a limited extent and with limited success; a process of historical opening took place, in that previously secret aspects of Socialist Unity Party (SED) rule were made public (for example through the opening of the Ministry for State Security fles); an often controversial process of lustration took place, in which former Ministry for State Security (MfS) operatives were excluded from certain kinds of public offce (Jarausch 2014, p. 78); property was restored to those from whom it had been confscated for various reasons by the SED regime (Quint 1997, pp. 142–153); the Enquete-Kommissionen of the Bundestag took on the function of a truth commission in the mould of a number of other transitions of the 1980s and 1990s (Yoder 1999); the state undertook to adjust the historical record by investing in historical education, memorials and museums designed to highlight the abuses of state socialism and the fate of its victims; fnally, the state offered judicial rehabilitation and fnancial compensation to certain victims of the socialist state. In the context of this study, my focus will be on the latter two mechanisms in this list: historical commemoration and compensation. As already set out in the introduction, my primary focus is on those who are classifed as victims of the SED regime in a narrower sense than can be applied to the generality of the GDR’s population. It should be noted, however, that many of the measures implemented as part of the Federal 40 D. CLARKE

Republic’s post-unifcation transitional strategy were predominantly perpetrator-focused. Wrongdoers were to be prosecuted, their crimes and those of the regime revealed to public scrutiny, and those who had col- laborated with the state as private individuals, primarily through the MfS, were to be exposed and excluded from certain forms of participation in public life. There is no doubt that these perpetrator-focused measures also had an impact on victims, for better or for worse. There was potentially satisfaction to be had in seeing some individuals put on trial, and the act of exposing and excluding MfS informers also had the potential to raise the comparative social status of those they had persecuted. The condemnation of the GDR regime and the failures of GDR society more widely by means of the Enquete-Kommissionen arguably provided retrospective validation of those who had resisted SED rule and suffered as a consequence. Memorial museums also have a social function wider than that of simply honouring the victims, and compensation measures may have a symbolic value for the wider society that exceeds the practical and symbolic beneft to the victims themselves. Nevertheless, the rationale for focusing a study that concerns itself with victims primarily on compensation programmes and on memorials is the recognition that both of these kinds of measures are fundamentally reparative in character and have a special importance in the lives of victims as “the most tangible manifes- tation of the efforts of the state to remedy the harms they have suffered” (De Greiff 2007, p. 153), whatever comfort they may draw from more retributive strategies. These are also the areas of policy that, nearly three decades after the fall of the GDR regime, remain to some extent live. Although a fnal settlement has apparently been achieved on the compensation regime for victims of state socialism, this has happened only relatively recently, and there are signs that victims’ associations will continue to press for expansion of the remit of compensation, both in terms of who can be compensated and in terms of what they can be compensated for. Equally, memorial museum sites remain loci of victim engagement and, in some cases, protest. Proposals for new memorial sites also continue to emerge. While the other areas of policy relating to the GDR’s transition to democracy can be viewed as resolved, these two areas are of continued interest, which doubtless refects the fact that they are issues around which victims can mobilize to express their ongoing sense of 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 41 dissatisfaction with the transitional justice they have experienced in the change from state socialism to liberal democracy. Mihaela Mihai (2016, pp. 6–7) observes that transitional justice can be studied at three interconnected levels. First, analysts can focus on why transitional justice happened at all, when a strategy of future- oriented putting aside of the past is also a possibility. Given that SED elites and former members of the GDR’s security services posed little immediate threat to the new democratic order once unifcation had been achieved, there was little to restrain post-unifcation political elites from implementing a wide range of transitional justice measures. Also, given the rise of a culture of “coming to terms with the past” in the Federal Republic in the 1980s, and a concomitant awareness of the failure to fully address the Nazi past in the immediate post-war period, it is perhaps not surprising that the legacy of the GDR seemed like a good opportunity to make good these past failings. This readiness to engage in a full range of transitional justice mechanisms was arguably boosted by the meeting of a prevailing anti-communist ideology among political elites in the Federal Republic and the demands for historical justice expressed by the GDR’s own civil rights campaigners during and immediately after the transition. Something must also be said here about the fall of the SED regime and the transition to democracy in the GDR as an anomalous case within the framework of transitional justice. Not only did the end of the SED regime lead to the dissolution of the GDR state and the whole- sale adoption of the social, political and economic order of the Federal Republic, but there is a very real sense in which the Federal Republic had been undertaking transitional justice avant la lettre since the founding of the rival GDR in 1949. As will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, compensation legislation for former internees and political prisoners under the Soviet Occupation and then in the GDR was introduced in the 1950s in the Federal Republic for those who had been able to fee to the West. By 1989, the West German state had also long been actively involved in the collection of data on crimes committed by the GDR state against its citizens, either through state-sponsored non-governmental organizations such as the Investigative Committee of Free Lawyers (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen) in the 1950s and 1960s, or through the Salzgitter archive, which collected information from individuals who had fed the GDR. 42 D. CLARKE

There were also precedents for forms of memorialization of the victims of the SED on West German soil: victims’ organizations and anti-communist organizations were active from the early 1950s in installing monuments in cities such as Berlin and Munich, and this culture of memorialization later extended to the “green border” between the two states and to the western side of the Berlin Wall (Ullrich 2006). Without direct access to the original sites of persecution, activists nevertheless sought to establish a tradition of memorialization, and it is therefore hardly surprising that moves to establish memorials at sites of incarceration were made swiftly following the fall of the SED regime. The second level of analysis proposed by Mihai concerns the choice of mechanisms. Why were specifc means of transitional justice adopted at a particular moment in time? While all transitional justice measures in the case of the Soviet occupation and the GDR regime certainly have their individual history, for the reasons outlined above all of the transitional justice measures already described were initiated within a few years of (and some even immediately before) unifcation. For example, we do not see the phenomenon of delayed lustration or of delayed restitution of property, which can be observed in other post-communist Central and Eastern European states (Pogany 1997; Nalepa 2010). The third level of analysis identifed by Mihai concerns the mechanisms that will be applied. In other words, once we explain why transitional justice is affrmed as an option, and once we explain why certain measures are adopted in an individual case, we need to consider why those measures were applied in particular ways. Taking my two key case studies, compensation and memorialization, it is important to note that they provide evidence of variation, not so much in terms of whether specifc measures were applied at specifc times, but rather in terms of how measures were applied at particular times and in particular contexts. Therefore, for example, the Federal Republic compensated victims of state socialism in different ways at different times, whereas differing memorialization strategies emerged at different moments and in different locations in post-unifcation Germany. What Mihai’s three levels of analysis for transitional justice do not address here is how the political system of the Federal Republic constructed victimhood as an object of political action. This is a more general problem for transitional justice as a set of practices and as an academic discourse that seek above all to address the needs of victims. While there may be acknowledgement that not all victims can, from a 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 43 pragmatic point of view, have those harms they suffered under the defunct regime addressed, analysts of transitional justice often take it as a given that there are victims out there who could be dealt with, even if it is not in the end possible to do so. My purpose will not be to deny that some (indeed, many) people have suffered under non-democratic regimes, but rather to investigate the ways in which certain of those people are constructed by the political system as victims, and to investigate the relationship of such construction to the kinds of policies for memory that are implemented in the name of victims. If we can defne transitional justice and the politics of memory as two ways for the political system to address the suffering of victims in the past, then we must arguably place them on a temporal continuum, on which the immediate and pressing needs of the transition produce one kind of policy, which is then followed by a more established stage when the trade-off of peace versus justice is less salient and when memory politics holds sway. Nevertheless, in as far as both varieties of politics focus on the needs of victims, they construct the notion of victimhood in different ways and to different ends at different points in time. It will be a key task of this study to show how and why this is the case.

Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory and the Constructivist Paradigm I have already indicated that my analysis will be informed by a constructivist paradigm. More specifcally, as the references to various social systems may already have indicated, the particular brand of constructivism I will draw upon is taken from Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. There are specifc advantages to adopting a constructivist paradigm of this kind. Firstly, and most importantly, as the title of this study suggests, I am interested in constructions of victimhood in the plural. Constructivism in Luhmann’s theory of social systems provides me with a means of making sense of why that plurality of constructions exists and with a means of explaining why these constructions are often incompatible with (or even in confict with) each other. Luhmann’s approach allows me to understand such plurality not in terms of the psychology or personal motivation of individual actors, but in systemic terms, demonstrating how even politicians who are well disposed towards victims and seek to provide them with material and symbolic recognition are nevertheless destined 44 D. CLARKE to fail to meet victims’ demands to some extent. In other words, it allows me to show how different social systems construct the problem of victimhood in fundamentally different ways and to provide a plausible rationale for this. To understand what it would mean to analyse constructions of victimhood within a Luhmannian framework, it will be necessary to frst examine in more detail what Luhmann considers to be the nature of social systems in contemporary society. In Luhmann’s own writing and in those of his commentators, the term “system” becomes interchange- able with “functional system,” “subsystem” and a variety of other terms. This indicates that, when Luhmann speaks of a “system” he is not referring in a holistic way to the whole of society, but rather to individual functions within that society. In fact, one might argue that the society that Luhmann refers to is something of a necessary fction, since he pos- its that there is no position from which the whole of society could be apprehended. Society may exist, but no perspective can observe its totality. What each system takes for that totality is, in fact, only a systemically conditioned perspective. In order to see itself, modern society develops functionally differentiated subsystems, whose task it is to observe society from a unique point of view. In observing society, these subsystems fulfl a unique function. For example, the function of the scientifc system is to produce new knowledge, the function of the economic system is to produce value, the function of the education system is to equip citizens for work through qualifcation, the function of the political system is to produce collectively binding decisions, and so on. In a highly complex society, Luhmann argues, no one system can convincingly fulfl all of these roles, with the consequence that each of them gradually becomes independent of the others and subsequently functions according to its own rules. Although each system has its own unique social function, they all share a basic mechanism in terms of their production of communication. In fact, the functioning of each system is synonymous with communication. So, for example, the political system produces policies, laws, regulations, speeches, press conferences, party manifestos and so. Luhmann defnes social systems as autopoietic, operatively closed, self-referential systems of communication. In order to fully understand the implications of Luhmann’s argument, each element of this defnition will have to be examined in detail. Autopoiesis (literally, self-creation) is for Luhmann the self-perpetuating movement of a social system from one 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 45 communication to another, characterized by its ability to produce a connection between those communications (Luhmann 1987, p. 62). Each system is faced with an environment characterized by high levels of complexity. However, to continue to function it must continue to communicate, not simply repeating itself, but moving from one communication to the next according to certain principles. Such movement can only be maintained if the complexity of the environment, which makes an excess of communications possible, is reduced in order to produce an actual communication (p. 67). Social systems as autopoietic systems therefore deal with reality in a selective way. In Luhmann’s (1992, p. 135) words they “make possible and insist upon a processing of information that is always selective.” Such communication is a form of sense-making (Luhmann 1987, p. 67), but it is a sense-making that is characteristic only of the social system in which it takes place. The principles by which each system moves between one communication and the next, thereby making possible this selective reduction of complexity, differentiate it from other systems and form the border between each system and its environment. Each system is therefore constituted by the way it makes sense of the world, and, along with its function within society, this unique way of communicating about the world is what sets it apart from the other systems and the realities they construct (Luhmann 1987, p. 265). It is in this sense that each system is operatively closed: it constitutes itself by drawing a boundary between itself and other systems, as only this boundary gives each individual system its identity. However, as we will see later, this closure does not imply that each system’s functioning is immune to stimulation from the other systems that make up its environment: “closure, not closedness!”, as Luhmann (1992, p. 303) reminds us (English in the original). How, then, does this differentiation occur? Firstly, Luhmann states that each system is defned by the medium of its communication. The notion of generalized symbolic media of communication is one of the more abstract concepts in Luhmann’s already very abstract language and can refer to phenomena as diverse (and themselves abstract) as language, money, justice and power. However, the important point for my purposes is that Luhmann does not claim that these symbolic media are the only basis for differentiating one system from another, or that they can be observed in their pure state. Rather, differentiation takes place when a system’s communication makes a distinction between one value and another, according to a binary scheme that would only be possible in 46 D. CLARKE the medium that is characteristic for that system. In other words, the symbolic medium has to exist (there has to be such a thing as power in a society for there to be a political system, for example), but it is only by applying a binary code that is made possible by the existence of that medium that differentiation can occur (Luhmann 1992, pp. 194–198). To take again the example of power, which is the symbolic medium of the political system, the borders of that system are determined not by that medium alone, but by its central code, that of government/opposition (the contemporary version of the more basic code of power/ submission). In other words, the communication of politicians and parties, defned in terms of their decision to communicate one piece of information or another, is determined according to whether that information is likely to help them gain political power or maintain political power (government), or whether it is likely to result in their loss of power, in the sense of losing political offce (Luhmann 2002, p. 98). Politicians do not baldly present their communications in that way, drawing on ideological values of all kinds in the presentation of their positions (Luhmann 2002, p. 271). However, in terms of reducing the complexity of the possible communications available to them, this founding binary is what differentiates the system within which they operate from any other. It is in this sense that systems are self-referential. Luhmann’s contention that systems are closed is linked to their self-referentiality. Clearly, no system can continue to function in disre- gard of its environment: in fact, from a certain perspective, coming to terms with the environment is the very purpose of systems. However, Luhmann’s conception of that environment and the relationship of systems to it requires elucidation. To begin with, Luhmann argues that the environment of each system is made up of the all of the other systems, so that each system is to an extent also environment: in other words, it is part of the environment for other systems. However, the individual system does not interact with the environment as a whole, which is just “everything else.” Rather it is faced with the complexity presented by this “everything else” and must somehow reduce that complexity, while at the same time responding to the communication produced by the other systems, which are part of that environment (Luhmann 1987, p. 249). To give a common example, the system of news media as described by Luhmann (1996a, p. 36) differentiates itself according to the code of information/not information, or in more common language news/not news. The news media are bombarded with communication produced 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 47 by other systems, including the political system, whose communication is determined by the code of government/opposition, as I will explore in greater detail below. However, not every communication produced by the political system is likely to be taken up by the news media as the basis for its own communication (there simply would not be time enough to deal with all of them). While the political system produces communication based on its judgement of what is likely to contribute towards an increase in power and a decrease in the power of others, it cannot guarantee that its communication will elicit a response by the news media in the form of a communication, that is to say that it has no guarantee that the news media will report on any particular communication. Furthermore, because the other systems, including the news media, remain “black boxes” (Luhmann 1987, p. 156) for the political system, it cannot predict what form that communication will take in response to its own communication. Clearly, no system’s communication is produced in a social vacuum. Each system can observe the function of the other systems and develop a set of expectations about the kinds of communication they will produce. Nevertheless, because each system remains fundamentally unknowable to the others, the actual reaction of any other system is open to contingency. Expectations of how other systems will respond are necessary for communication to take place, yet the response of the environment to any communication is uncertain, as there is according to Luhmann no such thing as complete mutual understanding (Luhmann 1987, p. 155). To take again the example of the relationship between politics and the news media, a political party may produce a communication in a particular way based on its expectations of the communications that the news media will produce in response. However, simply because that party has organized its communication around such expectations does not mean they will be fulflled in terms of the response of the other system. For instance, information that a party hopes to present to political advantage may be interpreted not in such a way that voters are swayed by positive stories in the news, but may instead be presented by the media as evidence of cynical manipulation of the facts in the service of political gain. As Georg Kneer and Armin Nassehi (1993, p. 99) point out, what all this leads us to conclude is that a given social system can never communicate with its environment, but can ultimately only communicate about its environment in its own self-referential terms. The response of other systems, and of the environment as a whole, is characterized by contingency. 48 D. CLARKE

Although I began by stressing the autopoietic, self-referential quali- ties of social systems in Luhmann’s account, it should by now be clear that social systems in that account are by no means independent of their environment and of other systems. Indeed, in order to keep producing their own communication according to their own defning codes, systems are bound to respond to the environment. Luhmann describes the relationships between individual systems in terms of a “structural coupling.” This is not a direct causal relationship, in the sense that one system makes the other do something, but rather a relationship of simul- taneity (Luhmann 1992, p. 39). Such coupling occurs when one system produces communications that can be responded to by another for its own purposes (Luhmann 1996a, pp. 122–125), although this coupling can also produce “irritation,” understood as communication which represents “a problem for the continued autopoiesis of the system”: in other words, a communication that a system cannot immediately make sense of in its own terms (Luhmann 1992, p. 40). This structural coupling is frequently organized around what Luhmann calls “topics.” Not all communication produced by one system will be of interest to another. However, Luhmann points out how particular “themes” or “topics” (Themen) crystallize in order to facilitate interaction between different systems, which make particular contributions (Beiträge) in the form of individual communications relating to those topics over time. Thus, while particular systems may experience a general structural coupling (e.g. the political system and the mass media), that coupling is often played out through specifc topics (Luhmann 1987, pp. 212–215). In the context of my analysis of the memory politics and transitional justice relating to the victims of state socialism in Germany, the topic of human rights abuses perpetrated during the Soviet occupation and by the GDR regime, and the topic of the measures appropriate to address these abuses, coordinate the communication of a number of systems. However, as will be become clear in Chapter 3 of this study, there are certainly other possible forms of structural coupling, including organizations, which will be particularly relevant to understanding the role of victim activism in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice. The decision to draw on Luhmann’s work has two important theoret ical consequences that need to be spelled out here. I have described the perspective of this study as “constructivist” in its approach to the construction of victimhood, implicitly distinguishing that point-of-view 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 49 from a “constructionist” paradigm. Broadly speaking, constructionists are interested in the various means by which individuals are socialized into particular views about reality, analysing the ways in which subjects learn to give meanings to the world and the phenomena they encounter in it. They are interested in the discursive and institutional construction of particular objects, for example “social problems” (Spector and Kitsuse 1977) or “moral panics” (Goode and Ben-Yahuda 1994). Such thinking begins from the premise that, although the world is objectively given, individuals do not know that world directly: instead, “human ‘knowledge’ is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations” (Berger and Luckmann 1967, p. 15). In other words, as Kenneth Gergen (2015, p. 30) puts it, “we understand the world through mental categories, but we acquire those categories through social relationships.” Ian Hacking (1999, pp. 6–7) notes that such thinking has a strongly progressive bent, in that it proposes that the way we see the world, and especially other people in it (e.g. women, the young, people from other ethnic groups), is not fxed, but rather the result of social construction and therefore open to change. What distinguishes this position from a “constructivist” stance is the way in which theorists who work in the latter tradition, and who have sometimes called themselves “radical constructivists,” shift the locus of meaning-making away from social communication and onto the individual cognizing subject, who builds a picture of the world based on experience. On the face of it, the constructionist position is the more intuitively convincing: after all, most people would agree that their views about the world are informed by ideas that have been communicated to them through social interaction and that they therefore to some extent “share” such ideas with others. However, constructivism calls into question such “sharing” of ideas about the world, stressing that, although the individual subject may need “other people in order to establish the intersubjective viability of ways of thinking and acting,” such “compatibility in the context of mental constructs” does not imply “sameness” (von Glaserfeld 1995, pp. 127 and 137). Rather, each individual develops their own mental constructs in response to and through their own purposeful activity in their environment; constructs that sometimes give the appearance of being shared. The extent to which Luhmann can be classifed as a fully fedged constructivist in the sense outlined above is the subject of debate. However, although he spent his early career as an advocate of systems 50 D. CLARKE theory in the tradition of Talcott Parsons, Luhmann’s theoretical work from the beginning of the 1980s, marked in particular by the publication of his seminal Social Systems in 1984 (Luhmann 1987), turned towards the constructivism expressed in his notion of the autopoietic system (Riegler and Scholl 2012, p. 1). This distances Luhmann from the subject-centred approach of radical constructivists as outlined above and shifts the focus of enquiry onto social systems. The question of agency will be discussed in more detail below, but it should be noted that Luhmann’s theoretical framework nevertheless shares key features with constructivism. Whereas constructivism focuses on the ways in which individual subjects construct their own reality, which remains fundamentally their own in spite of the appearance of congruence with other individuals’ realities, Luhmann insists that social systems construct their own reality, and that these plural realities are fundamentally differentiated. What differentiates these realities is, however, the specifc rationality that makes each system what it is. So, the legal system is the legal system because it sees the world in terms of legality, the political system sees the world in political terms, and so on (Moeller 2012, pp. 83–84). Also, whereas constructivists might argue that individual cognition adapts in order to arrive at more viable understandings of a changing environment, Luhmann regards the rationality of the individual system as fxed, and furthermore as focused primarily on its own self-reproduction, in spite of its orientation towards the environment (Buchinger 2012, p. 23; Scholl 2012, p. 9). To put this in everyday language, and to use an example pertinent to this study, the political system cannot stop communicating about the world politically, because then it would cease to be the political system and therefore cease to exist altogether. This leads to the second key consequence of adopting a Luhmannian perspective on the construction of victimhood in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice: namely, the question of agency. The empirical data on which much of this study is based focuses on subjects acting individually and collectively, whether they be politicians, victims, or historians and museum professionals. However, the theoretical decision to employ a Luhmannian framework demands a focus not on individual agents, but on systems. As Armin Scholl (2012, p. 9) points out in relation to Luhmann’s systems theory: “Observing systems consist of communications only. As a consequence, individuals, subjects or agents are not part of the social system but of a social system’s 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 51 environment.” While systems need human beings in order for such communications to come into existence (Riegler and Scholl 2012, p. 1), Luhmann is not interested in the individual psychology or motivation of those individuals, only in the system that he regards as producing the communication (Scholl 2012, p. 9). To stay with our example of the political system, we might imagine that a politician could have many kinds of personal motivations for standing for offce (to make a better world, for self-enrichment, to satisfy the needs of their ego), but the communications they produce in order to achieve that offce are actually the product, in Luhmann’s view, of the political system, which determines how such communications are formulated. So, for example, the speeches that our imaginary politician makes will be determined by the need to persuade voters to vote for them, even if the outcome of that communication (the actual number of votes they get) is contingent. This does not mean that Luhmann thinks that subjects are irrelevant in general, but rather that he regards what we call persons as particular kinds of psychological systems that may be observed by social systems (Luhmann 1987, p. 155), but which remain fundamentally non-identical with and external to those social systems whose communications are central to his theoretical project (Luhmann 1987, p. 51). This variety of functional constructivism has distinct advantages for the analysis that follows. In a situation in which there is dispute over the meaning of a category, in this case the problem of “victimhood,” it can be tempting to reduce any analysis of that confict to a matter of “who says what,” in other words to attempt to identify who is proposing a particular discursive construction of “victimhood” at a given moment as an explanation for that construction. To reduce this to a matter of (different kinds) of agents either remains descriptive or ultimately involves the researcher in speculation about individual or group motivations, that is to say in psychologizing, which can easily become a kind of supposition. Furthermore, such an approach would require a clear categorization of different agents, in a situation in which such distinctions are in fact diffcult to maintain. What about civil rights activists who subsequently become members of parliament and then engage in activism around the question of victimhood? What about a representative of a victims’ organization who publicly supports a particular candidate in an election campaign? Clearly, it is possible for individuals to move between different social roles (even in the course of an ordinary day), so that 52 D. CLARKE assigning them and their utterances exclusively to a particular group (or social system) on the grounds of their identity as a person becomes problematic. Luhmann’s focus on social systems allows us to escape from the trap of focusing on who is speaking and to focus on the systemic factors that produce specifc kinds of communication. This does not mean that we can stop talking about individuals, who (as already noted) physically produce communication. However, in terms of the way in which that communication is produced, it is ultimately the system that speaks. The central thesis that emerges from my engagement with Luhmann is, therefore, that when examining constructions of victimhood in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice, we need to pay attention to the systemic factors that lead to a plurality of such constructions, which means addressing the factors that condition the ways in which social systems produce communications about victims and victimhood.

Victims and the Political System The formulation of policies relating to memory and transitional justice is a function of the political system. From a Luhmannian perspective, it is therefore important to understand the characteristics of the political system as a functionally differentiated social system in order to understand how the notion of victimhood is constructed in that system’s communications. Luhmann’s Risk: A Sociological Theory of 1991 provides a useful starting point for thinking about his view of the place of the political system in wider society and its relationship to other functional systems. As Michael King and Chris Thornhill observe (2003, p. 182), this book was one of two attempts by Luhmann in this period to address contemporary concerns in West German society and therefore make his theory socially relevant in an applicable way, the other being Ecological Communication in 1986. In this context, it is also worth mentioning the earlier monograph Political Theory in the Welfare State of 1981, which outlines Luhmann’s views on the reasons for the ever-expanding remit of the political system in contemporary society. Whereas Luhmann’s sociology in general, and his political sociology in particular, are often couched in highly abstract terms, with a dearth of concrete examples to guide us in terms of how his insights might be applied, Risk, the book on ecology and Political Theory in the Welfare State show Luhmann addressing his theory to contemporary social phenomena. 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 53

Risk is also instructive because it highlights Luhmann’s notably sceptical attitude to the political process in democratic societies. This does not mean that Luhmann is necessarily anti-democratic or simply conservative (King and Thornhill 2003, pp. 217–220), a charge he frequently felt he had to defend himself against (Luhmann 1996b, pp. 69–70). What it does mean, however, is that he was concerned that the political system in modern society was doomed to take on ever greater responsibility for an ever-growing range of themes and problems, not all of which it was equipped to provide satisfactory solutions to. This is also a perspective he develops in Political Theory in the Welfare State. Despite or rather because of functional differentiation, Luhmann argues (2002, p. 215), the political system in democratic societies has increasingly become the structure that society turns to in order to solve problems that emerge from the evolution of autonomous social systems. So, to take a contemporary example, if the economic system produces an economic crisis, it is the political system that public opinion turns to provide a solution, even though the ability of the political system to “solve” the problem (in this case, create prosperity) appears to be limited. The political system is therefore increasingly called upon to formulate collectively binding decisions in response to insoluble problems, with a consequent loss of legitimacy, unless that is it can successfully present itself as having a workable solution; which is not the same as actually having one (2002, p. 216). As Luhmann argues in Risk (1991, pp. 51–52), the position that the political system fnds itself in has a distinct temporal dimension, a dimension revealed by the theme of risk itself. In pre-modern society, Luhmann argues, the relationship between what had been, what was now and what would be was relatively unproblematic. The events of any individual life or the life of a community were more or less predictable, and where unpredictable things did happen, such as failed harvests, dis- ease and so on, these were perceived as dangers that were part of life, not as the result of decisions, that is to say not as risks that might have been averted. In modernity, however, so Luhmann’s argument, the relationship between past, present and future is viewed as contingent upon human decision. The decisions taken in the past are the cause of present problems, and the decisions taken now will change those problems for the future. Paradoxically, this belief in the power of human decisions to change the future is also a belief in the danger of such decisions. The future is 54 D. CLARKE fundamentally unknowable, as are the outcomes of actions. So, failure to build more nuclear power plants now could lead to power shortages in the future, but could also lead to environmental devastation if there is an accident at one of those plants. Yet, simply not making a decision is not a solution either, since the reverse of this scenario also holds: if you build no nuclear power plants, you can be sure there will be no accidents, but you cannot be sure there will be no power shortages. As Luhmann writes (1991, pp. 35 and 37), while decisions cannot be avoided, there is no such thing as a risk-free decision (or, in this case, no risk-free non-decision). Under such conditions of uncertainty, the barriers to the politicization of themes is weak, Luhmann argues (1991, p. 156), and the political system is increasingly called upon to produce decisions and create the impression that it is capable of being a “system of social management” (“System der gesellschaftlichen Steuerung”; Luhmann 1991, p. 185). This drift towards a general politicization provides an explanation for the specifc contemporary politicization of the theme of memory in democratic societies. As I have observed above, the politics of memory and transitional justice both imply the need for a “proper” commemoration of the past in the present as a necessary pre-condition for an acceptable political future, a position perhaps best summed up in the stock phrase “Never again!” invoked in relation to the Holocaust. As this study will show, this is a commonly held position among all kinds of memory activists, politicians, historians and museum professionals when it comes to talking about the GDR regime and its victims; and it is primarily to the state, which has the necessary material and institutional resources, to whom such groups turn in order to secure the future they desire through what they regard as the proper commemoration of the past. The political system is bound to respond to this, as it responds to other calls for collectively binding decisions that will build a particular kind of future. Nevertheless, Luhmann sees a danger in this increasing responsibility of the political system for the future (and the past!), in that it involves the political system in two kinds of risk. Firstly, there is the risk that the measures taken to manage memory in response to societal pressure will not produce the intended outcome in terms of securing the political future. In fact, as we will see with the examples discussed in this study, there are good reasons to believe that the overall effect of the measures taken is diffcult to assess. Secondly, there is the risk to the political system itself, linked to the possibility of failure: namely, that failure 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 55 will damage the credibility of the political system, or at the very least the credibility of the politicians who were responsible for the measures implemented. As Luhmann notes (1991, p. 166), the failure to produce actual effects is often covered over by “talk,” in other words the sub- stitution of the claim of effectiveness for actual effectiveness. This is a risky strategy in itself, but a necessary one in areas where it is extremely diffcult to trace actual change back to a set of political decisions: as we will see in the case studies set out here, memory politics and transitional justice are two such areas. The political system is driven to take on these issues both by the pressure brought to bear by other social systems and by its own means of drawing distinctions and thus constituting itself as a social system, namely the binary of power and not-power. Politicians and political parties do not bluntly present their communications in terms of wanting to gain or maintain offce. Rather, they frequently present (or “re-code”) these in terms of other values to appeal to the electorate, engaging in a kind of symbolic politics where the actual outcomes of any policy (if, indeed, a policy is fnally formulated) are less important than the association of that policy with certain values deemed attractive to voters (Luhmann 2010, p. 333). Again, as we will see with the examples to be studied in this book, it is arguable that the main focus of memory politics, at least from the point of view of political parties, is the association with certain values rather than the empirically verifable engineering of the desired political future through recourse to the various means of memorialization, commemoration, compensation and so on. As should be clear from the above, all politics in modernity has a temporal dimension, in that it assumes a relationship between past, present and future conditioned by (risky) decision-making. However, in memory politics and transitional justice, this emphasis on the relationship between what was before, what is now and what is to come is foregrounded, since it is the very theme of the political debate itself. The discussion above has made clear the nature of the political system in Luhmann’s account in terms of the medium of its communication and the code by which that communication operates. It remains to be explained what the political system consists of from an organizational point of view. While Luhmann’s theory is very much focused on the level of communication, he nevertheless pays attention to the institutional aspect of the political system, which consists, he notes, of much more than just the political parties (Luhmann 1991, p. 172). In fact, 56 D. CLARKE for communication to be sustained, Luhmann argues, it is necessary for organizations to exist. Luhmann (1992, p. 337) does not assume that all systems will continue to exist forever, and states in fact that they depend on organizational forms to continue to exist at all. This does not imply, however, that each of the functional systems express itself through a single organizational form. Systems and organizations are not synonymous. Not the least reason for this is that, although the functional systems become differentiated in order to address the complexity of the problems facing modern society, even within themselves their distinct functional competencies are so complex as to require a range of different organizational forms (Luhmann 2002, pp. 230–231). Various kinds of organization serve to bind individuals into the functional systems (p. 231), yet we should also be careful to note that the systems themselves are not identical with a specifc segment of the population (p. 232). Although individuals can be civil servants, elected politicians, member of parties or protest movements, and so on, they can also participate in forms of organization which belong to other systems: for example, they might be in a club for amateur watercolourists and therefore participate in the artistic system, or run their own business and thereby participate in the economic system. Systems theory is not a way of describing groups of people, but rather a way of understanding how different types of communication are produced by those people under certain conditions; communications which could, in fact, carry on even if those individuals were no longer available to facilitate them. Political parties are obviously signifcant organizations that support the political system’s communication, and their primary function is to seek and maintain offce (power). We can describe organizations as contributing to the political system to the extent that they also operate in the medium of power. This is not to say that every individual belonging to a political organization (e.g. a local party branch, a lobby group, a pressure group within a “wing” of a specifc party) wishes to gain offce, but that their communication is organized around the getting and maintaining of offce for individual politicians or their party as a whole. As I will show in my empirical case studies, the political system does produce communication about victims, often in reaction to communication produced by other systems. When it does so, it assigns certain meanings to victimhood, constructing the nature and the political signif- icance of victim from the point of view of the political system. However, 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 57 this does not mean that all politicians, or the policies that they formulate, ascribe the same meaning to victimhood in relation to the Soviet occupation and the SED dictatorship. Indeed, communication about victimhood in the political system is subject to contestation. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 5, the nature of the post-unifcation political landscape, particularly in new federal states in the east, meant that politicians were willing to mobilize the theme of victimhood in order to delegitimize possible electoral opponents. This process inevitably led to competing discourses about the GDR past, the role of suffering in that past, and the measures appropriate to deal with the legacy of injustice in the present. In developing such communication, competing parties constructed victimhood in distinct ways. What bound those constructions together, however, was that they were the product of communications within the political system.

Victimhood and Protest In post-unifcation memory politics, victims of state socialism sought to press demands for recognition and redress for their suffering. This was not an entirely new phenomenon, given the presence of victims’ associations and victim activism in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany (see Chapter 3). In producing communication about their suffering in various ways, such groups simultaneously constructed (sometimes competing) conceptions of victimhood, which were then subject to change over time. In seeking to understand how such competing constructions were formulated by victims themselves, I will consider their communication in relation to the system of protest. This is not the frst attempt to capture the dynamics of protest in the context of social movements that focus on the historical legacy of the state socialist past. Kathleen Smith’s study of the emergence and activism of the civil society group Memorial in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, which sought to uncover Stalinist crimes and address the needs of their victims, draws on mainstream social movement theory to seek to explain how Memorial developed strategies in line with the political opportunity structures that emerged at particular times and, indeed, in particular places throughout the Soviet Union (Smith 1996). However, Smith’s otherwise excellent study has relatively little to say about how such activism constructed victimhood as a category, not least in light of the fact that many activists had not been victims of Stalinism themselves 58 D. CLARKE

(p. 84). Similarly, Jenny Wüstenberg’s (2017) recent study of memory activism in post-war Germany provides a detailed account of the various groups that sought to commemorate both the National Socialist and state socialist past, including victims’ groups. However, her approach is not primarily concerned with the construction of victimhood as a social and political role. My approach to activism by social movements focused on historical victimhood will direct attention more closely to the ways in which victimhood is constructed in the system of protest, in line with the overall aims of this study. The development of Luhmann’s theory shows a degree of ambivalence on the function of protest and the legitimacy of assigning a separate social system to that function. This ambivalence has several causes. In terms of organizational structure, protest movements are clearly more amorphous than the organizations that constitute the political system, just as their membership criteria are more fuid and less binding (Luhmann 2002, p. 317). More fundamentally, Luhmann (1996b, p. 136) posited that protest movements, while drawing distinctions in the way that other systems do, nevertheless do not do so according to any code that could provide the basis for the emergence of a social system of protest in the full sense. Such social systems, Luhmann proposed (2008a, p. 153), are not only capable of making observations, but also of making self-refexive observations about their own observations, which allows them to relativize their own point of view as systematically limited (although not therefore invalid) (Kneer and Nassehi 1993, p. 153). In this sense, social systems are able to produce self-descriptions and recognize the validity of the self-descriptions of others. To give a concrete example, a business person proposing some new scheme may say to a politician: “my interest is in making a proft, but I realize that it is diffcult for you to support this for political reasons.” This does not mean that the business person recognizes the political objection as valid in his or her own terms (from the point of view of the economic system), and they will certainly fght to bring their scheme to fruition despite the political objections. Nevertheless, they remain capable of acknowledging “the self-description of those against whom they protest” (Luhmann 1996b, p. 206). Rather than seeing themselves as another system within society with a point of view as valid as those of other systems, Luhmann (1996b, pp. 75 and 103) was concerned that protest movements regarded themselves as operating outside society, thereby failing to recognize any 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 59 limitations to their own perspective, while criticizing the other social systems for their limitations. This, Luhmann argues (2008a, p. 201), can lead to a sense of “moral superiority,” as protesters only ever judge others by their own criteria, refusing to allow for the legitimacy of the criteria of other systems. While protest movements may criticize the communication produced by other systems according to a series of moral imperatives, Luhmann (1996b, p. 206) proposes that they are not capable of taking into account “the self-description of those against whom they protest”:

social movements allow themselves the freedom [to protest, DC] without taking into account the self-descriptions of the functional systems, that is to say without taking into account the internal rationalities that make things the way they are. (p. 191)

This leads in Luhmann’s view to a form of complexity reduction that tends towards over-simplifcation (Kern 2008, pp. 180–181). These concerns on Luhmann’s part do speak of a distinctly conservative view of protest as a disruptive and deviant force that refuses to “play by the rules.” Nevertheless, as the useful volume edited by Kai-Uwe Hellmann (Luhmann 1996b), its enlightening editorial introduction, and its equally valuable interview between editor and author all demonstrate, Luhmann’s theoretical position on social movements and on protest more specifcally remained unresolved into the mid-1990s. One can speculate that, had Luhmann lived longer (he died in 1998), he might have arrived at a means of conceptualizing protest as a social system in its own right, having gone as far as defning protest movements as “autopoietic systems of a special kind” (Luhmann 1996b, p. 213). For the purposes of this study, I will build on Luhmann’s own theoretical insights in his published work, and on the work of scholars who have developed his ideas, in order to arrive at such an appropriate conceptualization of the system of protest that helps us to better understand the engagement of victims’ groups in the politics of memory and transitional justice. A useful starting point for a reconsideration of Luhmann’s position on protest is his argument that protest movements focus on the consequences of functional differentiation itself (Luhmann 1996b, p. 103). They observe the outcomes of the functioning of the other systems, not that functioning on its own terms (p. 209), and when they protest against those outcomes, they do so not just against those outcomes in 60 D. CLARKE themselves, but equally as symptoms of a functionally differentiated society. However, although such protest can be regarded as protest against functional differentiation itself, in real terms it is often converted into a demand to the political system to make good the failings of the other systems. As already noted, since politicians in a democracy rely on voters for their maintenance of power, they are inclined to include ever more problems in their remit and promise the voters improvements (Luhmann 2011, p. 26), even though it is impossible for any single system (the political system included) to control the function of other social systems (p. 55). When citizens are harmed by the negative outcomes of functional differentiation, they call on the political system, or the state as part of that system, asking it in effect to reduce the autonomy of the other systems (p. 73). Because the political system cannot ultimately achieve this, it tends to introduce compensatory measures (p. 123). For example, the state cannot infuence the economic system in order reduce unemployment in any predictable way (although it can certainly try), but it can provide the unemployed with benefts, back-to-work schemes, training, etc. Here it is necessary to consider the signifcance of the notion of suffering in relation the phenomenon of protest. In his book Risk, Luhmann (1991, pp. 111–134) introduces the category of the affected (Betroffene) as key to protest movements: these are the people whose lives are potentially affected by the outcomes of functional differentiation; they suffer harms because of it. The affected can be motivated to organize with others who have been similarly subject to negative outcomes of the function of social systems and are able to produce communication about their suffering. This suffering acts as a moral claim that the political system can respond to. Luhmann is not alone in observing the extent to which the modern liberal state in particular is frequently placed in the situation of having to address such affectedness in political terms. Although she does not use a systems theory framework for her observations, Wendy Brown (1995, p. 17), for example, has pointed out that identity politics in particular, which draws on notions of historical suffering, can be read as a response to the vicissitudes of modernity, in which the negative experiences of individuals are not suffciently taken into account by the various social systems. In this context, pain, and particularly past pain, becomes a pow- erful political tool and a demand for action on the part of the political 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 61 system, which is pressured to fnd ways of compensating for that suffering (p. 74). Both Brown and James Nolan have invoked the notion of “therapeutic discourse” to describe one reaction of the political system to the demands of suffering, demands which, as Nolan argues, the impersonal functioning of institutions of the state would otherwise fail to recognize (Brown 1995, p. 75; Nolan 1998). Nolan (1998, pp. 24–45) regards this desire to heal individual pain and redeem suffering as a symptom of a political system in search of new forms of legitimacy in the face of the many problems it cannot solve. While, like Brown, Nolan does not argue from a systems theory perspective, this analysis nevertheless tallies with Luhmann’s assertion that the political system is increasingly called upon to address problems associated with a rationalized modernity without necessarily having the where- withal to do so. Brown, Nolan and Luhmann are all essentially arguing that affectedness (Betroffenheit) or suffering are the expression of the demand for redress as it is directed to the political system, in the face of the failure of other social systems to respond to the needs of the affected adequately. Hellmann (1996, p. 236; 1998, p. 501) has proposed that the moral nature of the claims made by protest movements, of which Luhmann is sceptical, could make “morality” a viable form of generalized symbolic medium of communication through which to establish the autonomy of the system of protest. Despite Luhmann’s ambivalent view of protest movements, he does nevertheless afford them a useful purpose in contemporary society, namely that of identifying those problems that have their origins in functional differentiation, but which the main social systems would otherwise have diffculty observing. Protest thus has a kind of “early warning effect” (Luhmann 1996b, p. 159). Dissatisfaction with the other social systems, expressed in communication about the suffering of the affected in moral terms, provides such a “warning,” allowing the other systems the opportunity to see negative outcomes they would not otherwise notice; even if they will still only address them on their own terms (Hellmann 1998, p. 498). Luhmann (2008b, pp. 111–112) observes that conficts become coded in moral terms where one system, organization or individual shows themselves incapable of formulating a communication that appears to take another’s point of view suffciently into account. This does not mean that both parties can share a point of view, but Luhmann argues that those parties can be suffciently satisfed that their point of view has 62 D. CLARKE been recognized and respected. If such respect is absent, the system, organization or individual formulating the communication in question will be perceived as morality inadequate. So, to give a concrete example, if a serious environmental problem is causing human (and possibly non-human) suffering, but it is ignored by the political system altogether, protest will communicate this in terms of a moral failing. Such moral coding, as Hellmann points out (1996, pp. 190 and 237), can also be seen in protest movements’ construction of social problems, which they frame in terms of disappointed expectations. Those who have the power to make decisions are held responsible for the negative outcomes of those decisions, which are deemed to fall short of the expectations held by the protesters and thus to have failed not merely in practical, but also in moral terms. If morality in this sense can be taken as such a medium of communication for the system of protest, this would further allow for the formulation of particular binary codes in relation to specifc protest movements within that medium. With regard to protest movements that focus on justice for historical victims, such a code can plausibly be identifed as the code of “recognition.” The desire for recognition is one frequently invoked by victims of historical abuses (Jacoby 2015, p. 528). This has also been observed by Wüstenberg in the case of the victims of state socialism in Germany, although she sees the recognition demanded by these groups as “diffcult to defne precisely” (Wüstenberg 2017, p. 236). I would argue that such recognition needs to be understood in the very specifc sense proposed by Axel Honneth (1992) in his account of the “moral grammar of social conficts.” Honneth’s key argument is that social movements, broadly defned, are driven as much by the desire to achieve “recognition” as by concrete goals that might contribute to it. He defnes “recognition” (Anerkennung) in Hegelian terms, but applies it to social movements’ desire not only to change particular aspects of the societies they operate it in, but to produce a shift in the values of those societies. In the transition from feudal society, where the recognition of groups and their values was a matter of social hierarchy, to a modernity in which different groups make competing claims to moral authority, Honneth (1992, p. 205) argues that social conficts become a matter of those groups seeking to have their experiences, achievements and values recognized as those that will defne the wider culture. This shift is refected in the dynamics of social movements that represent the interests of those who have suffered injustice. Their aim is to have the experiences and 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 63 values of an oppressed minority integrated into the mainstream of social values, a process which Honneth (1992, p. 272) defnes as recognition. Elazar Barkan (2002, p. 363) has made a similar point about the importance of the recognition of the identity of an oppressed group in processes of coming to terms with the past, above and beyond the concrete goals of compensation, rehabilitation, etc. While, within a Luhmannian framework informed by Hellmann’s analysis, I prefer to interpret social movements in terms of communication in the medium of morality, the code of recognition proposed by Honneth offers a viable starting point for analysing the communication produced by victims’ groups in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice. I attribute those communications to the system of protest, but the specifc kind of protest this study will address in its case studies expresses itself primarily through that code of recognition, which is framed primarily as a moral issue. Victims’ groups construct the nature of victimhood itself in terms of a demand for recognition of the values represented by their suffering, a recognition that would have positive effects for society as a whole. The demand of victimhood is that victims be recognized as the bearers of these values, and that society’s commitment to the values represented by them be expressed in appropriate measures to compensate and commemorate their suffering. Perceived defcits in transitional justice or the politics of memory can therefore be framed as (moral) failures of the other social systems to provide appropriate recognition, and the general defcit in recognition for victims in the wider society can be interpreted as a failure of the measures put in place to achieve it. As will become clear in the analysis presented in this chapter, however, the focus of victims’ groups within the system of protest on the need for recognition produces a strong structural coupling between the system of protest and the political system. Despite the fact that protest is very often about pointing out to the political system what it has failed to achieve, protesters need to make their claims resonate with the political system in order for it to even take notice of their critique. It is by no means obvious that the political system should formulate a response to communications in the system of protest: such responses are contingent. Therefore, in order to elicit an appropriate response, protest must be formulated in such a way that the political system can produce communication about it. In the case to be discussed here, this means that victimhood in relation to the Soviet occupation and the SED regime 64 D. CLARKE must become politicizable so that politicians will claim advocacy for the victims’ cause (Elster 2004, p. 249; Jacoby 2015, pp. 525–526). Chapter 3 will demonstrate how, during the Cold War, victims’ organizations representing those who had been persecuted by the Soviet occupation or under SED rule struggled to maintain this diffcult balancing act within the system of protest, which can only keep communicating while a grievance against the other social systems, and in particular against the political system, can be formulated, while at the same time being bound to present that grievance in such a way that it can become the subject of political communication. Offering an alternative account of protest movements from a systems theory perspective, Heinrich Ahlemeyer has proposed that “mobilization” should be taken as the symbolic medium that creates the closure of protest as a social system (Ahlemeyer 1989, pp. 181–183; 1995, pp. 115–116). Social movements, Ahlemeyer argues, are primarily driven by the need to mobilize ever greater numbers of people (and keep the already-mobilized active) in order to continue to exist, so that any communication they produce is ultimately concerned with an appeal for such active engagement. This is plausible in as far as protest movements do not generally beneft from the more stable institutional structures enjoyed by the political system: if one political party or even a whole government dissolves itself, the political and bureaucratic structures could still be flled with new actors who would continue to produce communication within that system. Social movements, and protest movements in particular, do rely on keeping people engaged outside of such supporting structures, or face the prospect of ceasing to exist (that is to say of no longer being able to produce communication). However, Ahlemeyer’s notion of mobilization can easily be understood in relation to the more fundamental medium of morality as proposed by Hellmann. While moral claims are directed at other systems to address the problems that protest movements construct, they equally have a role to play in mobilizing participation. In the case of victims’ activism, such communication amounts to the formulation of the claim that not enough is being done to address victims’ suffering and that victims should therefore be motivated to protest, or indeed have a moral duty to do so. Furthermore, it is also clear that such movements can have the “latent” and “expressive” function of offering a set of com- mitments around which collective identity can be constructed, binding potential members to the cause (Hellmann 1996, pp. 123–125). 2 VICTIMHOOD IN THE POLITICS … 65

As I will show in Chapter 3, the communication of victims’ organizations therefore faces in two directions: constructing victimhood not only as a demand to the political system (and, indeed, to other systems), but also as a demand to those the organizations understand as victims, and who make up their potential constituency, to remain engaged in the fght for justice. This demand to victims themselves also offers, however, a possibility of collective identity founded on a commitment to a vision of the social and political role of the victim in the present.

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Victims’ Organizations and the Construction of Victimhood

Organizations Between Politics and Protest An analysis of victims’ organizations from the point of view of systems theory requires an engagement with two key themes in Luhmann’s later work. While much of his theorizing is dedicated to exploring the autopoiesis of functional systems, later writings pay more attention to two interrelated subjects: namely, the role of “structural coupling” between social systems and the relationship of organizations to such structural coupling. The latter topic is essential if we are to understand how the individual functional subsystems of modern society are able to respond to their environment, which consists of the other subsystems. Luhmann (1998, p. 96) stresses that, in their self-referentiality, social systems are able to communicate “about their environment, but … never with their environment.” In other words, it is impossible for any system to address communication to another system with the certainty that this other system will respond in such a way that will allow the frst system to produce further communication; there is always a danger that the frst system will simply be speaking into a void. At the same time, if each system essentially communicates about itself, there is clearly a danger that it will fail to take any account of its environment, in which it is expected to fulfl its specifc social function. As social systems are geared towards complexity reduction, they cannot address all of the noise produced by their environment in their communication

© The Author(s) 2019 71 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_3 72 D. CLARKE without risking becoming overburdened (Luhmann 1998, p. 114). Therefore, to adequately respond to the environment, functional systems need some means of making specifc communications produced by other systems salient amid this general noise of society: they need to transform some of this noise into information (p. 803). Luhmann’s later work emphasizes the role of structural coupling in this process, whereby systems are able to react to their environment (Luhmann talks of “irritation”) without their own communication being determined by that environment. Such “irritation” is necessary in order for the system to continue its own autopoietic operations (Luhmann 1998, p. 790), but is processed only on the system’s own terms (p. 803). Such structural coupling is, therefore, “completely compatible with the autopoiesis of systems; they are not constrained by it, but rather use it to take account of the conditions in the wider environment” (Luhmann 2002, p. 373). Nevertheless, structural coupling does produce a limited form of coordination between systems, while simultaneously leaving those systems opaque to each other (Luhmann 1998, p. 106). What Luhmann is arguing here is that structural coupling creates a space in which different systems have a heightened awareness of the expected range of others’ communications that they will be confronted with, that is to say that two systems develop the habit of expecting only a limited range of communications from each other (Bonacker 2003, p. 83), but at the same time become more sensitive to each other’s communications in the sense that those communications are regarded as more relevant irritations than that of the general noise of the environment. Luhmann is suggesting, as Edwin Czerwick underlines (2011, p. 167), that in developing such structural coupling systems are choosing to make some kinds of relationship with other systems more important than others on the grounds that they are relatively predictable. At the same time, as systems learn to formulate the kinds of communication that are more likely to be recognized by other systems as relevant irritations (i.e. as information others can use), they may modify their own communication to make it more relevant to others, without completely giving up their own systemic autonomy (Simsa 2001a, p. 288). This can lead to what Luhmann has described as “structural drift” in the operation of autonomous systems, whereby the perceived codes of another system are imported into one’s own communication so that it can be taken up by the other. A pertinent example of this would be the planning of communications by protest movements 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 73

(e.g. demonstrations, spectacular public actions) in terms of a perception of the likelihood of a response by the system of the mass media (Luhmann 1998, p. 862). Organizations are discussed by Luhmann in terms of their function in the process of structural coupling. He describes organizations as a special kind of autopoietic system (“organizational systems”) that produce decisions; or, rather, that communicate decisions (Luhmann 1998, p. 830; 2000, p. 63). In order to achieve this, of course, organizations have to distinguish between the decisions that will be communicated and the many possible decisions that could be communicated. To communicate a decision implies the construction of a link between the past, the present and the future: a meaning is attributed to the past, as the background to the present state of affairs, while the decision itself implies a particular future development that would not occur without the decision being made. In other words, to communicate a decision implies the belief that this will make a difference in the world (Luhmann 2000, p. 140). However, the actual outcomes of such decisions are uncertain in terms of the response of the other social systems (whether they be functional or organizational systems). Thus, organizations oscillate between a complexity reduction based on the communication of individual decisions and their own confrontation with uncertain outcomes (still more complexity), which of course requires further decisions (pp. 209–214). In this sense, the autopoiesis of organizational systems proceeds via an open-ended chain of communicated decisions (Luhmann 1998, p. 830). Organizations are necessary for the functional systems to produce communications to which their environment can respond (Luhmann 1998, pp. 842–843). In other words, they give form to social systems, although no one organization can encompass the whole of any one functional system: for example, political parties communicate policy decisions, but they do not stand for the whole of the political system (pp. 842–843). Without organizations, such systems would be unable to communicate beyond themselves (Luhmann 2000, p. 834), especially in any systematic fashion over a longer period of time. Organizations allow systems to develop routines of communication towards their environment and the other systems in it (p. 388) and in doing so create structural couplings to other systems. They “concentrate information and bundle communications” so that a “permanent irritation” is created, on the basis of which other systems are able to create their own communication (p. 400). 74 D. CLARKE

The relationship of organizational systems to functional systems is variable, and Luhmann encourages us to examine the exact nature of structural coupling via organizations on a case by case basis. Most organizations are located frmly within a single functional system and serve the communication of that system, taking on the functional priorities and the code of that system (Luhmann 1998, p. 841). Therefore, for instance, political organizations communicate decisions that are (at least in part) directed beyond the political system, yet that communication will nevertheless be determined by the binary distinction between government and opposition. However, Luhmann (2002, p. 398) also argues that several functional systems can operate within an organization, even if one functional system may be dominant. Indeed, in communicating decisions, organizations are often not dominated by the logic of one of the functional systems, but rather coordinate different functional systems (Simsa 2002, p. 162). This cannot be reduced, however, to a matter of one system using an organization to “infuence” another: a decision reached by an organization is, after all, a decision that the social systems coupled in that organization will communicate about on their own terms. Nevertheless, the decisions communicated by the organization must be usable by all systems coupled by it as information on which to base their own communications. If not, there is a danger that the decisions reached by the organizational systems will simply be met with indifference (Simsa 2001a, p. 287). Even if those decisions are relevant, the coupling between systems thereby achieved remains “loose” (Czerwick 2011, p. 168; Simsa 2002, p. 159), both in the sense that the decisions communicated cannot determine the response of the other and in as far as the structural coupling must be constantly reproduced, so that the existence of the relevant organization over an extended period becomes necessary. Even then, an organization may lose its relevance to a particular functional system and thus cease to produce the desired structural coupling. Despite the centrality of structural coupling, not least through organizations, to Luhmann’s view of society, his contribution to our understanding of such interactions remains substantially theoretical, not to say abstract, so that the consequences of his model for the analysis of such interactions remain to be explored on the basis of empirical case studies. Luhmann’s writing itself is an invitation to apply these concepts to case studies in the real world more than it is a demonstration of the validity of his theoretical ideas in relation to such examples 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 75

(Luhmann 2000, p. 397). This is particularly the case when we consider the relationship between the political system and other social systems (Simsa 2002, p. 168; Brodocz 2003, p. 90). The present chapter will take Luhmann’s insights as a starting point for an analysis of the relationship between the political system and the victims’ organizations that emerged in the post-war period to represent the interests of victims of the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although Luhmann’s model is useful in helping us to understand the changing ways in which these organizations sought to communicate the experience of the victims over time, both to the political system and to their environment more generally, it should be noted that they remain anomalous in some respects in relation to Luhmann’s description of the structure and role of organizational systems. Luhmann’s (2000, p. 286) focus is very frmly on organizations whose personnel is recruited via the mechanism of paid work, which is only partially the case for the organizations to be discussed here. Nevertheless, he does note the possibility that organizations may evolve in the form of voluntary associations (Luhmann 1998, p. 840), while observing that the issue of resources in the form of money is no less essential to the existence of this kind of organization (Luhmann 2000, pp. 467 and 837). This is very much the case for the organizations discussed in this chapter. Also, the case studies chosen here will show that the relationship between the organizations to be analysed and the political system in particular was by no means stable over time. At some moments, we see victims’ organizations functioning as organizational systems within the political system, at other times they take the form of organizations more comparable to those Luhmann describes in relation to protest; and, under certain circumstances, we fnd these victims’ organizations occupying a kind of hybrid position, in which they take on the role of providing structural coupling between the political system and the system of protest. As this chapter will demonstrate, the shifting and complex status of those organizations that sought to represent the interests of the victims of state socialism in Germany, from the beginning of the Cold War until its end, was determined to a signifcant extent by the shifting domestic and geopolitical landscape, to which these organizations were forced to respond in order to continue to exist. The purpose of this analysis, in the context of the present study, will therefore be threefold. Firstly, these two case studies will provide a test 76 D. CLARKE case for the value of employing Luhmann’s notion of structural coupling to such interactions between the political system and organizations that seek to represent the interests of the victims of historical injustice, an endeavour that will have wider value in terms of understanding the role of such organizations in relation to the politics of memory and transitional justice. Secondly, the analysis will demonstrate how the prevailing political conditions of Cold War West Germany created specifc kinds of opportunities for the expression of protest through such organizations, while also placing limits on that protest, defned by its relationship to the political system; a relationship that was characterized to a great extent by the structural coupling between politics and protest created by the victims’ organizations themselves. Thirdly, and most importantly in the context of the present study, it will demonstrate how such structural coupling between politics and protest led to shifting constructions of victimhood within victims’ organizations, showing how the structural coupling of those organizations to the political system made certain kinds of construction of the victim’s social and political role viable at certain times. Luhmann (1998, p. 864) also defnes the relationship between social systems and organizations in terms of the latter’s situation relative to the centre and the periphery of the system. If we take the state to be at the centre of the political system, then political parties are closer to that centre, whereas protests movements arguably exist at its periphery (Lange 2003, p. 245). This view assumes that protest movements are exclusively oriented towards the centre of the political system. However, as I discussed in the previous chapter, protest movements not only seek to “irritate” the political system so that it will address the harm that motivates protest, but also to address those feelings of “affectedness” among their constituency within the system of protest for the purposes of mobilization. The organizations that must exist so that protest can express itself can therefore be understood as a form of structural coupling between the system of protest and the political system: they provide a structure within which decisions are communicated in ways that are relevant both to the political system (politicians, parties, government offcials, etc.) and to the subjects that the system of protest seeks to mobilize (the victims themselves). Luhmann is wary of attributing the characteristics of organizations to protest movements, given that his approach to the problem relies very heavily on the case of the New Social Movements of the left in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, which he fnds too amorphous and 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 77 heterogeneous in their bundling of different social concerns (everything from anti-nuclear protest to self-actualization) to neatly ft his model. Nevertheless, he does recognize that organizations do emerge within and develop out of protest movements, including NGOs and even political parties, and that this is necessary, just as it is for any other functional system, in order for external communication to be facilitated (Luhmann 1998, p. 850). For the purposes of this analysis, I will treat the victims’ organizations to be analysed here as “protest organizations,” in that they seek to represent a constituency of affected individuals whose collective voice would otherwise be inchoate and, indeed, invisible to the political system. These protest organizations function as organizational systems in Luhmann’s terms in that they communicate decisions to their environment, that is to say both to the political system and to their own members (and also, of course, to other systems such as the mass media). These decisions focus strongly on the construction of the victim’s social and political role under the circumstances of the moment. Victims’ organizations, as I will demonstrate below, communicate decisions to take specifc action and call upon their members to participate in that action, but those decisions to take action are also decisions that construct the role of the victim in certain ways. Decisions offer a narrative linking the victims’ past (persecution) to the present situation, to which they can make a difference by assuming a special role and taking action based on that role. These decisions, like the decisions of organizational systems more generally, are therefore future-oriented. As I will demonstrate in the case of the victims’ organizations to be studied here, this can lead to a double discourse within protest organizations at certain points, with offcials producing political communication in their interactions with the political system and communicating protest when addressing members of the organization. At particular junctures, organizations that present themselves as expressions of protest can subordinate themselves entirely to the political system, in essence allowing the political system to co-opt protest to its own inherently political ends, in what Luhmann (1987, p. 290) would term as an instance of “penetration.” Such penetration, which we can understand as an extreme outcome of “structural drift,” is a potential threat to protest organizations in terms of their bundling of communication not only outwards towards the political system, but also for the purposes of motivating their members. They cannot achieve such motivation by the mechanism of paid employment (Luhmann 1998, p. 855), 78 D. CLARKE but must do so rather through the creation of unpaid roles, the formulation of programmes that invite participation and the expression of inspiring values (Ahlemeyer 1995, p. 135). As Ruth Simsa observes of non-proft organizations more generally, a category that can encompass protest organizations, the need to communicate decisions that speak to different functional systems leads to a kind of “multilingualism” that has to be carefully managed (Simsa 2001b, p. 290). If an organization that claims to speak for an affected group only does so in terms that address the priorities of the political system too directly, that organization runs the risk of not appearing to make a difference with its communication, that is to say of being irrelevant to the priorities of its members. Here it is also important to note that, although protest organizations do receive communications from their members, this does not mean that the organizations’ offcials, who are responsible for the organizations’ communication, have direct access to the feelings of their supporters, or that there is a collective will that they can simply translate into communicated decisions (Luhmann 2000, p. 286). Rather, each protest organization constructs the motivation of its members through its communication of decisions made on their behalf, decisions which are then constructed as binding for those who wish to become or remain members (p. 390). In this sense, protest organizations also seek to reduce the complexity of their environment in as far as that environment is also partly constituted by the individuals who make up their potential constituency. In contrast to the functional systems, organizational systems are not open to all, but rather develop mechanisms for inclusion and exclusion (Luhmann 1998, p. 844; 2000, pp. 392–393). In the case of the protest organizations to be examined here, defnitions of victimhood must be developed in order to ascertain which individuals may be members, but the decisions communicated by the organizations in question also have the mobilizing function mentioned above. The organizations communicate decisions that construct a future-oriented narrative, setting out what the mobilized membership can do collectively to make a difference to the world beyond the organization. Failure to construct such narratives convincingly will lead to potential members self-excluding. A further threat to these organizations lies in a potential failure to produce communication to which the political system can respond, subsequently shifting towards communication that is exclusively expressed in codes that place it within the medium of protest (moral outrage, 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 79

Fig. 3.1 Relationships between the political system and the system of protest

rejection of “political” compromises, refusal to understand the constraints on the political system that lead to certain decisions; Luhmann 1998, pp. 856–857). The danger of this last outcome for the organizations in question is that they will no longer be seen as relevant by the political system, which will either ignore their communications or dismiss them as extreme or unhelpful. While such uncompromising opposition may help to motivate members’ engagement, in the long term it may also lead to frustration and disengagement. These differing relationships between the political system and the system of protest, as expressed in the organizations to be analysed in this chapter, are summarized in Fig. 3.1.

The Association of the Victims of Stalinism in the Cold War The frst case study to be discussed in this chapter is that of the old- est and longest-surviving of the organizations founded to represent the victims of state socialism in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the GDR. Founded in 1950, the Association of the Victims of Stalinism (Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalismus, or VOS) is still active today. It frst emerged as an organization representing those it characterized as former political prisoners in a context in which numerous anti-communist 80 D. CLARKE organizations, largely based in West Berlin, claimed the right to represent the interests of victims of the Soviet occupation and the emerging regime of the SED in what was to become the GDR. The best known of these were the Fighting Group Against Inhumanity (Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, or KgU) and the Investigative Committee of Free Lawyers (Untersuchungsauschuss freiheitlicher Juristen, or UfJ), both of which received funds and advice from the American secret service operating in West Berlin (Murphy et al. 1997, pp. 107–115). However, these organizations were not primarily led by those who had been persecuted under the Soviet occupation or in the GDR, nor did they aim to be mass membership organizations for such victims. In fact, the KgU, the most controversial of these groups, was led by two men (Ernst Tillich and Rainer Hildebrandt) who considered themselves to be victims of the National Socialist regime (Greiner 2010, p. 345), and who argued that the failure of Germans to resist the NSDAP gave them a special moral responsibility not to repeat the same mistake with the equally totalitarian SED (Merz 1987, p. 67). The UfJ and the KgU collected information about the crimes of the Soviet occupiers and the SED regime, and distributed their fndings among Germans in East and West, on the assumption that awareness would strengthen Germans’ will to resist. This approach was very much in line with the wishes of the United States as the Federal Republic of Germany’s key ally. Although many West Germans did not believe that the GDR would last, there was a marked tendency in the immediate post-war years to regard the Cold War as a matter for the two superpowers, over which ordinary Germans had little infuence (Creuzberger 2008, p. 459). While the emphasis on “liberation” of peoples in communist-run states, also known as “roll-back,” only became offcial American policy from 1952 under President Eisenhower, Bernd Stöver (2002, pp. 25–26) has pointed out the extent to which Truman’s “containment” policy of the immediate post-war period actually foreshadowed many elements of Eisenhower’s stance, which were simply pursued with more vigour under the successor administration. From 1948, when Tito’s break with Moscow appeared to demonstrate that individual states could potentially be levered out of the Soviet sphere of infuence, the United States increasingly emphasized the necessity of winning over the populations of communist states in the hope that they would throw off their oppressors (p. 198). 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 81

From 1949, the policy of “roll-back” or “liberation” also became the offcial position of the newly formed Federal Republic, and of its Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs (Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen, or BMG). This ministry took over funding of the UfJ from the United States in 1950, and also funded (and in some cases instigated) numerous further anti-communist initiatives designed to maintain Germans’ sense of national unity and undermine the SED regime in the East (Friedel 2001, p. 49; Kreuz 1980, p. 21). Anti-communism was a common denominator of political culture in the early Federal Republic (Major 1997, p. 258), and the three major West German political parties ran Eastern Offces (Ostbüros) that similarly sought to support those who rejected the domination of the SED in the GDR, encouraging a spirit of resistance to a regime which, at the beginning of the 1950s, none of them expected to last long (Buschfort 2000, p. 62). This focus on “roll-back” or “liberation” with regard to the GDR provided a ready-made discourse with which organizations representing various groups of Germans who had suffered as a result of the lost war and the Soviet occupation could frame their experience in terms of a socially and politically relevant victimhood. For instance, Michael Schwartz (2014, p. 169) has argued that organizations of expellees, representing Germans who had been forcibly removed from territories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, came to understand the meaning of their experience in predominantly anti-Soviet terms under the infuence of the Konrad Adenauer government. With the VOS, we can see a similar adoption of “liberation” rhetoric. The main publication of the VOS, Die Freiheitsglocke (The Liberty Bell), gives a clear sense of the discursive strategies employed by offcials of the organization (who largely authored the articles printed here) in order to emphasize the contemporary relevance of their membership’s experiences in the recent past. Indeed, the very title points to an allegiance with American liberation policy (Stöver 2002, p. 383). The bell in question, which featured on the magazine’s masthead, was a representation of a copy of the Philadelphia Liberty Bell that had been funded by 16 million US citizens on the initiative of former US Military Governor, General Lucius D. Clay. Clay had then taken the bell on a tour of 26 German cities in 1950, before ending his “Crusade of Freedom” at the Town Hall of Schöneberg, where the bell still hangs today (Berlin.de, n.d.). 82 D. CLARKE

In the early years of the VOS’s existence we can observe how offcials from the organization both drew on and repurposed “liberation” rhetoric to their own ends. Writing in 1951 in the Freiheitsglocke, Georg Duwe (co-founder and vice chair of the VOS) complained that, in the period since 1948, despite the “sacrifce” of his “comrades” in the service of “Europe’s struggle for freedom,” the “political capital” represented by their suffering and that of their families had not yet born any “dividends” to the beneft of the victims themselves (Duwe 1951, p. 3). It should be noted that other organizations such as the KgU and the UfJ tended to see the suffering of the victims of the Soviet occupation and the GDR as politically useful in terms of their own propaganda objec- tives, but did not focus their energies primarily on providing support for those victims once they had arrived in the Federal Republic or West Berlin. Here the VOS, which saw itself not only as an organization publicizing abuses in the East, but also (and perhaps even primarily) as offering support to those who escaped, clearly attempted to piggyback the issue of material compensation and support for victims onto the existing “liberation” agenda. At the same time, it nevertheless proposed a distinc- tive profle for itself in relation to other organizations. One of the VOS’s primary goals in the early 1950s was to establish a compensation scheme for victims who had fed to the West, as detailed in the “Plan of Work” published on November 2, 1950 as the organization’s founding document (BArch B137/203). Throughout this period, offcials of the VOS were keen to emphasize that their contribution to the policy of “liberation” in relation to the GDR was not being suffciently recognized, that is to say that their past suffering, while considered useful, was not being suitably rewarded after the event. In this context, the decision of Adenauer’s government in 1952 to offer compensation to Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference for the Holocaust provided an opportunity for Wilhelm Kalweit, co-founder and chair of the VOS, to highlight the lack of compensation for victims of Stalinism:

This difference in the value attached to the different sacrifces made appears to create the impression that the fght against Stalinism is a matter of secondary importance, that it does not have the same signifcance as the fght against Hitler. And yet this impression is contradicted by the generous resources devoted to the prosecution of the Cold War. This generosity, sadly, does not extend to the victims who have fallen in battle. They are left like worn- out millstones on the edge of the battlefeld. [Sic, DC] (Kalweit 1952, p. 1) 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 83

I will return to some of more dubious aspects of the argumentation put forward here, including the implication that victims of the Holocaust were heroically sacrifcing themselves in the fght against National Socialism, in the context of debates over compensation in the wake of the Second World War (see Chapter 4). However, for now it should be clear that the key strategy of VOS offcials was to emphasize their members’ contribution to the state’s agenda in terms of policy towards the East, exploiting it as a kind of moral capital that might be used to leverage fnancial compensation. The activism of the VOS therefore explicitly drew on the dominant discourse of “liberation,” while also exploiting that discourse in the service of its own goals. These arguments also had a secondary function in terms of the organization’s understanding of the category of victim itself. From the end of the Second World War until the fall of the GDR regime, the nature of oppression in the Soviet Zone and the GDR changed considerably, and different individuals were affected in different ways at different times. It has been and remains a key diffculty for an organization such as the VOS, which claims to represent the interests of all victims, to accommodate these varied experiences under a single defnition of victimhood. As the frst few issues of Die Freiheitsglocke show, such discussions were already a feature of the organization’s early history. The VOS had been founded by a group of men released from the Sachsenhausen internment camp (Siegmund 2003, p. 49). Sachsenhausen’s inmates at the time were largely those sentenced by Soviet Military Tribunals (SMTs). While early on in the occupation those convicted by SMTs were often Nazi party members or supporters of the National Socialist regime, entirely innocent Germans, especially young people, were also convicted of resisting the Soviet occupation on fimsy evidence. From 1948, as the SED tightened its grip on East Germany with Soviet support, SMTs were frequently used as a means of persecuting members of political parties who resisted the SED’s claim to power (Erler 1999, pp. 206–209). Alongside this already complex group, the potential victims of Stalinism also included those arrested and interned following the Soviet occupation, who were not subject to trial. This practice lasted only until the end of 1946, but many remained interned at least until trials were organized in 1950. Lutz Niethammer (1999, pp. 107–108) argues that, unlike those interned in the western zones of occupation, individuals interned in the Soviet Zone were more often low-ranking party members, since the Soviets tended to place former SS, SA and concentration 84 D. CLARKE camp personnel in prisoner-of-war camps. Nevertheless, it is clear that there was a signifcant presence of those who had supported the Nazi regime both among internees and among those convicted by SMTs. Offcials and members of the VOS writing in the Freiheitsglocke clearly perceived the presence of some (not especially high-ranking) Nazis among those imprisoned in the GDR as a potential problem in terms of their collective assumption of victim status. Here again we see an instrumentalization of the anti-communist rhetoric of “liberation,” with prisoners transformed in retrospect into “freedom fghters” whose commitment to the anti-totalitarian cause transcends their implication in National Socialism. In the second issue of Die Freiheitsglocke, a very likely pseudonymous Erdmann Greifenstamm (1951, 1–2) proclaimed:

we can say with complete conviction that nobody [who was imprisoned, DC] came back a Nazi. The rough hand of fate has reformed these individuals better than any de-Nazifcation could have done. It has changed their way of thinking and has given them a conviction which sadly not everyone in our Fatherland possesses. These people have become the sworn enemies of any form of dictatorship.

In a similar vein, Peter von Ketschendorf (1951, p. 2) implied that a refusal to acknowledge the suffering of former members of the NSDAP who were interned by the Soviets would waste their potential value as resisters to the new regime:

Splitting hairs in this way will not create any freedom fghters. In the Soviet concentration camps, we experienced how a shared danger can bring together people who were once divided by politics. Deprivation and death behind barbed wire brought the socialists, conservatives and liberals together with National Socialists, who proved themselves as men and as human beings.

In this view, the internment experience allowed for the overcoming of old political divisions in a shared fght against dictatorship. This new union of “freedom fghters” was supposed to allow former Nazis to shake off their responsibility for the old dictatorship by committing themselves to fghting the new communist oppression, at the same time as it allowed the VOS to propagate a shared victim identity based on 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 85 resistance to Soviet occupation and SED rule, very much in line with the discourse of “liberation” that dominated government policy at the time. Only by extending recognition of this victim status to all, so the implication, would new “freedom fghters” be inspired among those who remained in the GDR. In retrospect, the VOS has come to be seen as an organization that enjoyed a privileged relationship with the state. However, as will become clear below, this relationship was sometimes fraught and always complex. Although it may seem that, in comparison with other groups, the VOS had the ear of those in power, as Jenny Wüstenberg argues (2017, p. 50), it was more often the case that it sought to align itself with policy of the West German state and to defne the signifcance of its members’ victimhood in relation to that policy. The desire of early leaders of the VOS to emphasize the compatibility of their agenda with current government policy must be seen in the light of their repeated approaches to the BMG in order to secure funding for their activities. However, archival sources demonstrate the ambivalence of civil servants within the BMG with regard to the VOS on a number of levels. The VOS was and remains an organization with a dual function: namely, to support victims, but also to campaign for political change on their behalf. In October 1952, the VOS leadership addressed itself to the Federal Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in order to seek his support for funding. In doing so, it underlined the importance of the social function the VOS served in offering advice to newly arrived victims of Soviet and SED persecution in West Berlin and the Federal Republic (BArch B136/4376). However, in the early 1950s, the VOS was also pursuing the introduction of a compensation regime for victims of the Soviet Occupation and SED rule, which was not yet government policy (see Chapter 4). From the internal discussions within the BMG, it is clear that civil servants were weighing a number of factors when deciding whether the VOS was an organization that they could work with and that they should seek to fund. Not all of these concerns related to the political activities of the VOS. In one report from November 1954, for instance, a BMG offcial pointed to concerns expressed by a number of authorities that the apparent ability of VOS volunteers to work for extended periods of time and fnance a signifcant bureaucratic operation relying on only their unemployment beneft might point to clandestine funding by a foreign intelligence agency (BArch B137/203). At the same time, the BMG 86 D. CLARKE found it hard to ignore the potential value of the work that the VOS carried out and the extensive contacts it had among victims who had moved to the Federal Republic and West Berlin. Writing that same month, another offcial suggested that ongoing funding might be possible (ad hoc sums had already been paid) if a clear line could be drawn between the VOS’s social work and its political agenda (BArch B137/203). As Simsa notes (2001a, p. 293), one way in which civil society organizations of various kinds can make themselves relevant to the state is to offer services that complement state activities and serve the established political goals of government. However, in order to be accepted in this role by the state, it becomes necessary for such organizations to align their services as closely as possible with those priorities as they originate within the political system. In order to continue to function as an organization, the VOS needed the fnancial resources the state could provide. However, this alignment of services offered with the priorities of government had to be successfully balanced against the VOS’s campaigning role, both from the point of view of the BMG and the VOS itself. From the perspective of offcials, funding was explicitly regarded as a means of controlling the VOS and steering its agenda in a suitable direction, that is to say as an organization primarily interested in integrating victims into life in the West, which was also one of the Ministry’s respon- sibilities. In this sense, offcials were clearly in favour of a penetration of the organization, that is to say of a subordination of its work to the government’s political priorities. However, the BMG distrusted the team of Kalweit and Duwe for their apparent commitment to using the VOS as a platform for political as opposed to merely charitable activities. The VOS’s published rhetoric around victims as battle-scarred freedom fghters in the Cold War, as evidenced by Duwe’s and Kalweit’s texts in the Freiheitsglocke, seems to have cut little ice with the BMG, if indeed offcials had read them. Nor did such rhetoric appear in the communications of the VOS with politicians and civil servants, which makes plausible the suggestion that this particular construction of the victim’s role was primarily aimed at victims themselves, as the constituency of the VOS. Talk of a moral debt to the victims and the need for compensation could also function as a mobilizing moment of protest, the success of which allowed the VOS to point to a sizeable number of supporters, lending itself political clout. Indeed, the extensive contacts of the VOS to its membership were regularly cited by BMG offcials when explaining 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 87 the need to exert some form of control over the organization (BArch B137/203). What we therefore see with the early VOS is, on the one hand, a congruence between some of its goals (integration of victims in the West, contribution to the policy of “roll-back”) with some of the political goals of the government, refected in the latter’s willingness to provide the VOS with funds. However, this apparent compatibility in some areas was accompanied by a dissonance between the VOS’s political aims and government policy. This ambivalent relationship is arguably refected in the rhetoric we see in the Freiheitsglocke, in that the VOS leadership attempted to formulate a model form of victimhood for its members that was both compatible with, but to a certain extent also challenged the government’s policy, both assenting to the government’s cause of “roll-back” and criticizing its failure to support those who had allegedly paid the price of this policy. In this way, the early VOS established for itself a precarious position on the fringe of the political system, while simultaneously formulating communications that could be understood by its members as an expression of protest. In this sense, the VOS could fulfl the function of structural coupling between the political system and a specifc segment of its environment, namely the victims of Stalinist oppression, but only by communicating two varieties of decision: a communication of the decision to protest against the failures of government policy when it addressed its members, accompanied by a more conciliatory non-public communication with ministerial offcials when discussing the future of the organization. It is worth noting here that, where the decision to protest was communicated to members, that protest was framed in such a way that it could still be understood by the government as being (at least partially) compatible with its overall strategy in relation to the GDR. From the BMG’s point of view, the tensions inherent in this position could be resolved to a certain extent by a change in leadership at the VOS. From around the autumn of 1954, the BMG had been in close contact with a senior civil servant from the Ministry of the Economy, Werner Köhler, who had become a member of the VOS committee in June 1954 and who was chair of the regional group that had been established in Bonn, the new capital of the Federal Republic. Although Köhler complained that he had not been invited to any meetings by his Berlin colleagues, he was still able to report back to the BMG at least once about a visit to the city, offering his assessment of the situation of the 88 D. CLARKE

Berlin leadership of the VOS, which offcials regarded as propelling the organization’s political agenda (BArch B137/203). Doubtless on the grounds of his ministerial contacts, Köhler was asked by the VOS in October 1954 to take on responsibility for nego- tiating funds with the BMG. He and the BMG would have preferred, in fact, for the leadership of the VOS to be taken on by him, working from Bonn, with the Berlin offce reduced to a regional representation of the organization. However, it was not until June 1955, when Kalweit and Duwe resigned from the leadership, that this quasi-takeover became possible. The key change that Köhler’s leadership brought about, as the VOS continued to press for regular and more signifcant funding from the BMG, was an attempt to more closely align the activities of the VOS with the priorities of the federal government. Writing to the BMG in February 1957, for example, Köhler outlined the content of a planned event for VOS members in Berlin, the subject matter of which included the following topics: “The political responsibility and participation of former political prisoners”; “The VOS’s role in the defence of the Federal Republic against the forces of Bolshevik world revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat”; and “The VOS’s role in assisting the authorities” (BArch B137/203). Such developments are a testament to the desire of the VOS under Köhler’s leadership to offer itself as a kind of disseminator of government positions among victims, but also to present victims themselves as potential multipliers of the anti-communist creed working on behalf of state agencies. This approach denotes a move towards a situation in which the VOS became less an organization in which the systems of politics and protest were structurally coupled than one that had become penetrated by the political system. This integration of the VOS into the political system in the service of government policy is equally refected in the mobilizing rhetoric directed towards members. By the late 1950s, the viability of a strategy of “roll-back” or “liberation” had become increasingly unconvincing. Following the sup- pression of resistance to Soviet domination in the GDR itself (1953) and later in Hungary and Poland (both 1956), the US and the Federal Republic became increasingly resigned to the status quo with regard to communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, a process which culminated in the “end of illusions” represented by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 (Stöver 2002, pp. 805 and 810). At the same time, by 1957, the Soviet Union was itself emphasizing the need for peaceful coexistence with the West. This change of circumstances was explicitly 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 89 acknowledged in Die Freiheitsglocke, and there was consequently a notable shift in the discourse by which VOS offcials sought to make clear why it remained important for West German society to remember the suffering of its members and why victims themselves should remain politically engaged. Rather than framing the commemoration of the victims’ suffering as a contribution to resistance to the communist regime in the GDR, offcials writing in the magazine began to focus on the necessity of defending democracy within the Federal Republic, among a population deemed to be increasingly comfortable and depoliticized in the wake of West Germany’s “economic miracle.” The implied danger here was that such a population would no longer be in a position to resist anti-democratic (that is to say, communist) forces who might try to undermine the political system in the West. For example, in 1957 VOS offcial Susanne Sievers (1957, p. 10) emphasized the “responsibility” of former political prisoners

to be an active element in the politics of the Federal Republic that pricks the conscience of the well-fed. The victims of Stalinism must be the yeast in the great bread of our people, shaking its will to freedom and independence awake, keeping alive its sense of responsibility for that freedom.

What we see here is an adoption of the notion of containment by the VOS leadership, as the prospect of “liberation” in relation to the GDR becomes ever more distant. In this discourse, which is maintained well into the 1960s, the sacrifce of those who suffered at the hands of communists in East Germany is fgured as a reminder to “well fed West Germans” with their “refrigerators, television cabinets, holidays in Italy, cocktail parties and abstract art” that they must not forget their duty to defend the ideals on which democracy is founded (von Koss 1962). This argument segues with the plans laid out by Köhler in 1957, as discussed above, to use the VOS to educate its members on the policy of the government with regard to the containment of the communist threat and the necessity of their mobilization in the service of that political goal. A similar argument can be seen in the presentation of a volume of poems fnanced by subscription by VOS members. Ihr steht aber im Licht (But You Stand in the Light, 1962) collected poems by former internees and political prisoners who had fed the GDR. Most of the contributors were amateur writers. The title of the volume itself implicates non-victim readers directly: they are regarded as standing in the light that is denied 90 D. CLARKE to the persecuted. This expression is taken from one poem that urges the reader not to forget the sacrifce of the victims. Although many of the pieces simply describe experiences of suffering with little commen- tary, others draw heavily on the Christian imagery of martyrdom. For example, there are references to the “path to Golgotha” (Pförtner and Natonek 1962, p. 82) and drinking from the cup (p. 84). In addition, one whole section of the book is entitled “Gerufen und erhört”: Literally “called and answered,” which is possibly a reference to Isiah 49, 8 (“In the time of favor I will answer you”). This section is taken up exclusively with poems that are inspired by Christian religion, and a frontispiece shows skeletons behind barbed wire, some of whom appear to be rising from the dead, against a background of crosses (Pförtner and Natonek 1962, p. 173); in the sky, we see a crucifed fgure, presumably Christ. Just as Christ died to save the world in Christian theology, the introductory material to the volume makes clear, so the victims of communist oppression “have sacrifced themselves in the name of the free world” (p. 22). This emphasis is telling, in that the suffering of the victims is no longer understood as a sign of resistance likely to contribute to the overthrow of the communist regime in the GDR, but rather as an experience that has somehow contributed to the preservation of freedom in the West. The presentation of the victims as Christlike martyrs and the address of the collection’s title suggests a call to West German readers to remember the victims’ suffering and to emulate them in their defence of democratic freedom. This shift in rhetoric was not only designed to maintain a sense that the victims’ past suffering was still relevant to West German society, but can also be understood as propagating a coherent victim identity to bind individual members to the organization. The challenge for the VOS was no longer simply a matter of creating a victim category that made sense of heterogeneous experiences, but was now rather a matter of encouraging those who might potentially regard themselves as victims of the communist regime in the East to maintain that identifcation, to remain loyal to the VOS itself, and to remain active in their support of its goals. The danger of the “well fed” society of the economic miracle to the VOS as an organization was not only that the victims might seem less relevant to ordinary West Germans with their largely materialistic and parochial concerns, but that individual victims themselves might join the ranks of the complacent. Addressing the general assembly of 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 91 the association in 1964, chairman Hans-Joachim Platz highlighted this apparent depoliticization of victims:

The rust of contentment is also eating away at the former political prisoners. With a fatter belly came also a sense of being more comfortable, with a return to economic security and relative wealth came also a sense of indifference towards the problems of society. (Platz 1964)

What lay behind this concern was at least in part a recognition that, once integrated into West German society, many members left the organization and were no longer interested in regarding themselves as victims whose past experiences had left them with a special responsibility to play a political role. This trend was surely facilitated to an extent by the compensation scheme introduced in 1955, the Law on Aid to Former Political Prisoners (Häftlingshilfegesetz, or HHG), on which the VOS had campaigned, and which will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4. As Platz made his appeal to members to remain politically active, frst signs of a decline in membership were making themselves felt. The VOS rarely published membership fgures, but recorded 23,000 in September 1963 (Köhler 1963, p. 20). By September 1968, however, it had only around 10,000, representing only one-seventh of the number of former political prisoners living in the Federal Republic (Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus 1968); and by 1973 the Freiheitsglocke was only being printed in a run of 4000, a number of which would have been made available to institutions and relevant politicians, not only to members. It seems clear from this sharp decline that those who might potentially have seen themselves as victims of state socialism either no longer regarded themselves in those terms, or were no longer attracted to the version of victimhood propagated by the VOS. It could also be speculated here that, even though the VOS continued to campaign for improvements to the HHG, it was regarded as too closely aligned to the priorities of government to achieve effective change on behalf of its members. This was certainly a charge that rival groups raised at various points in the VOS’s history, as will be discussed in more detail below. Köhler seems to have been particularly keen to fnd the resources to train VOS members as potential speakers and dis- cussants for public events, where the moral authority of their suffering would lend weight to their advocacy for government positions against 92 D. CLARKE the communist threat. In the late 1950s, drawing on this logic, Köhler was able to persuade the Press and Information Offce of the federal government to pay for several seminars for VOS members with this aim in mind. Describing the value of the events, Köhler wrote: “we are increasing the self-confdence of our comrades and, with their help, we are strengthening resistance to the communist threat in the West German population.” VOS members’ value to the government, Köhler and his fellow VOS offcials believed, was therefore that they were able to undertake “valuable work in the political education and enlightenment” of their fellow citizens (BArch B145/3522).

The VOS in the Era of Détente The strategy developed under Köhler’s leadership, and continued by his immediate successors, was to integrate the VOS into the periphery of the political system. At the same time, the organization sought where it could to maintain at least the rhetoric of protest as a means of mobilizing members’ support. However, this protest was directed not against the political system of the Federal Republic, but against the political system of the GDR and the Soviet occupier. It was a historical peculiarity of the VOS’s situation in the Cold War that it could continue to fght against an unjust and morally discreditable political system elsewhere, while simultaneously affrming the political, social and economic status quo within which it operated. From the point of view of the GDR regime, therefore, the VOS was an organization located very frmly within the system of protest, while from the point of view of the government of the Federal Republic it was a harmless and perhaps even useful transmitter of its own standpoints to the wider population, and thus very much part of the political system. With the advent of a new Social Democrat-led foreign policy for the Federal Republic in the mid-1960s, however, and particularly during a long period of Social Democrat-Liberal government from 1969 until 1982, the VOS found itself representing stances that became oppositional in the West German context. Rather than immediately revising its own view of the social and political role of victims of state socialism in the Federal Republic, or indeed its own self-conception as an organization representing those victims, the leadership of the VOS held onto positions that were now no longer compatible with the government view, sliding from a position of penetration by the political system 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 93 to position in which it risked becoming so frmly and uncompromisingly aligned with the system of protest that it might be regarded as irrelevant by the political system. There were two dangers in this insistence upon established positions within the VOS. Firstly, while the transition to a “normal” life in the Federal Republic may have been one cause for victims’ growing disinter- est in the VOS, the decision of its offcials not to modify their position in the face of new political realities also opened up a cleavage between the activists of the organization, on the one hand, and the broader membership, on the other. The sharp decline in membership particularly in the later 1960s and into the 1970s can at least in part be explained by the leadership’s initial reluctance to adjust their position in response to the emergence of peaceful coexistence as a favoured strategy on the part of the United States, and in relation to the emergence of the Ostpolitik promoted by Willy Brandt, frst as Foreign Minister and then as Chancellor. Secondly, by this time a regular recipient of substantial federal funding, the VOS ran the risk of losing its position as preferred representative of victims of the GDR and therefore of jeopardizing its economic survival. Karl Wilhelm Fricke, a journalist who, as a former political prisoner himself, remained one of the foremost commentators on human rights abuses in the GDR and who was a signifcant fgure within the VOS, acknowledged the diffculty of this new situation in his introduction to a volume of autobiographical texts that the organization published in 1967: “There may well be voices who believe that the experiences documented here had been better not published for the sake of understanding between the two Germanys” (Fricke 1967, p. 5). Those voices were heard particularly within government. When Social Democrat Herbert Wehner took over the BMG in 1966, he soon expressed his mistrust of the VOS as a group of irresponsible Cold War warriors (Creuzberger 2008, p. 491). The VOS leadership’s initial response to this change of mood was to resist the agenda of détente and Ostpolitik and thus shift the organization more frmly into the system of protest. For over a decade it found itself in the invidious position of instinctive opposition to a policy of rapprochement with the regime that had persecuted its members, while at the same time recognizing that many of its goals as an organization, not least that of securing more substantial compensation for victims, were dependent on the goodwill of the political establishment in the Federal Republic, where a broad consensus on the necessity of de-escalating tensions with the East was emerging. 94 D. CLARKE

The VOS leadership’s refusal to reformulate its position may also have been infuenced by the views of those victims who did choose to remain members and who tended to express bitterness with the new political status quo. Their perspective was summed up in May 1967 by the Chairman of the Mannheim group of the VOS, who was quoted in the regional newspaper Badische Zeitung critiquing the new tone in the Federal Republic’s policy towards the GDR:

It was the mood of the Cold War that indirectly contributed to the action we have taken. And today we are regarded in many circles as an unwelcome reminder of the offcial policy of the 1950s. (Stelling 1967)

In the autumn of that same year, Gerhard Beyer of the VOS leadership wrote directly to Christian Democrat (CDU) Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger expressing the disappointment of VOS members, but also making clear the potential link between the apparent end of the victims’ political usefulness and the inadequate compensation that was still at the heart of the organization’s concerns. Insisting that “we are no Cold War warriors,” he noted that, in relation to failed attempts on the part of the VOS to have the HHG revisited,

the current political situation and the social situation of our members leaves many with the feeling that we no longer have a place in the political landscape of the Federal Republic. (Bayer 1967, p. 5; cf. BArch B137/2204)

In a statement released to the press, the VOS insisted that the federal government should continue to fght for German unifcation by encouraging Germans in the GDR to resist the SED regime; a point of view that appeared to represent a return to the “roll-back” rhetoric characteristic of West German policy in early 1950s. The policy of Kiesinger, in his coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), was denounced as “opportunistic” (BArch B137/2204). Summoned to the BMG to discuss the issue, Beyer left a less than favourable impression on Wehner and his offcials, with the Minister accusing the VOS of being “irresponsible” in its calls to support resistance within the GDR. Köhler, who also attended this meeting as former chair of the VOS and its then administrative head in the Bonn offce, pointedly asked if the new status quo meant that the VOS “still had a 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 95 reason to exist,” a question that the Minister declined to answer, while nevertheless underlining that the BMG’s continued funding of the organization was “another question” (BArch B137/2204). The implication was clear that, if it no longer had a function as a transmitter of government policy to its membership and to the wider public, the VOS was not necessarily regarded as fundable by the BMG. In the years that followed, different approaches to a redefnition of the social and political role of victims were mooted within the VOS leadership, with a particular focus on the rise of left-wing radicalism during and after the student movement of the late 1960s. Gitta Bauer’s (1968, pp. 1–2) contribution to the general assembly of the VOS in March 1968, for example, demonstrates that this search for a sense of purpose was closely linked with the decline in the signifcance for wider society of remembering victims’ experiences:

In my view, our society can ill afford—at this time of confusion, and the relativization of all values—to do without a group of people who have been hardened in the fres of terror and oppression. We do not want to be written off as belonging in the past, people with whom one at most has pity, but whose political views one believes one can simply push to one side.

Nevertheless, it became clear that such a reorientation, attempting to install victims of the communist regime in the GDR as moral authorities qualifed to be taken seriously on broader social and political matters, would have little purchase with the politicians on whom the VOS relied to achieve its specifc goals. In the following decade, the VOS and its offcials failed to arrive at a convincing alternative narrative in terms of the positive social and political role of victims, or on the importance of maintaining the memory of their suffering in West German society. Instead, they largely held fast to opposition to détente with the East. There is evidence that this position contributed to increasing losses in membership, with some voicing their rejection of the VOS’s apparently uncompromising position. Clearly, not all those who had been victims of oppression in the GDR regarded Ostpolitik as anathema (Reese 1974). The diffculties that the new political status quo caused for the VOS were resolved at least temporarily when the committee that had continued to run the organization in the Cold War tradition was replaced by 96 D. CLARKE offcers offering an alternative platform in April 1978. The then editor of Die Freiheitsglocke, Eberhard Reese (real name Sigurd Binski), set out the need for a change in direction in highly pragmatic terms:

The VOS cannot simply represent one position on relations between the German states. It needs both the opposition and the government on its side. … Because nothing we want to achieve can be achieved without the government. (Reese 1978)

It is notable that the title of the general assembly of the VOS where this change of direction was inaugurated took the motto “Freedom and Human Rights.” This foreshadowed a shift in the VOS discourse about the social and political role of victims that allowed the organization to adopt a position that remained critical of the GDR and demanded that the suffering of its victims should not be forgotten, while at the same time keeping within the bounds of what the organization clearly felt was acceptable from the government’s point of view. This new strategy was not purely an innovation of the organization itself. As Samuel Moyn (2010, pp. 121–175) has pointed out, the notion of human rights as standards to which states could be held by the international community, as opposed to principles whose implementation was an internal matter for sovereign states alone, emerged in the 1970s at least in part as a response to détente between the superpowers. Within the framework of peaceful coexistence, the West could apply pressure on communist states for their failure to uphold human rights without framing such critique in terms of an attack on their political system as a whole. President Jimmy Carter, who quickly became a hero fgure for the VOS (Göhl and Rothenbächer 1977), was at the forefront of this development. However, the invocation of human rights was also compatible with West German Ostpolitik, which hoped to use rapprochement with the GDR as a means of applying pressure to the communist regime to ease some of its more repressive measures towards the East German population. Negotiations in the context of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, leading to the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, were an important expression of this approach. Although the VOS had begun to adopt the term human rights as a slogan before the leadership change of 1978, this focus became central in the years following this tactical shift. Addressing members in December 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 97 of that year, the new chairwoman of the VOS, Jutta Giersch, set out this human rights agenda:

It remains a primary responsibility of the VOS to work tirelessly and visibly for the cause of human rights in eastern Germany, however diffcult others may fnd it to hear that message. (Giersch 1978)

Despite Giersch’s presentation of the VOS’s position as potentially controversial, in the context of the times this new interpretation of the role of victims was clearly designed to allow for activism within a politically acceptable framework. In other words, it allowed the VOS to oppose the regime in the GDR, while at the same time avoiding “a course of hard confrontation with the federal government” (Reese 1980, p. 1). Furthermore, behind the scenes, the development of détente with the GDR has also provided unexpected opportunities to the VOS in terms of its relationship to the political system. The “buying free” (Freikauf) of political prisoners from the jails of the GDR with hard West German Marks had begun in 1962, but the practice had developed signifcantly during the years of Ostpolitik. The numbers grew to such an extent that by 1989 over 33,000 political prisoners had been released into the Federal Republic, along with many more members of their families and individuals who had applied to be released from their GDR citizenship (Wölbern 2014, p. 12). Over a quarter of a million Germans’ freedom had been purchased by the Federal Republic by the end of the 1980s (Rehlinger 1991, p. 7). While the Federal Republic had agreed not to publicly acknowledge these “special measures,” the arrival of large numbers of former GDR citizens in the West did not go unnoticed in the long term. Initially, the West German press had come to a voluntary agreement not to report on the matter, so as not to undermine this form of cooperation with the SED regime (Rehlinger 1991, p. 62). In the autumn of 1972, however, the conservative journalist Gerhard Löwenthal used his popular current affairs broadcast “ZDF-Magazin” to refer to the arrangements for “buying free” East Germans (Wölbern 2014, p. 386). By the late 1970s the issue had caught the attention of the media as a potential social problem. For example, in a documentary broadcast by North German Television on 26 May, 1978 (“From the GDR to the West: The Fate of Released Political Prisoners”) the journalist Mascha M. Fisch approached the problem of GDR émigrés exclusively from the 98 D. CLARKE point of view of the psychological and social diffculties they faced when integrating into life in the Federal Republic. Fisch argued that, while former political prisoners may have imagined they were arriving in the “Golden West,” they found themselves living in less desirable accommodation (“often right next to homeless shelters and accommodation for foreign guest workers”), with few prospects and little sympathy from West Germans. Homelessness, Fisch noted, was a particular problem, but (perhaps more importantly, given the centrality the journalist gave to this argument) former political prisoners should not expect to be celebrated as “heroes” or “martyrs”:

[The former political prisoner] should understand that he will be treated completely normally; and that this is as it should be. Because he is only one part of the GDR population, which otherwise has to get along with the regime or at least does not attempt to resist it. Many – if not perhaps the majority – of those people who live in the GDR do not agree with the regime. (Fisch 1978)

Very much in line with the politics of détente, this journalist started from the viewpoint that the GDR regime was something that Germans could not simply do away with (at least in the short term) and that a central concern should therefore be the welfare of the majority of the GDR’s population, who had to put up with SED rule, rather than a minority of resisters whose actions should not be treated as exemplary. This interpretation reduced the fate of those bought free by the Federal Republic to that of a social rather than a political problem: they were prey to various social ills, such as unemployment, homelessness and depression, but these needed solutions at the level of West German society (either from the authorities or from sympathetic fellow citizens) and were denied a political signifcance in terms of infuencing the Federal Republic’s stance towards the GDR. On 27 July, 1979, the prime-time current affairs programme “Kennzeichen D” (known for its centre-left perspectives on the news) carried a comparable report on the case of a 23-year-old former political prisoner from the GDR who was now residing in a secure psychi- atric unit after a suicide attempt, which had been preceded by a failed (drunken) attempt at bank robbery and jail time for an incident of threatening behaviour. The report presented its subject not so much as 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 99 suffering from the after-effects of persecution in the GDR, but from the alienation he experienced in the consumerist society of the West and the exploitation he had faced in the labour market as someone with a physical disability (Kennzeichen 1979). As in Fisch’s report discussed above, the focus here was more on the failure of the Federal Republic to integrate a vulnerable group than on the signifcance of this group in terms of the relationship of the Federal Republic to the GDR. The following months saw a spate of reports in mass market periodicals that told similar tales of failed integration, focusing on isolation, an inability to deal with the challenges of a consumer society and mental diffculties; issues which were consistently presented as a kind of culture shock and not as the traumatizing effects of the experience of political imprisonment (Spiegel 1979; Weber 1979; Dillmann 1979; Schütte and Zilk 1980). While there may have been a certain validity in emphasizing this aspect of the transition from the GDR to life in the Federal Republic for former political prisoners, many of whom had by this stage been “born into” the state socialist system (to use GDR poet Uwe Kolbe’s expression), such media reports arguably refected a depoliticization of the fgure of the former political prisoner as victim in the wider society of the Federal Republic, which chimed in with government stances on Ostpolitik. While seeking to help political prisoners in the GDR, the government was not interested in mobilizing their suffering or their resistance to SED rule to challenge the status quo of German division. The VOS’s shift to a championing of the importance of human rights may have allowed them to continue to protest against the GDR regime without explicitly calling for resistance to it, yet this growing concern over the social situation of those bought free by the Federal Republic also offered an opportunity in terms of asserting the value of the organization to the government. Indeed, in making its case for continued funding, the VOS made explicit the centrality of its role in integrating former political prisoners into West German society, as in its yearly report to the BMG in 1977:

Because of the extensive fnancial support offered to the VOS, we are able to play a special role in strengthening our free and democratic system. By means of targeted and intensive mentoring and integration, particularly of those newly released political prisoners, we can achieve an effective beneft to the Federal Republic. (BArch B137/9972) 100 D. CLARKE

In fact, in its communications with the BMG, the VOS had begun to reframe its role in relation to government policy long before the change in its leadership in 1978. The key theme of this reorientation was the VOS’s role in containing that threat to the federal government’s agenda of peaceful coexistence with the GDR regime represented by former political prisoners, who were allegedly radicalized by the experience of persecution. In the VOS’s annual report to the BMG in 1972, for example, the VOS leadership emphasized the role of the organization in mod- erating such impulses:

There is a group of former political prisoners of younger years who wish to use their membership of the VOS as a platform for the most spectacular and even violent forms of resistance to the GDR. It takes a lot of patience to channel their over-enthusiasm in the right direction, but it is an important part of our work behind the scenes. (BArch B137/9971)

From 1976, the VOS pressed the government to allow it to take on a central role in the integration of political prisoners either as they arrived from the GDR at the emergency reception camp located at Gießen or on a residential basis immediately after their stay at this facility. Discussions between the individual Länder as funders of the camp, under the aegis of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, revealed a certain amount of dis- quiet at the prospect of handing over what was deemed to be a “state responsibility” to a civil society group (BArch B106/97387). Initially, the VOS was able to secure funds from the Ministry for organizing “Integration Seminars” outside of the Gießen camp. In an outline proposal for the frst of these seminars, the VOS set out the importance of this work:

A complete lack of knowledge, and incorrect notions about and expectations of the possibilities of our free and democratic system under the rule of law already lead to conficts in the frst days and weeks [after arrival from the GDR, DC]. Beginning from the assumption that former inhabitants of the GDR, and particularly those just released from prison, have been consistently trained to behave only as dictated by bureaucracy, [former political prisoners] are mostly helpless when immediately required to act independently and to interact with the various authorities in our free Federal Republic of Germany. (BArch B106/97387) 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 101

Despite the strenuously apolitical tone here, the Ministry of the Interior remained suspicious of the political positions of the VOS, pointing for instance to the strongly voiced opposition to the government’s Ostpolitik from many members during annual meetings of the association. While noting that the election of a new committee headed by Giersch in (1978) promised an approach that was “politically more astute and more circumspect, less loud and spectacular” (BArch B106/97387), the Ministry of the Interior, and the federal states whose agreement it had to secure, preferred to develop its own seminars in collaboration with other civil society organizations, such as the International Society for Social Work, which was part of the German Red Cross. Nevertheless, the VOS continued to pursue the idea of integration seminars and related activities, appealing to the Federal Ministry for Inner-German Relations (Bundesministerium für innerdeutsche Beziehungen, or BMiB, as the BMG had been renamed in 1969) for funds. In the VOS’s annual report for 1978, for example, the new organizing committee stressed the political dangers facing newly arrived former political prisoners:

Those former political prisoners arriving in the Federal Republic today have grown up in a totalitarian system. They are as yet unfamiliar with the workings of a pluralistic society and its problems. … In the case of some of the newly released this can lead to a danger of politically extreme behavior and the inability to come to terms with their new life. (BArch B137/9973)

This work extended to the setting up of “Junior Circles” within the VOS, in which older members with a longer experience of life in the Federal Republic offered support to those who had only recently been released from prison in the GDR, and regular, residential mentoring seminars, which continued throughout the 1980s. While the VOS collected its own funds from its (dwindling) membership, and had its administration subsidized by the BMiB, seminars and other events aimed at the political education of former prisoners could be the subject of project funding from the Ministry. Such work could also be mobilized to defend the VOS’s core funding when this was under scrutiny. For example, in 1982 the VOS defended itself against proposed funding cuts as follows: 102 D. CLARKE

The Ministry knows the problems of this group [i.e. former political prisoners, DC] very well and cannot have overlooked or failed to notice that the VOS – in particular under the leadership of the last four years – has made a signifcant contribution to addressing the problem of right-wing extremism in this group and to resisting communist tendencies. … Here we have … contributed signifcantly to a greater understanding of our democratic social order. (BArch B137/20221)

While the organization is a little vague on where these communist tendencies are to be found (in the general population or among former political prisoners is not clear), its emphasis on the former political prisoners as potentially in danger of becoming radicalized and turning to the political right, while consistent with VOS positions since the early 1970s, only serves to emphasize the extent to which the VOS, at least when addressing the government, chose to pick up on the growing concerns about former GDR citizens as a social problem in the Federal Republic and frame these as a potential political problem for the state. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, the VOS leadership continued to emphasize the potential for radicalization of disoriented and culture-shocked former political prisoners, whether framed as a threat to the democratic order in the Federal Republic or as potential spoilers of the Federal Republic’s non-confrontational stance towards the GDR regime. This strongly echoed the situation in the 1950s, when the VOS stressed its role to the BMG in terms of the complementary services it could offer to victims in the furtherance of government policy. By this point the VOS as an organization was in essence communicating two different kinds of decision. Turning towards its members, as evidenced by publications in Die Freiheitsglocke, it sought to communicate a decision to protest against the GDR in a way that was compatible with Ostpolitik and that would therefore not be perceived as barrier to cooperation with the West German government. The focus on human rights as a theme of protest was congruent with the Federal Republic’s signature with the GDR to the Helsinki Accords, although the BMiB clearly preferred a more low-key approach to securing human rights in the GDR. From 1978, the VOS’s key compromise was that it would not seek to draw attention to such human rights abuses as a means of condemning Ostpolitik as a whole. In this way, the VOS could propose to its membership a form of activism that was potentially mobilizing, but prevented the organization drifting too far into the system of protest and becoming alienated from the political system, which it depended on for funds. 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 103

The VOS remained structurally coupled to the political system via the mechanism of that funding (as BMG offcials had argued that it would in the 1950s), but was able to simulate a protest stance to an extent by directing such protest communication against the GDR and not against West German government policy. Behind the scenes, however, it addressed the communication of decisions of a different kind directly to the BMiB as one organization of the political system to another, stressing its contribution to policy goals such as the successful integration of the former political prisoners into West German society and the neutralization of their potential to become a base for opposition to Ostpoltik. In doing so, the VOS effectively constructed the younger victims of the SED regime as politically volatile and potentially dangerous to the project of Ostpolitik, while at the same time constructing its older members as those who possessed a special set of skills (based on their own experience of integration into West German society) that would help them to solve the problem of the disaffection of newly arrived former political prisoners on the government’s behalf. Drawing on Luhmann’s terminology, we can therefore understand the VOS in this phase of its existence as facilitating a structural coupling of the systems of protest and politics, but one which was only achieved by limiting the production of protest communication to a specifc sphere of its activity (mobilizing members). It communicated decisions to protest that could be tolerated by the political system, at the same time as it communicated (in private) other kinds of decision to government offcials.

Challenges to the VOS The strategies adopted by the VOS as an organization did not go without challenge from among those who defned themselves as victims of Soviet occupation and the SED regime. Disaffected by the VOS’s approach, some sought to form alternative organizations with alternative strategies. Not only were such organizations challengers to the VOS in terms of their co-option of its constituency, the victims themselves, but they were also potential rivals for state funding. A comparison with such organizations makes clear the extent to which the VOS’s approach was predicated on its integration into the political system as described above, in that other organizations tried and failed to achieve structural coupling with that system: their failure demonstrates the limitations placed on 104 D. CLARKE organizations who sought such structural coupling in terms of the viability of the available strategic options. For example, the failure of the Association of Political Prisoners of the Soviet System (Vereinigung politischer Häftlinge des Sowjet-Systems, or VPH) to make itself into an attractive partner for government may be said to have a number of causes, not the least of which was its tendency over the years to descend into internal squabbles, splits and litiga- tion. However, it also provides an object lesson in the shifting room for manoeuvre that the Cold War afforded such victims’ organizations, and which the VOS was able to exploit more successfully. Founded in 1954 by a group splintering off from the VOS, the VPH challenged the VOS’s inclusive version of what it meant to be a victim of the Soviet occupation and the SED regime by limiting its membership to those who had been imprisoned for resistance to state socialism after May 8, 1945. This excluded those who had been detained by the Soviet occupier because of their alleged activities under National Socialism. According to the VPH, these “victims,” tainted with the suspicion of Nazi affliations, were regarded by its 6500 members as too dominant within the VOS (BArch B145/3525). Initially, the VPH, whose membership was concentrated in West Berlin, was successful in obtaining some funding from the state for its magazine Nordlicht (Northern Light) on the grounds that the BMG felt that it was particularly important to support such groups in Berlin (BArch B145/3525). However, during the 1960s, it failed to establish itself as a preferred partner of the BMG/ BMiB, not only on the grounds that the VPH’s persistent internal strife presumably tended to make offcials wary of investing public funds. At various junctures, the VPH showed itself to be an obstacle to, rather than a promoter of, the acceptance of government policy among its members. For instance, the VPH was particularly strong in its criticism of the VOS’s handling of the issue of compensation. While the VOS continued to express some concerns over the compensation regime instituted by the HHG (as will be discussed at length in Chapter 4), its chair Werner Köhler in particular appeared to the VPH to be more interested in selling the policy to VOS members than challenging it. In Nordlicht, for example, Köhler was accused in 1960 of telling VOS members that they would have to wait until German unifcation for full compensation for their suffering, at the behest of the BMG and in exchange for government funding (VPH 1960, p. 3). In essence, the VPH was accusing Köhler’s VOS (not unreasonably) of having become 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 105 penetrated by the political system and of no longer being capable of a protest function. This accusation seems to have had some resonance within the ranks of the VOS membership, judging by a series of critical letters that circulated among them, signed by a faction of disgruntled VOS members calling itself the “Loyalty and Freedom” group (BArch B137/2204). However, such claims, when articulated by the VPH, also need to be set in the context of its own continued but unsuccessful efforts in the early 1960s to secure just such ongoing funding for itself from the federal government (BArch B137/15646). Alfred Weiland, as a particularly active member and vice chair of the VPH in the early 1960s, made repeated approaches to the BMG, stressing that his organization was truly engaged in a political fght against the GDR regime and that the VPH had not become merely a “social security club,” that is to say that they were interested in more than simply helping members receive payments through the HHG (BArch B137/15646). Stressing that the VPH had not become “depoliticized,” Weiland was able to secure some limited funds for one-off projects, yet he arguably misjudged the expectations of the BMG of such an organization: in the era of containment, aggressive opposition to the SED regime was potentially less useful to the government than the VOS’s apparent policy of selling the compensation provisions of the HHG to a reluctant constituency. The key point in the breakdown of relations between the BMG and the VPH centred, however, on the issue of the “buying free” of political prisoners from the GDR. As noted above, the West German government complied with the desire of the SED regime for these transactions to be kept out of the public eye as far as possible. The VOS, while aware of these developments, did nothing to challenge the government’s tac- tics. Weiland, however, by this time the chair of the VPH, became aware in August 1964 of the case of a young man in West Berlin whose freedom had apparently been bought by the West German government. Weiland approached the press and had to be brought into the BMG and informed about the government’s “special measures,” over which he was then sworn to secrecy. Subsequently, however, others in the VPH leadership accused Weiland of having brought the organization into disrepute. Furthermore, the BMG called him back into speak with them in November 1966, suspect- ing him of having been behind further reports in the press giving details of the “buying free” of prisoners (BArch B137/15682). Although 106 D. CLARKE

Weiland denied this, he clearly did not manage to convince offcials at the BMG, which was now under Social Democrat control, that he was a reliable partner in the new age of Ostpolitik. Writing shortly after the meeting, Weiland described his response to offcials who had asked him what the VPH would do if the “buying free” of prisoners collapsed because of press reports:

I responded: Then the VPH would be able to get back to its real task: A militant confrontation with red fascism, i.e. communism/Bolshevism. And that is exactly what I shouldn’t have said!! (BArch B137/15682)

Clearly, in these exchanges, as the BMG passed into Social Democrat hands at the dawn of the new Ostpolitik, Weiland and his organization were suspected not merely of sabotaging the government’s policy, but of looking forward to its collapse so as to launch a more militantly anti-communist agenda. Whether Weiland and the VPH would have followed through on this threat is perhaps beside the point. What is signifcant here is that Weiland had shown himself incapable of managing the VPH’s relations with the BMG and of formulating a position for his organization that would have allowed the BMG to offer fnancial support, safe in the knowledge that the VPH would further its policy goals. The subsequent acrimony within the VPH, during which other offcials tried to get rid of Weiland, showed that the organization recognized the gravity of its situation, but these internal struggles also provided the BMG with a good reason not to offer further funding to what appeared to be an increasingly chaotic organization (BArch B137/15682). A more serious threat to the VOS’s preeminent role in relation to the political system was the emergence of victim activism in the context of the International Society for Human Rights (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, or IGFM), which had originally been founded in 1972. This organization offered a home in the late 1970s to fgures from the VOS such as Eberhard Göhl and Wulf Rothenbächer, who had been voted out as chairs of the VOS in 1978 in favour of Giersch and her supporters, or to those who preferred a more militantly anti-communist stance. This controversial organization was often criticized for emphasizing human rights abuses in communist-run states while downplaying the crimes of right-wing regimes such as that in South Africa (Kuck 2000). Although claims that it was a neo-fascist front were unfounded (Wüst 1999, p. 13), the IGFM 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 107 can certainly be regarded as an organization that drew support from anti-communist and conservative circles, in opposition to the generally more left-liberal constituency of Amnesty International, for example. Indeed, the focus of what became the IGFM’s German section before the fall of the Berlin Wall shows a strong concentration on case- work related to the GDR, especially in relation to GDR citizens who had applied to be released from their citizenship and to resettle in the West. By 1989, the IGFM was dealing with over 3000 such cases per year (Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte, n.d., p. 1). In the early 1980s, the IGFM received considerable criticism from the government, in particular from the SPD Minister for Inner-German Relations Egon Franke, for its very public campaigns for the release of these appli- cants and of political prisoners (Wüst 1999, p. 75). As already noted, the government had established discreet channels of communication with the GDR regime to secure the release of individuals, not least through the system of payments offered for the release to the West of those deemed to be political prisoners. However, this discretion, which the GDR demanded for such negotiations, was undermined by the IGFM and the Working Group August 13 (Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August), an anti-communist organization founded by former KgU vice chair Rainer Hildebrandt, both of which used their work with former prisoners to collect information on human rights abuses in the GDR and disseminate it to the press (Wölbern 2014, p. 372). Activists within the IGFM clearly understood their work in terms of bringing the communist regime in the GDR to an end and promoting the eventual reunifcation of Germany. In this sense, they represented a return to the “liberation” strategies of the 1950s. By the early 1980s, under the infuence of US President Ronald Reagan, this notion appeared (at least at the rhetorical level) to be in vogue once more, and the IGFM made a clear link between the publicizing of the crimes of the communist government in the GDR and the need to strengthen Germans’ readiness to shake off the post-war status quo. Rothenbächer, for example, writing in the IGFM’s magazine DDR heute (GDR Today) in 1987, called on West Germans to form a “Reunifcation Movement” and pointed to the West German government’s refusal to react publicly to human rights abuses in the GDR as one reason why such a movement was failing to emerge (Rothenbächer 1987). Similarly, the organization Calls for Help from Over There (Hilferufe von Drüben, or HvD), which emerged from a series of television 108 D. CLARKE broadcasts by conservative journalist Gerhard Löwenthal on the situation of those persecuted in the GDR, supported the IGFM’s approach, making links between the “traditional silence of the government of the Federal Republic” and the “destruction of the Germans’ sense of belonging together” (Löwenthal 1979, p. 2). For Löwenthal and his supporters, the publicizing of the suffering of those whose human rights were abused in the GDR was therefore a means of creating empathy that would transcend German division. Jan Philipp Wölbern (2014, p. 391) argues that the confict between such conservative-nationalist groups and the government hinged on whether the GDR could be encouraged to respect human rights in exchange for the fnancial support of the West, while maintaining discretion on both sides, or whether greater respect for human rights in East Germany could be forced through spectacular publicity. However, what Wölbern overlooks is the extent to which such groups regarded the cause of victims of the communist regime as a means to achieve the more important goal of the fall of the SED regime and German unifcation. With the advent of Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic-Liberal coalition in 1982, the atmosphere of hostility to the government lessened somewhat, as Wölbern notes (2014, pp. 391–392). The IGFM initially approved of Kohl’s rhetorically tougher stance towards the GDR, which placed a stronger emphasis on the ultimate goal of unifcation than had been the case for the social–liberal coalition of 1969–1982. However, this soon gave way to a realization that there was a great deal of continuity between Kohl’s approach and that of his predecessor in terms of the practicalities of dealing with the East German regime (Garton Ash 1994, p. 100). This much was clear, for example, in the IGFM’s yearly report for 1983, which accused the federal government under Kohl’s conservative–liberal coalition of having given up its proper role of speaking up for those suffering human rights abuses in the GDR and of acting in essence as an apologist for the SED regime, stabilizing its rule (IGFM Deutsche Sektion 1983, pp. 12 and 14). This link between the stability of the SED’s hold on power and the question of protesting against human rights abuses was key to the German section of the IGFM. Writing the following year in an article for the Wall Street Journal, its chair Reinhard Gauck accused the West German government of removing the potential for resistance to the GDR system by essentially helping the SED to remove the opposition from the country. If those political prisoners were 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 109 released back into the GDR, they would surely continue to resist the SED’s rule from within, Gauck argued (Gauck 1984). The VOS, in contrast, having initially taken up the human rights agenda, remained more circumspect, avoiding the IGFM’s and HvD’s more publicity-oriented approach: for example, it did not follow their lead in publicizing the experiences of those “bought free” by the Federal Republic or of persecuted individuals still in the GDR who wished to leave. As a result, some within the IGFM and HvD came to regard the VOS as (at best) well-meaning, but out touch and ineffectual (Schmidt 1988, p. 11); at worst, as too cozily arranged with the BMiB, which was providing its funding (Löwenthal et al. 2002, p. 208). These competitor organizations, who worked closely together, apparently had the advantage that they were able to secure suffcient funds privately, and so did not have to rely entirely on the BMiB. It is also worth noting that, despite the presence of some former political prisoners from the GDR among their ranks, neither the IGFM nor HvD regarded themselves primarily as victims’ organizations in terms of their membership. Whereas VOS offcials sat on the compensation board created to administer the HHG, the funds for which had to be regularly replen- ished by the government, neither of these rivals were primarily interested in victim compensation; although HvD did collect and distribute funds for newly released GDR citizens arriving in the West. Nevertheless, despite their apparent independence from government and government policy, the IGFM’s German Section did make signifcant overtures to the BMiB in an effort to challenge the VOS’s status as a key partner of the Ministry. In this context, the IGFM found itself in the paradoxical situation of both asking for money in order to be able to expand its activities (it asked for 1.6 million Deutschmark in December 1984; BArch B137/10082) and vociferously opposing the government’s policy towards the GDR at the same time. Responding internally to the IGFM’s approaches, BMiB offcials pointed out this discrepancy (BArch B137/10082). In a meeting with IGFM representatives, the BMiB also underlined the danger that it perceived in the making public of cases of individuals seeking to leave the GDR, which potentially exposed them to further persecution (BArch B137/10082). The IGFM drew further unfavourable attention to itself in late 1984 on account of its organization of a public hearing in Bonn on human rights abuses in the GDR, which was flmed for broadcast by Löwenthal. There were mixed feelings about this in the BMiB, which did not automatically consider such 110 D. CLARKE events as incompatible with the government’s wider policy towards the GDR (BArch B137/10082). However, the event was also the cause of an intervention by the GDR’s representative in the Federal Republic, Hans Schindler, at the Federal Chancellery. Although Schindler’s protest was rejected on the grounds that this had been a private meeting, and despite the fact that some limited funds were made available for IGFM publications by the BMiB in its aftermath, this threat to relations with the GDR arguably caused offcials to approach the organization with even greater caution (BArch B137/10082). A further incident that contributed to the deterioration of relations between the IGFM and the BMiB centred on the Prague embassy crisis of 1984/1985, when some 160 GDR citizens travelled to Czechoslovakia and entered the Federal Republic’s embassy, refusing to leave until they were guaranteed safe passage to the West. The IGFM pressed the government to be allowed to take up contact with those inside the embassy in order to provide them with further support, and then approached the media to complain about the organization’s treatment when this request was refused. From the point of view of offcials in the BMiB, the IGFM’s refusal to see the potential danger that they were exposing the would-be émigrés to, given that increasing numbers of individuals were being prosecuted in the GDR for contact with the organization (BArch B137/10084), was a source of frustration, especially given the complex and sensitive nature of the negotiations with SED regime over the case (Rehlinger 1991, pp. 167–169; BArch B137/10084). The IGFM thus ran the risk of being perceived as a spoiler of government policy rather than making a positive contribution to its implementation. By the beginning of 1985, the relationship between the IGFM and the BMiB had broken down. In a letter to members of the German section, IGFM offcials described the reasons for this break:

those fears expressed at the 12th annual meeting of the German Section of the IGFM in 1984 in relation to the inadequate response of the federal government to human rights in the GDR have, sadly, been completely confrmed. All-German policy [Deutschlandpolitik] is being confused with opportunism, while the terrible injustice in the GDR, especially against those who simply want to move from one part of Germany to the other, is being drowned out by the government’s announcements on further suc- cesses in creating “continuity” and “stability.” 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 111

The trust that the members, friends and supporters of the IGFM had placed in the federal government has been squandered. Our hopes for a fruitful and confict-free cooperation have come to nothing. In the course of the year the relationship of the government to the IGFM has escalated from what might still have been regarded as supportive criticism to open hostility. (BArch BB137/10082)

However, as the authors pointed out, the key consequence of this deterioration in relations was a future lack of funds. The dealings between the IGFM and the BMiB highlight the diffculties of the structural coupling of the political system and the system of protest via the mechanism of victims’ organizations, as already noted in the case of the VPH. As I have shown, from the early 1950s, offcials in the BMG/BMiB had sought to couple such organizations to the political system by means of fnancial incentives. At times, the VOS had run the risk of becoming an organization that was entirely penetrated by the political system in the shape of the BMG/BMiB and that was incapable of communicating decisions that could be understood in terms of protest. The VOS was able to resolve this dilemma from the late 1970s by communicating decisions to launch protest actions aimed at the GDR system, but within the bounds of what was politically acceptable from the point of view of the BMiB. In its dealings with the BMiB, however, it communicated decisions that were compatible with the political system, presenting itself as an instrument of government policy in the face of what was constructed as the growing social problem of the former political prisoner as an unintegrated and potentially unreliable political element within the Federal Republic. Clearly, the IGFM’s German section would have liked to have taken on similar roles to the VOS as an extension of government policy. For example, it too offered its services for the integration of former political prisoners in the Federal Republic (BArch B137/10082; BArch B137/10084). However, its refusal to focus its protest communication entirely towards the GDR, and its insistence on formulating that protest in such a way that ministerial offcials perceived it as undermining government policy, meant that it became ever more uncoupled from the political system. It therefore ended the 1980s as an organization located in the system of protest, with limited ability to “irritate” the political system in a Luhmannian sense, although it was also quite capable of irritat- ing offcials in the more commonly understood sense of the term. 112 D. CLARKE

While this had fnancial consequences for funding, it also had consequences in terms of being heard by ministerial offcials, who increasingly regarded the actions proposed by the IGFM as “unrealistic,” in other words as incompatible with established policy goals (BArch B137/10084). This lack of “realism” expressed itself on the part of the IGFM in a vision of the role of victims of the SED as resisters to the regime: resisters who deserved to be encouraged in their struggle, which was presented as a contribution to overcoming German division in the longer term. The construction of victimhood preferred by the VOS, in contrast, at least in its communication with the BMiB, understood victimhood as a social problem located within the Federal Republic, but with no wider implications for government policy towards the GDR.

Social Democrats as Victims of State Socialism in the Cold War The civil society groups discussed so far as representatives of victims’ interests sought throughout the existence of the GDR to formulate a viable position for themselves in relation to the systems of protest and politics. The positions established were always compromises, yet not always successful ones. In the following, I will discuss the case of victims of the Soviet occupation and of SED rule who identifed themselves as Social Democrats and whose activism as victims was bound up with their more general activism on behalf of the SPD in the Federal Republic. This case provides a useful contrast to the more conservative-leaning, but nevertheless non-party organizations discussed above, in that the groups formed by these Social Democrats were frmly located as organizations within the political system, that is to say as organizations within a political party that was part of the political system more broadly. These victims were integrated into the institutions of the SPD and received funding directly from the party for their Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge in der SBZ/DDR (Working Group of Former Political Prisoners in the Soviet Zone of Occupation/the GDR, hereafter AK), alongside other special interest groups of party members, such as the Working Group of Formerly Persecuted Social Democrats (Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemals verfolgter Sozialdemokraten), whose members had been persecuted under National Socialism. Both organizations were specifcally for individuals who had both suffered political 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 113 persecution because of their Social Democrat convictions and who also remained members of the SPD, understanding their activism (at least in part) as serving the party in its political competition with other parties. In this way, these individuals placed their experience as victims in the service of the SPD’s struggle for political power. However, as I will demonstrate below, there was always a danger that it would become impossible to reconcile this party-political logic with the experience of persecution in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the GDR, and with its personal consequences. As a result, in the long term, the Working Group began to take on more protest functions, often against the policy of their own party, but eventually against the political system in general. In doing so, they had to redefne what it meant to be both a victim of the state socialism and a Social Democrat. As Friedholm Boll points out (2001, p. 220), until the building of the Berlin Wall, the cause of those Social Democrats imprisoned in the Soviet Zone and later in the GDR was a major focus of the party’s activity. Social Democrats had become victims of persecution by the Soviet authorities in the immediate aftermath of the war. The party had been refounded in the Soviet Zone in June 1945, but numerous offcials were arrested on account of the threat that they posed to the dominance of Soviet-sponsored Communist Party members in the competition for local political infuence (Boll 2001, p. 217). This pressure increased with the forced merger of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the SPD in April of 1946, following which members of the newly founded party, the SED, were purged for “Social-Democratism.” These purges particularly affected mid-level functionaries, who in many cases were sentenced to long jail terms by SMTs (Bouvier 1996, pp. 213 and 330). Although many SPD members withdrew from active political engagement following the merger with the SED (Bouvier 1991, p. 47), others sought to maintain contact with the SPD in the West, supported by the party’s Eastern Offce. Again, those who maintained such contacts were subject to persecution and imprisonment (Bouvier 1996, pp. 261–278). In 1948–1950 alone, during the period of the “Stalinization” of the SED, an estimated 200,000 Social Democrats were disciplined, persecuted or pressured into leaving the GDR. Around 5000 were given long prison terms by SMTs (Rieke 1994a, p. 6; Bouvier 1996, p. 258), of whom 400 are believed to have died before being released (Rieke 1994a, p. 6). 114 D. CLARKE

The support of the SPD’s Eastern Offce for loyal Social Democrats still living in the GDR and working on behalf of the party in the 1950s, like that of the other parties’ Eastern Offces for their own sympathizers, was focused on the maintenance of internal resistance to the SED regime in the era of “roll-back” (Buschfort 2000, p. 28; Boll 2001, p. 301). The party’s campaigning on behalf of those were imprisoned as Social Democrats in the GDR, and its willingness to draw press attention to the experiences of those who were eventually released (Boll 2001, pp. 281– 289), can be seen partly in this context. However, in West Germany the SPD was also focused on carving out for itself a specifc profle on relations between the two German states and the possibility of reunifcation (Deutschlandpolitik). In its function as the opposition party within the political system of the Federal Republic, the SPD was bound to produce communication about German-German division whose primary function was to delegitimize the policy of the CDU-led government and present itself as a credible alternative. In the early 1950s, the SPD as a political force was not closely associated with the national cause, which had been very effectively occupied by the CDU. The Social Democrats therefore wished to emphasize their reliability on the national question (Czerwick 1981, p. 48; Schrimer 1988, p. 11). The SPD’s policy of opposing moves by the CDU to integrate the Federal Republic further into Western alliances and con- solidate the state as a distinct entity was an attempt to promote its profle as the party more committed to reunifcation. This was particularly the case in relation to the talks leading to the Paris Treaty of 1955, by which the Federal Republic’s sovereignty was restored by the Western Allies (Schrimer 1988, pp. 26–27). Responding to the subsequent talks between the four occupying powers (including the Soviet Union) at Geneva in that same year, the SPD continued to press for moves towards German unifcation under conditions of neutrality as a basis for a de-escalation of the Cold War, whereas the CDU-led government insisted that the Federal Republic should remain integrated into Western alliances (Schrimer 1988, p. 47). Edwin Czerwick (1981, p. 77) points out that the SPD’s commitment to a unifed Germany outside the two blocs of the Cold War was also driven by a belief that such an arrangement would provide the basis for a new democratically socialist political and economic order in Germany, transcending the social market economy of West Germany and the state socialism of the GDR. 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 115

The high point of the SPD’s attempt to formulate an alternative position on unifcation was its “Germany Plan” of 1959, which proposed an inter-German conference to formulate plans for an all-German constitution and the development of the modalities for German unifcation outside of the existing power blocs as a means to secure peace and stability in Europe. In doing so, the SPD portrayed the CDU under Adenauer as having contributed to the failure to grasp opportunities for unifcation since the founding of the Federal Republic (SPD 1959, p. 41). However, following the SPD’s turn towards an explicitly non-Marxist position at its Bad Godesberg conference later that year, the party’s strategy of improv- ing its image as a credible party of government led to an abandonment of the Germany Plan, which, as André Schirmer (1988, p. 106) points out, could be perceived as both disloyal to the Western powers and naïve in its view of Soviet intentions. In fact, the Germany Plan had met with considerable criticism in West Germany and within the party itself, thus achieving little in terms of the SPD’s desire to improve its electoral chances (Czerwick 1981, pp. 75–76; Lee 2010, p. 226). In Czerwick’s (1981, pp. 91–92) analysis, the move from a fundamental opposition to Adenauer’s Western integration to a basic acceptance of this consensus in all-German policy, which included an acceptance of the social and economic model of the post-war Federal Republic itself, allowed the SPD over time to develop an oppositional stance towards the CDU-dominated government in matters of policy towards the GDR and socialist bloc. The SPD was able to press for a more active engagement with West Germany’s neighbours to the east, while at the same time avoiding alienating voters who were broadly supportive of the status quo. Furthermore, by offering practical suggestions for new forms of engagement with the GDR within the predominant consensus on all-German policy, the SPD could begin to present itself as a realistic and therefore more credible political force in the eyes of voters. Before the SPD’s renunciation of its own Germany Plan in 1960, however, the Party’s foregrounding of the suffering of SPD members who had become political prisoners or otherwise been subject to persecution in the GDR must be understood as a protest against the status quo of German division, strengthening its claim to be the party of German unity. It also usefully served to differentiate the Western SPD from communism, given that some leading SPD members in the Soviet 116 D. CLARKE

Zone had in fact supported merger with the KPD in the East and had then participated in the marginalization of social democratic traditions within the SED (Bouvier 1996, p. 330). Following the lead of Kurt Schumacher, the party’s frst chair in the post-war period, the Western SPD in the 1950s took a strongly anti-totalitarian line, which tended to equate National Socialism, the Soviet Union and the GDR regime (Boll 2001, p. 291). In doing so, the SPD was able to portray a continuity between the suffering of its membership under National Socialism and later in the GDR, not simply metaphorically, but in some cases also literally (Boll 2001, pp. 298–299). Schumacher went as far as claiming in a speech in 1951 that the SPD was in fact the only party to have properly recognized the parallels between the two dictatorships, as evidenced by its refusal to cooperate with the SED as a “block party” in the GDR’s political system. The SPD, Schumacher claimed, was the only party to have drawn the proper conclusion by taking on the dangerous task of working illegally against the communist regime (Schumacher 1994). In carrying out this work, Social Democrats risked incarceration for the cause of German unifcation, as a 1955 documentation on political prisoners published by the party made clear:

What these prisoners have done and what they continue to do under the most diffcult conditions is an example to all Germans and a reminder to them of the need for unity and for their unshakeable determination in the struggle for reunifcation of our country! (SPD 1955, p. 44)

Constructing the meaning of the sacrifce of the victims of political oppression in the GDR in these terms, the 1950s saw the leadership of the SPD make frequent public reference to the problem of persecuted SPD members. For instance, Herbert Wehner, a signifcant fgure in the SPD’s policy on the German question who had formulated the Germany Plan of 1959 and later served as Minister for Inner-German Relations in the era of Ostpolitik, took a special interest in the question. At the party conference of 1950 he read out a smuggled letter calling for help for Social Democrats held at Bautzen following a riot and hunger strike in the prison (Rieke 1999, p. 236). In the same year, party chairman Franz Neumann presented a document of over 100 pages to the press, in which the crimes of the SED were detailed (Boll 2001, p. 281). The documentation of the conditions in GDR prisons cited above, along with a similar 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 117 brochure published in 1952 by the party under the title Youth Behind Barbed Wire: Young Germans in the Hands of the Soviets (SPD 1952) was of a piece with this approach, as was the organization in 1956 of a conference for former political prisoners within the SPD (AdsD SPD-PV 13637). At this time, however, there seems to have been no formally organized group for former political prisoners within the SPD. Dieter Rieke, one of the most signifcant and well-known victim-activists in the party (Boll 2001, p. 245) mentions only a “Freundeskreis” (circle of friends) of former political prisoners meeting “sporadically” by the end of the 1960s (Rieke 1999, p. 245). The likely reason for this is that the SPD saw the Eastern Offce, which was Rieke’s own frst contact with the SPD in Bonn when he approached the party in the mid-1950s (1999, p. 235), as responsible for issues relating to the political prisoners in the GDR. In that sense, the SPD already had an internal organization for addressing these issues and for engaging former political prisoners once they arrived in the Federal Republic. The archives of the SPD’s Eastern Offce reveal its concern that the issue of political persecution in the GDR and the political value to extracted by engaging those victims who had arrived in the Federal Republic might be lost to those more sympathetic to the government’s agenda. The VOS was particularly worrisome, in that it appeared to be attracting SPD members while at the same time placing itself in the service of the government’s policy (this and the following based on AdsD SPD-PV-Ostbüro 0479 H II VOS 1706). In May of 1953, for example, offcials of the Eastern Offce had sight of a letter that they believed amounted to an offer from one of the founder members of the VOS to Adenauer to provide support from the VOS to the CDU in the forthcoming parliamentary election. This concern was compounded following the takeover of the VOS by Werner Köhler, not only because information came to light suggesting that Köhler and other leading fgures in the VOS had been members of the NSDAP, but also on account of Köhler’s apparent policy of aligning the VOS with the CDU. This approach apparently included the cooperation of the VOS with the harmless-sounding Working Group of Democratic Circles (Arbeitskreis Demokratischer Kreise), which the SPD leadership regarded as being a propaganda instrument of the CDU-led government, funded through back channels. 118 D. CLARKE

In the mid-1950s, the Eastern Offce of the SPD and the VOS did seek to engage with each other, however. The Berlin representative of the VOS, Julian Lehnecke, and Köhler himself were keen for SPD members to join the VOS and for the party to relinquish its suspicion of the organization, as they made clear in conversation with SPD offcials. The SPD, for its part, had an interest in attempting to steer the VOS back onto what it considered to be less partisan territory, in order to deny the CDU the political advantage that the support of the victims of Stalinist oppression in the GDR might confer. Writing to Herbert Wehner, one SPD member who had attended the VOS annual conference in 1958 argued that the dominance of former National Socialists in the VOS had been mitigated by the arrival of more “genuine political prisoners” recently released from the GDR, many of whom were also SPD members. Surely, he argued, this was an opportunity for the SPD: given that the current VOS leadership was willing to accept the compensation legislation put forward by the government in the form of the HHG, greater infuence for the SPD in the VOS would provide a platform for mounting opposition to the government’s policy on this issue:

Until now, the [SPD] has supported the victims of terror in the Soviet Zone: in parliament, in the press and in speeches at party meetings. And now? Do we want to let the CDU steal a march on us? The real political prisoners are united in their demands – irrespective of which party they come from. That’s important, that should be acknowledged. It lends weight. If the VOS lot want to be fobbed off, that’s their problem, and they will have their reasons.

This call to colonize the VOS and turn it into an instrument of SPD- led opposition against the compensation regime formulated by the government was not heeded, and was perhaps not realistic, given the bulk of non-SPD supporting members already present in the organization. Furthermore, there were voices within the SPD, particularly from the German Trades Unions Association (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund), who were vehemently opposed to engagement with the VOS on the grounds of the National Socialist past of some of its leading fgures. The presence of SPD members in the VOS, it was argued, would only serve as a fg-leaf for what was essentially an organization of former Nazis. 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 119

Ultimately, the Eastern Offce and the SPD more generally arrived at a position of seeking to infuence the VOS in its local groups where possible, while rejecting any formal engagement with the VOS leadership on the grounds, as an offcial of the Eastern Offce wrote in 1959, that it had become “a gathering of former Nazis, who occupy the key positions” and that it was a mere “off-shoot of the current government.” The best that could be hoped for under the circumstances was that SPD members might engage with the VOS “at the lower levels” in order to “prevent or push back against the worst anti-Social-Democratic impulses.” What becomes clear when considering the archival sources relating to the Eastern Offce’s dealings with the VOS is the extent to which the SPD considered the issue of the role of the victims of the Soviet Occupation and the SED regime primarily in party-political terms. Offcials were concerned that SPD members who had been imprisoned under the Soviets and in the GDR should play a role in claiming these issues as a terrain on which the SPD could challenge government policy, but had strong doubts about whether the VOS would provide a vehicle for such a challenge. At best, the VOS might be neutralized as a potential vehicle for government propaganda.

Victims of State Socialism in the SPD in the Era of Ostpolitik In his analysis of the role played by victims of state socialism as activists within the SPD, Boll (2001, pp. 221 and 273) comes to the conclusion that the coming of the era of Ostpolitik ultimately led to the sidelining of former political prisoners and a certain amnesia within the party on the issue of their persecution. While this claim is valid to an extent, the existing archival sources reveal that, from the beginning of the 1960s, when the SPD began to formulate a policy vision that shifted focus away from an immediate concern with unifcation, and the collapse of the SED regime in the later 1980s, victim-activists within the party still sought to fnd ways of drawing on their experiences that would have a direct beneft to the party in terms of its competition with domestic political opponents. The victim role that these Social Democrats constructed through their activism was therefore inherently political: even when they communicated their position internally to other sections of the party, who were in 120 D. CLARKE fact their main audience, they formulated that communication in political terms. As an organization, and therefore as a system for the communication of decisions, a formally constituted group of victim-activists within the SPD sought to communicate to their fellow party members and the party leadership their decisions on how the political resource of the Social Democratic victims of Soviet occupation and the SED dictatorship could contribute to party’s struggle for power. The emergence of an organization within the party charged with providing these activists with a forum was, in one sense, a response to the fnal closure of the Eastern Offce in 1971; and yet, from the SPD leadership’s point of view, it was also an attempt to provide an institutional structure that would contain and make politically productive the potential of the victims’ experience and activism. While the victims within the SPD tended to perceive their communication of decisions about their political role within the party as a contribution to the party’s goals, the party leadership itself was equally concerned that such communication should not disrupt the new foreign policy to which it had committed. The frst moves to establish a more formal organization for former political prisoners within the SPD resulted from an initiative of victims themselves; or rather from the initiative of one particularly energetic and prominent activist. Hermann Kreutzer, who had been given a 25-year sentence by an SMT for his resistance to the forced merger of the KPD and the SPD (Ansorg 2005, pp. 67–68), was by the late 1960s a senior civil servant in the BMiB, based in Berlin, and an important fgure in the local SPD. In June 1968, Kreutzer organized a meeting in Berlin to establish the Kurt Schumacher Circle (Kurt-Schumacher-Kreis, or KSK), which by its very name sought to reconnect with the anti-totalitarian tradition established by Schumacher in the 1950s. The reason given for the founding of the group, which was aimed at former political prisoners who were also members of the SPD, was to bring to bear the moral weight of that experience of persecution to persuade the SPD to contain what Kreutzer perceived as the growing infuence of young left-wingers in the party. According to the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, when those attending discovered that just such a young radical appeared to be among their number, the inaugural meeting of the KSK descended into fsticuffs (Spiegel 1968). For Kreutzer and those who supported him, there was a clear link between the SPD’s apparent openness to left-wingers who had joined the 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 121 party following the implosion of the student movement of the 1960s and the leadership’s openness to dialogue and a reduction of tensions with the GDR. Writing from the point-of-view of post-unifcation Germany, Kreutzer (1994, pp. 92–94) summed up his view of the situation as follows:

At the end of the 60s, a tidal wave broke over the SPD. Tens of thousands of left-wingers, including many students and graduates from the 1968 movement, pushed their way into the SPD with the clear goal of turning the SPD from a party of the workers into a party of left-wing ideology. … Willy Brandt and the group around him, … who espoused the ideology of détente, opened the doors of the SPD to its left-wing supporters.

Kreuzter’s group shared with the SPD’s Seeheim Circle, founded in 1974, a concern that the integration of the New Left, as former student radicals were known, endangered the anti-communist consensus that had been central to the SPD’s reorientation towards a reformist position that fundamentally supported the social and political order of the Federal Republic (Gebauer 2005, p. 49). Like Kreuzter, these internal critics of the party leadership in the 1970s were worried that the SPD’s traditional anti-communist position was becoming a taboo, regarded as outmoded not just by the New Left, but also by a party leadership intent on normalizing relations with the GDR (p. 56). In an interview with Boll (2001, pp. 310–311), Kreutzer later portrayed the founding of the KSK as a re-establishment of an existing group, although to judge from Rieke’s account cited above any such group may have been fairly informal, given that the SPD relied heavily on the Eastern Offce to deal with these questions (cf. Bouvier 1996, p. 276). What is certain, however, is that on November 5, 1971 the group calling itself Working Group of Former Political Prisoners in the Soviet Zone of Occupation/the GDR was established in Bonn as an offcial working group of the SPD with administrative support from the party apparatus. This support was initially located within the SPD’s Offce for Expellees and Refugees (AdsD SPD-PV [Ablage Helwig-Wilson III]). The name “Kurt Schumacher Circle” was still often used alongside this new title, particularly by Kreutzer for the Berlin group, whereas Rieke was responsible for running the national organization. This split between a Berlin base and a national structure remained a feature of the AK, leading to tensions between an at times more volatile Berlin membership and Rieke’s 122 D. CLARKE approach, which was more clearly focused on aligning the activities of the AK with party policy. By the end of the 1970s, a series of controversies had seen Kreutzer leave the AK, lose his civil service position and eventually be expelled from the party. However, it would be wrong to assume that Kreutzer’s purpose was to mobilize the voice of victims of communist oppression against the SPD itself: rather he sought to use the infuence of those victims to steer the party away from what he believed would be an elec- torally damaging turn to the left, abandoning the SPD’s working-class base. Under Kreuzter’s infuence, the Berlin KSK (despite its links with the national AK) was not afraid to go public with accusations that the wisdom of those who had suffered for the cause of Social Democracy was being drowned out by the left-wing radicals. For example, in February 1975, Kreutzer wrote in the name of KSK to the party leadership accusing it of ignoring the concerns of the former political prisoners, then took his story to the press when he felt that the response had been inadequate. According to Kreutzer, the victims were being called

reactionary elements, saboteurs of the process of détente and enemies of socialism, while former employees of the Eastern Offce were accused of being subversive agents and spies. … It is shaming that we, after the sacrifces that we have made for democracy and the SPD, must be exposed to such politically malicious slander. We can only regard this as the work of left-wing radicals and their sympathizers in the SPD, who with the failure of the student movement have entered the party and against whom the party leadership has failed to defend itself out of a misplaced desire to integrate these individuals. (AdsD SPD-PV 1975)

Such outbursts, driven primarily by Kreutzer’s own activism, appear to have led to a parting of the ways between the national AK and the KSK in Berlin, although the exact modalities of this remain unclear. What is certain, however, is that while Kreutzer continued to criticize the party leadership on the interrelated issues of left-wing infltration and Ostpolitik, Rieke set about reorienting the AK’s stance to make it more clearly compatible with the then Social Democrat-Liberal government’s foreign policy. Rieke, along with Hans Stephan, the party administrator responsible for supporting the AK within the relevant department at SPD central 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 123 offce in Bonn, used the period following Kreutzer’s departure from the national AK leadership to address the party hierarchy directly (but not publicly) in order to re-establish the importance of the former political prisoners in the SPD’s thinking. Writing to SPD chair Willy Brandt in April 1978, Rieke expressed on behalf of his membership their disappointment at the

lack of attention that the party chair and the party leadership has shown to the debt it owes to those comrades who have sacrifced a signifcant portion of their lives and their careers. This lack of gratitude is felt not in terms of the re-integration of these comrades into an orderly life, but simply in terms of the entirely justifable expectation that the higher echelons of the party will take account of the experiences and insights of the former political prisoners when reaching decisions today, especially as far as these decisions relate to the confrontation with communism. (AdsD SPD-PV 13637)

On the face of it, such demands did not differ very signifcantly from Kreutzer’s position, and yet there is no expectation here of particular action the party leadership must take in response to the views of the AK: the important point is that they should somehow be heard, as indeed Stephan expressed in his protocol of the meeting of the AK’s organizing committee in relation to this communication with Brandt: “A particular response is not necessary. It is only hoped that the party should show more understanding for the work of the AK” (AdsD SPD-PV 13637). This plea for inclusion seems to have borne fruit, in that the SPD became willing to sponsor a large conference of the former political prisoners, which took place in Bad Godesberg, October 5–7, 1979, to coin- cide with the 30-year anniversary of the founding of the GDR. This was the frst major meeting of the victims of state socialism within the party since the launch of an exhibition on communist terror in 1961 (Boll 2001, pp. 297–302), and the frst proper conference devoted exclusively to discussions among this group since 1956. What is remarkable about the protocol of the discussions of October 1979 is the extent to which the need of the AK’s members to be useful to the party overrode previously expressed concerns about the direction of the SPD’s policy towards the GDR. In a keynote speech to the conference, the AK’s vice chair Heinz Lehmann spoke of the diffculties that members faced accepting the 124 D. CLARKE party’s Ostpolitik, but insisted that it was ultimately the AK that had to accommodate itself to new realities:

We should not get caught up in the past, should not mourn the opportunities we may have missed through imprisonment and being forced to fee East Germany. Rather, we should accept this as part of our fate, while also not letting ourselves be hemmed in by it. … Political prisoners and émigrés are often diffcult people in terms of their mentality. They refused to conform in the place where they used to live, resisted, or belonged to an ostracized group. For circumstantial reasons, but also for reasons of character, they tend not infrequently to be rigorous in their attitudes. They often extrapolate from their past experiences to the present in an undifferentiated way. … Yet their experience and, therefore, our experience is not the whole truth, as some would have it, but just part of the truth. To recognize and understand that fact would lead to a more relaxed attitude and would also help to put aside some prejudices. … If détente is, on the one hand, unthinkable without the protection of human rights, then their protection is, on the other hand, not possible in those places where they are still under threat without a certain measure of détente. Our government is on the right path, linking these two issues together in an appropriate way to achieve both goals. (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8, 910])

The message in Lehmann’s address was clear: those former political prisoners engaged in the AK could no longer assume that the party leadership’s (and, indeed, the government’s) Ostpolitik would be determined by the conclusions they drew from their experience of persecution in the Soviet Zone and the GDR. This opened up the question, of course, of how victims’ past experience might in any way be relevant to those policy decisions. This was a question that was much to the fore in the deliberations that took place in Bad Godesberg, with the chair of one of the conference discussion groups summing up the collective view of the delegates as follows:

The Working Group recommends to the party that it should engage as many of the former political prisoners as possible as speakers in the coming election campaigns. These Social Democrats are particularly well qualifed to explain the necessity of a policy of détente. … 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 125

For the sake of clarity, I just want to repeat that the party should make use of us. We have many years of prison between us, but many of us are also Social Democrats of many years’ standing, who have a clear standpoint as far as defending the Federal Republic and its state are concerned. Who else is better placed to sell Ostpolitik and our policy on Berlin than the Social Democrats who are members of our Working Group? That’s what we are trying to tell the party and its leaders. (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8, 910])

In formulating this position, the AK was attempting to claim a political role for itself within the party, perhaps in recognition that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that the decisions communicated by it would modify the leadership’s stance on Ostpolitik. The only way for the organization to continue to function as a part of the political system at this point was for it to offer to communicate its decision that its members should participate in the promotion of government policy to the electorate. Speaking to the AK at the beginning of their conference, Heinz Kreuzmann, parliamentary secretary at the BMiB, made this point explicitly. Highlighting the attempts by the CDU and the conservative media to instrumentalize Ostpolitik against the SPD, Kreuzmann called on the AK to work against such infuences on public opinion: “This is my message to you, comrades: I call again upon each and every one of you to use whatever possibilities you have to continue to educate those around you” (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8, 910]). The party’s ongoing diffculties with Kreutzer and his semi-independent KSK group in Berlin illustrated the consequences of a failure to communicate decisions about how the former prisoners should behave in ways that aligned their role with the government’s policy. Claiming not to have been invited to the Bonn conference, Kreutzer wrote to the organizers with dire warnings that they risked both alienating former political prisoners, who he claimed were leaving the SPD in increasing numbers, and failing to halt the infltration of the party by those sympathetic to communism (AdsD SPD-PV 13637). Kreuzter, in contrast, was increasingly willing to turn to conservative media and the CDU itself in order to make his message heard, for example, in an essay criticizing the SPD’s failure to ward off the infuence of “Moscow’s friends” for the right-wing Deutschland-Magazin (Kreutzer 1979) and a public claim that the SPD had been infltrated by 40,000 communist agents. This latter intervention led to Kreuzter being sent into early 126 D. CLARKE retirement by Egon Franke, the SPD’s then Minister for Inner-German Relations (Weis 1980). Finally, Kreutzer was expelled along with other KSK members from the SPD after publicly supporting the CDU in the Berlin Senate elections, which the Social Democrats lost (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt II, Ref 8, 908]). Kreutzer and others in Berlin were by this point clearly more committed to the cause of anti-communism and resistance to Ostpolitik than to the SPD itself, although the KSK, which continued to function as an independent organization under Kreutzer’s aegis, was no less integrated into the political system for that: it now sought to use what infuence it had in the service of opposition to the SPD, rather than in support of it. This state of affairs necessitated the founding of a new Berlin group of the AK within the SPD in August 1981, the organization of which was taken on by a long-time KSK member, the photographer Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson (SPD-PV [Abt II, Ref 8, 908]). For Rieke and Lehmann, now rid of Kreutzer’s infuence, the key question remained whether the SPD’s leadership would make good on its apparent promise to draw upon the former political prisoners’ potential as activists in the service of the party. Internal communications within the AK throughout the 1980s show that this was in doubt. By 1984, Rieke was formulating another letter to the SPD’s leaders to express members’ frustration that the AK was still not being consulted on policy issues they considered relevant to their expertise, despite what they considered to be active attempts on their part to engage in a dialogue:

The members of the AK note that their many attempts to contribute have been overlooked by the party leadership and that their requests for political discussions have not met with a satisfactory answer, leaving aside our clear expectation that the party leadership should make contact with the former political prisoners whenever there are questions to be answered for which the experience of the AK ought to be taken into account. (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8]).

What becomes clear here is that the AK found itself in an impossible position in terms of its place within the wider party. As the contrast with Kreuzter’s actions shows, the former political prisoners could communicate two kinds of decision within their organizations on the basis of their experience of persecution: either they could decide to attempt to modify the party line, or to present themselves as supporters of that line. The 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 127

SPD leadership was willing to support the AK when it became necessary to sideline Kreutzer and his supporters within the party itself, and to bring the AK frmly back within the SPD-led government’s constituency, but it clearly had little real need of the victims’ support beyond this. Although the AK sought to construct a viable model of victim activism based on their potential role in defending and promoting Ostpolitik, the party leadership and the SPD-run BMiB only needed acquiescence, not active support. While the AK was free to carry on communicating its decision to support Ostpolitik for public consumption, it could not expect to change anything, which made that communication (and therefore the organization that produced it) potentially redundant. Writing to Heinz Lehmann, by then chair of the AK, in 1985, one member summed up this dilemma:

The group of former political prisoners is politically so meaningless that its opinions can no longer have any infuence in the party. And where there are disagreements, these are only to the beneft of our political opponents. If there is therefore no longer any political purpose for the group, it is senseless to try to keep it alive. (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8.])

This sense of purposeless was compounded in the late 1980s by the SPD’s ever closer engagement with the SED, specifcally the controversial discussions between the SPD’s Commission on Basic Values (Grundwertekommission) and the GDR’s Academy of Social Sciences, which led to the publication of a common paper on “The Confict of Ideologies and our Shared Security” in August of 1987. The SPD leadership, particularly party chairman Willy Brandt, saw the beneft of this process in terms of the party’s ability to create a profle for itself in relation to Ostpolitik after having returned to opposition (Reißig 2002, pp. 29 and 282) and was only minimally sensitive to the issue of the past suffering of SPD members at the hands of the SED. While assurances were made that the perspective of the former political prisoners, and the AK in particular, would be taken into account in the process of negotiat- ing a common position on the future engagement between the SPD and the SED (p. 286), the question of the persecution of Social Democrats was deliberately bracketed out of the discussions towards the common paper on the grounds of its political sensitivity. Given that this dialogue started from a position of neutrality on the preferability of one social and political system over another, it would 128 D. CLARKE have found such neutrality diffcult to maintain if these abuses were highlighted (Reißig 2002, p. 103). Although a concession was made to the need to hear the voice of the AK, when Dieter Rieke spoke to a meeting of the inter-party group preparing the common paper at the end of 1986, he felt that both sides considered that his insistence on considering the fate of Social Democrats persecuted by the SED and the Soviet occupier was “inappropriate” (Rieke 1999, p. 259). The publication of the fnal version of the SPD-SED paper was met with anger and a sense of alienation by members of the AK. At their seminar on inner-German relations in early September of 1987, AK members formulated a statement to the party leadership, rejecting any further dialogue with the SED. The key point in their opposition to the dialogue was the premise enshrined in the SPD-SED paper that the competition between the systems should be peacefully resolved, while leaving open the outcome of that competition:

We see no point in entering into an ideological competition with a communist dictatorship to decide how peace is best secured and to decide which social system is better. … We Social Democrats know from our own experience what rigorous methods the communists are willing to use to fght Social Democracy and how they have destroyed it in that part of Germany that is under their control. Thousands of Social Democrats had to take the bitter path of long years of incarceration in communist camps and prisons. Many of them gave their lives to stand up for democracy and human rights. … We, the former political prisoners of the communist dictatorship, therefore expect that the leadership of the party will take a clear stand towards this discussion paper and refute any common ground with communists. (AdsD SPD-PV [Abt. II, Ref. 8])

This anger soon gave way to resignation, however. While in a newsletter to members Lehmann could only hope that the paper would soon be forgotten, Rieke went as far as to suggest to members that their moment of relevance to the party might have passed:

And so we see that the course of history rolls over many people and many things, including over us as former political prisoners. And if this is how things are, then we will perhaps be bystanders in our party, witnesses to the past, who carry in us a piece of the party’s history, but whose problems do not seem to count for much anymore. (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]) 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 129

In a similar vein, writing to members following his re-election as chair of the AK, Lehmann seemed to have lost all hope that the voice of the former political prisoners would be heard within the SPD:

We can no longer expect that our past gives us the right to special treatment. Whether we feel that this is just or not is another matter, since it would be foolish not to take note of the new spirit of the times, especially when we have no way of changing it and we would in any case make ourselves irrelevant if we tried to do so. (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge])

In Lehmann’s view the AK at this point faced a kind of double irrelevance: the communication of decisions in favour of the SPD’s position in relation to the GDR was redundant, since that communication could not be regarded as adding support to a process that was not in need of it, whereas communicating decisions to challenge the party’s position from within would only lead to the party ceasing to take any notice of the AK at all. In system-theoretical terms, the AK represents an instance of an organization internal to the political system that had become uncoupled from other political organizations: the decisions it communicated no longer registered as relevant to other political organizations in terms of their own communication of decisions. Nevertheless, with the advent of changes within the GDR in 1989 and during the reunifcation process, the AK suddenly regained a political value for the SPD that it was briefy able to exploit.

Social Democrat Victims of State Socialism and the Reunification Process As the party most closely associated with Ostpolitik, the SPD was vulnerable in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the SED regime to criticism for having been insuffciently critical of the GDR and even of having stabilized the East German state through its policy of non-confrontation and dialogue. The CDU, in power from 1982, had the rhetorical advantage of having declared its commitment to Germany unifcation at the same time as having, from a pragmatic point of view, continued to foster cooperation with the GDR (Bruns 1989, p. 164). This difference between the two parties became more starkly politicizable as the SED regime began to collapse, with CDU General Secretary Rainer 130 D. CLARKE

Barzel accusing the SPD in the Bundestag of having conducted a decades-long policy of “Wandel durch Anbiederung” (i.e. trying to bring about change by cozying up to the SED), in a parody of the SPD’s own slogan of “Wandel durch Annäherung” (change through convergence) (Garton Ash 1994, p. 329). In the wake of the GDR’s peaceful revolution, this pressure continued, as the Christian Democrats saw the opportunity of exploiting the SPD’s close association with détente and its concomitant policy of stabilizing the SED regime; a policy which the CDU had, of course, continued themselves after 1982 (Garton Ash 1994, p. 184). These attacks can be understood in the light of the widely held assumption at that time that the SPD was likely to have a natural advantage in any electoral competition on the territory of the former GDR (Bouvier 1996, pp. 19–20). The CDU was therefore keen to exploit this perceived weakness in the SPD’s image, accusing Social Democrats of portraying themselves as “martyrs” to communist oppression only as a means of distracting from the party’s complicity in the founding of the SED regime; a line which, of course, also allowed the CDU to draw attention away from the complicity of its own sister party, the CDU of the GDR (Klitscher 2009, pp. 80–84). The forced merger of the SED and the SPD (which had, as already noted, been supported by some Social Democrats in the Soviet Zone), Ostpolitik itself, and more specifcally the SPD-SED paper of 1987, became points of party-political contention, in particular in the context of the frst democratic elections in the GDR in March 1990 and later in the frst all-German elections of December 1990. In the March elections, for example, the SPD became so worried about its potential association with the SED that it published a special information sheet for voters that emphasized the role of Social Democrats as victims of the forced merger of the two parties and its aftermath (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]). While the SPD’s uncertain stance on unifcation allowed the CDU to present itself as the party of German unity (Kvistad 1993), the SPD’s association with a less confrontational attitude towards the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s could also be mobilized against the party, not least by former political prisoners such as Kreutzer, author Ulrich Schacht and others, who had once been SPD members, but who now sought to attack the SPD from the right (cf. Löw 1994). Following German unifcation, the SPD responded to such attacks with a series of attempts to come to terms with its own past relationship 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 131 with the SED regime, for instance by holding a conference in 1990 to emphasize the suffering of SPD members under Soviet persecution (documented in Rieke 1994b), or by publishing a reassessment and defence of the SPD-SED paper of 1987 (SPD 1992). As I will show below, members of the AK sought to actively engage in this defence of the party, mobilizing their own past suffering to emphasize the party’s role as a victim of and resister to SED rule. As events in the GDR developed in the early part of 1989, there were already signs that the SPD leadership was becoming more receptive to taking up the cause of the former political prisoners once more. For example, as the GDR came under criticism for its handling of an opposition demonstration at the annual commemoration of the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1989, the SPD began to distance itself from its former partner in the East–West dialogue. Ehrhard Eppler, one of the architects of the SPD-SED paper, even appeared on national television to insist that the existing links between the SPD and the SED did not preclude criticizing oppression in the GDR, which was in any case incompatible with meaningful dialogue (Eppler 1989). In this context, Lehmann of the AK felt emboldened to write to SPD chairman Hans-Jochen Vogel to intercede on behalf of former political prisoners to seek their rehabilitation by the SED regime. For the frst time in a number of years, Lehmann was able to suggest that, with change afoot in the GDR, it was important for the SPD to be seen as a champion of the victims, lest others make political capital from the issue (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]). At a subsequent meeting with GDR leader Erich Honecker in May 1989, Vogel did raise the issue of persecuted Social Democrats, although only in the context of the diffculties that some of them faced getting permission to visit the GDR (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]). By June 1989, the SPD had modifed its position on dialogue with the SED. While not abandoning contacts altogether, the leadership had become convinced that the SED was incapable of democratic reform, and therefore decided to develop further contacts with opposition groups within the GDR (Reißig 2002, p. 341). As the GDR regime came under increasing pressure, Vogel (1989) also become a champion of the cause of rehabilitation for the former political prisoners, issuing a statement in November 1989 to the effect that this issue should have a central importance in the coming reforms in the east of Germany. Once 132 D. CLARKE

Honecker’s government had fallen, the party chair and the AK issued a joint statement, stressing the status of SPD members as victims of the SED regime whose legacy of resistance was now being taken up by the population of the GDR:

The members of the SPD Working Group of Former Political Prisoners of the former Soviet Zone of Occupation and the later GDR have followed the development towards democracy and the realization of human rights in the GDR with a great sense of satisfaction. What Social Democrats and others in the former Soviet Zone of Occupation and, later, in the GDR fought for at great personal cost is being won today by their compatriots in the GDR. … The members of the SPD’s Working Group expect that the GDR leadership will soon investigate this past injustice and its crimes …. (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge])

As time went on, it became evident that it would be necessary to stake out the SPD’s claim to this issue, faced with those who might serve to turn the topic against the party. A call for such rehabilitation was also issued by Kreutzer’s KSK, which strongly implied that the SPD’s previous lack of interest in the issue could have been driven by its desire not to annoy the SED during negotiations of the SPD-SED paper of 1987 (Kahl 1990). The SPD therefore had a clear stake in championing the victims’ cause when faced with the possibility that it could be used against the party in the general climate of criticism of its pre-unifcation positions. The AK, as the protocol at an internal conference in March of 1990 shows, was incensed by these attempts to “poison the atmosphere against Social Democrats” (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]). In the coming months, representatives of the AK found themselves more in demand from the SPD’s leadership, for example, accompanying the party’s delegation to the conference of the Eastern SPD in February 1990 (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge]). AK activists were witnessing a sea change in attitudes to the former political prisoners in the higher echelons of the party. Writing to AK members in June of 1991, the administrator responsible for managing the group’s affairs at SPD central offce, summarized the new situation as follows: 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 133

Although the relationship between our Working Group and the party leadership in recent years was, in fact, a non-relationship, marred by tensions that could only be contained with great diffculty, a change has happily taken place. German unity has brought to light new knowledge that tends to support our point of view. Now many people in this country – and I include some politicians from our own party in this – are becoming aware of the terrible things that happened in the early years of the GDR.

Now, she argued, the key task was to rehabilitate and compensate the victims. This was an issue on which the party was leading the way, with the support of the AK, and with clear benefts in terms of its standing in the east:

the fact that the party has begun to fght for the cause of the victims [has] removed a [self-inficted] stain on its reputation. This, along with other events, has contributed to an increase in the respect in which it is held in the new federal states. (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge])

The cause of rehabilitation and compensation was a potentially fruitful one for the AK and for the SPD more generally. The SPD, for the reasons outlined above, had a heightened awareness of the need to be seen to champion the victims’ cause, as further evidenced by its sponsorship (through the party’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation) of regular meetings of the Bautzen Forum at the site of the former prison where many SPD members had been held. Within the AK, the work of the Bautzen Forum was understood explicitly in party-political terms as an opportunity to set out the SPD’s claim to the issue of persecution in the GDR, denying the CDU domination of this political terrain (AdsD SPD-PV [AK Ablage Helwig-Wilson II]). In its years in opposition after German unifcation, until the federal election of 1998, the SPD became an advocate of better compensation for victims of the Soviet Occupation and the SED regime (as will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4). This allowed the SPD to defect criticism from the right that it had been complicit in that regime, by presenting itself instead as the true champion of its victims. This provided a clear role for the members of the AK, who could engage in support of the SPD’s campaign for better victim compensation, fnding that their contribution to the party’s political communication was once again 134 D. CLARKE required. However, with the advent of a Social Democratic coalition with the Green Party at the federal level in 1998, a fnal phase of disengagement between the AK and the SPD began, in which the AK as an organization moved ever more clearly out of the political system and into the system of protest.

Victims of State Socialism in the SPD after 1998 The advent of a Social Democrat-led coalition at the federal level brought with it a revision of the compensation legislation that had frst been introduced by the previous administration. However, there was disappointment among the leadership of the AK that the SPD had not been willing or able to fulfl all of the victims’ expectations once in power. Initially, following the passing of the new legislation in 2000, Heinz Lehmann as chair of the AK was willing to communicate a conciliatory message to its circa 115 members:

There are no perfect laws, just as there are no perfect human beings. In recognizing this, we should not feel sad, given that we have achieved more than the negative attitude of previous governments and the limited fnancial resources would have allowed us to expect. … Our party has been able to implement fundamental aspects of its suggestions from its time in opposition. We need to recognize this and to recognize our own contribution, which was effective only because we did not hold onto unrealistic illusions. (AdsD SPD-PV [Arbeitskreis ehemaliger politischer Häftlinge])

Nevertheless, as several letters from Lehmann on behalf of the AK’s leadership to senior SPD members show, the AK’s willingness to adopt this placatory stance, communicating a view to its membership that their voice had been heard by the party within the limits of what it was prac- ticable to achieve, was increasingly tested by the SPD’s ongoing rapprochement with the post-socialist Party of Democratic Socialism (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, or PDS) in the eastern federal states, including a formal coalition in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern from 1998. Furthermore, when the SPD’s headquarters moved from Bonn to Berlin in 2000, direct administrative and fnancial support for the AK was no longer envisaged by the party, although it appears that Hans-Joachim 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 135

Helwig-Wilson, who took over as chair of the AK from Lehmann when the SPD moved its operations to the new capital, was still able to access offce space. The AK could continue to exist to the extent that individuals, and particularly Helwig-Wilson himself, invested their time and energy, but members of the AK (whose average age was now 75) clearly felt that they were becoming marginal within the party. Under these conditions, Helwig-Wilson drew parallels to the situation of the AK during the era of détente, as in this newsletter to members from October 2000:

You have all experienced how the party perceives our Working Group. It remains to be established if we can continue to work within the SPD. Since the PDS is regarded as a democratic party that can be cooperated with, even though it is a party for former loyal functionaries of the SED, we are regarded as a nuisance. … But didn’t they use to say that we were the Cold War warriors in the party? (AdsD SPD-PV [Ablage Helwig-Wilson I])

This sense of alienation from the party only continued to grow in the following years, leading up to the third version of the compensation legislation for victims that was brought forward by the SPD-led coalition government in 2007, and which (as I will discuss in Chapter 4) still failed to meet the victims’ demands. The party leadership received numerous letters of protest from AK members and the group even organized a public protest outside the Willy Brandt House, the party’s new Berlin headquarters. Writing to Hubertus Heil, the SPD’s General Secretary at the time, Helwig-Wilson declared that the AK would now move into opposition to the party’s leadership, joining together with other victims’ organizations to protest against the compensation regime and against the failure of the SPD, but also of the political system in general, to take account of the victims’ needs. The change of rhetoric in this letter to members in April 2007 is signifcant:

It used to be the case that governing parties would seek to engage with the victims. Clearly, they are now too cowardly to do so. In this case, the only thing the victims can do is turn to the public. And this protest will continue until the victims are no longer living or those in power realize that a fair victims’ pension must be paid. Our fate is part of German history. (AdsD SPD-PV [Ablage Helwig-Wilson I]) 136 D. CLARKE

The position of the AK was now no longer presented by Helwig-Wilson as compatible with the overall political goals of the SPD. Indeed, the SPD was viewed as being just another “governing party,” the SPD leadership as just another example of how “those in power” behaved towards the victims. It is important to note here that the term “victims” emerges as a description of AK members, whereas before they would generally have been referred to as those who had fought and suffered for the SPD’s cause. It was clearly increasingly diffcult for the AK chairman to formulate a role for those SPD members who had been persecuted under Soviet occupation and in the GDR in terms of their contribution to the fght for Social Democracy, since the party leadership’s treatment of them appeared to imply that their sacrifce was no longer signifcant enough to be the subject of political communication. In other words, the AK understood the party leadership’s failure to respond to the decisions it communicated as a sign that the victims were in a very real sense no longer visible to the political system. They had become a group of individuals whose decisions could no longer be a meaningful starting point for the decisions of other organizations within the party. Under such circumstances, which appeared not to allow for a viable construction of the victim role in terms of activism within the SPD as part of the political system, the only option for the AK as an organization was to begin communicating its decisions on its future actions in the medium of protest, stressing the moral failure of the political system as a whole to offer the necessary recognition to the plight of the victims. Activism within the SPD was no longer a viable response to historical suffering, since the party itself was now presented by the AK, along with the political system more generally, as one of the causes of the victims’ lack of recognition (Helwig-Wilson 2007).

Conclusion In the circumstances of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, the political competition between the two main parties in the Federal Republic, which was also played out at the level of Deutschlandpolitik, provided specifc opportunities for organizations to emerge that communicated decisions about how victims of the Soviet occupation and the SED dictatorship should respond to and participate in contemporary political debates. The circumstances that allowed such organizations to 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 137 emerge, however, also delimited the kinds of decisions they could meaningfully communicate at any given moment. The victims’ organizations discussed above were heavily dependent on the political system: to continue to function, they were reliant on the resources that the political system could divert to them, whether from the state or, as in the case of the AK within the SPD, via political parties themselves. The decisions communicated by these organizations were not only directed towards the political system and the parties within it, but also towards their own members, for whom such decisions were meant to have a mobilizing effect. This mobilizing effect, however, was called into question where the decisions communicated were too closely in line with the priorities of the political system, represented by the government or individual political parties, since organizations such as the VOS and the AK could only continue to convincingly communicate decisions that were seen to have an effect, that is to say when they could make claims that they had effected change in the political system. As Luhmann (2000, p. 140) points out, the communication of decisions by organizations implies a projected difference between the future as it would have been had no decision been communicated and the future that the decision has helped to shape. Where such a difference is not evident, the decision communicated becomes redundant. Where the decisions communicated by victims’ organizations chimed in with the decisions communicated by government or political parties within the political system, the mobilizing potential of those communications was in doubt and the organizations risked becoming irrelevant not only to their members, but also to the political system itself, which did not necessarily need such decisions as relevant communications for the formulation of its own organizations’ decisions. On the other hand, if the victims’ organizations communicated decisions that were in contradiction to or threatened to spoil the outcomes of decisions taken by government and or by individual parties, their access to necessary funding and institutional support soon came into question, as organizations such as the VPH and the IGFM experienced. All in all, then, such organizations negotiated a fraught terrain, the nature of which can be more clearly understood by framing their relationship to the political system in the system-theoretical terms set out by Luhmann. In the case of the VOS, the tension between the mobilizing communication of decisions to protest and the need to remain relevant to the political system, and specifcally to the BMG/BMiB, was resolved by a 138 D. CLARKE splitting of the organization’s communication: communicating one set of decisions to the Ministry and one set of decisions to membership. This splitting was made possible by the peculiar situation of the victims of the SED regime being resident in the Federal Republic: the organization could communicate decisions to protest against the GDR while maintaining a fundamentally affrmative stance towards West German government policy. In the case of the AK, such a split did not take place: its communication remained in any case for the most part internal to the SPD itself, with only a smaller splinter group leaving the party in order to attack the party’s stance in the media. It was only when the AK found itself in a position in the post-unifcation period in which the decisions it communicated could no longer be understood as relevant to the SPD more widely that it emerged as fully fedged protest organization, uncoupling from the political system in which it had originated and by which it had until that point been penetrated. In the case of the VOS, I will analyse its emergence more fully into the system of protest in the following chapter, which will look in further detail at the post-unifcation debate over victim compensation. What this analysis has demonstrated overall, however, is both the necessity and the conficted nature of organizations representing the victims of historical crimes. Without such organizations, no decisions could be formulated about how victims should collectively respond to their situation: in other words, it would not be possible for a role to be constructed for such individuals as victims in the society they now inhabit. At the same time, the practicalities of organizational survival, and thus of the ability to communicate such decisions, tempt organizations to enter into forms of structural coupling with the political system that potentially threaten their credibility and their ability to mobilize their members.

Archival Sources AdsD Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn. = (NB Not all of the relevant fles in this archive had been catalogued with offcial classifcation marks. Where no offcial clasifcation exists, the classifcation mark that appears on the fle itself has been used and is indicated in square brackets). BArch Bundesarchiv Koblenz. = 3 VICTIMS’ ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VICTIMHOOD 139

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Compensating the Victims of State Socialism

Compensation and Transitional Justice The implementation of compensation measures to address the situation of victims of former regimes is now a well-established feature of transitional justice, as one possible form of reparation for past injustice. A variety of rationales have been proposed for the use of compensation, including the need to help victims overcome the material consequences of their persecution (Kritz 1995a, p. xxviii), offcially acknowledging victims (Kritz 1995a, p. xviii), vindicating their struggle against oppression (Danieli 2007, p. 314), deterring future regimes from carrying out similar abuses (Kritz 1995a, p. xviii), re-establishing respect among different groups in society (Webber 2012, p. 144), or creating new confdence in “society and its institutions” among victims (Shaar and Malca 2015, p. 11). However laudable these aims, the actual formulation of compensation measures, both in terms of who is compensated and in what ways, is fraught with diffculty. Victims can reject compensation measures that appear to seek to “buy them off” (De Greiff 2012, p. 39) by requiring of them that they implicitly assent to a post-transition settlement that does not meet their needs more broadly; for example, where that settlement fails to pursue perpetrators or fails to promote an interpretation of the past with which victims are comfortable (Moon 2012). Compensation, although material, is always also fundamentally symbolic, not least because it is an attempt to translate human suffering into

© The Author(s) 2019 145 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_4 146 D. CLARKE monetary value. In an important sense, “what has happened can never be undone,” so that any compensation would seem doomed to failure: victims “can never be satisfed” by mere money (Schotsmans 2005, p. 114). Nevertheless, compensation potentially has a wider symbolic dimension as an expression of a whole set of relationships, between victims, perpetrators, the state and post-transition society. As Claire Moon (2012) has proposed, when victims question or even reject compensation measures, they are questioning or rejecting that whole set of relations. Furthermore, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, the acceptance or non-acceptance of any form of compensation is also expressive of the acceptance or non-acceptance of a specifc meaning ascribed to victimhood and the social and political role of victims that is attendant upon that meaning. Compensation schemes, as formulated by the political system, construct the meaning of victimhood in a specifc way and can be in confict with competing constructions proposed by victims themselves. In challenging compensation schemes, victims are also challenging the meaning that the political system has ascribed to them and their experience. Equally, even where victims and politicians agree about the meaning that is to be given to victims’ experience, compensation schemes can be deemed to fall short of the duty the political system owes to those who have experienced historical injustice if compensation does not appear adequate to the status that the political system has conferred on victims rhetorically. Turning to my specifc case study, the debate over compensation for victims of the Soviet occupation and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime has been characterized since the peaceful revolution that brought an end to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) by a tension between the framing of compensation measures as falling fundamentally within the purview of welfare and pressure from victim groups to frame that compensation as a symbolic recognition of an honorary status that is understood in terms of the victims’ heroic resistance to state socialism and their consequent contribution to the unifcation of the post-war German states. While victims have campaigned for higher levels of compensation, and for the circle of those eligible to be extended, their claims-making has been communicated in the moral terms of recognition, with a specifc emphasis on this heroic aspect. The communication of these claims therefore aligns with the protest function of victim groups as outlined in the previous chapters. 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 147

However, the function of victims’ organizations as organizational systems not only requires of them that they communicate decisions, both to their members and to the political system, but also that they choose not to communicate other decisions (Luhmann 2000, p. 50). Victims’ organizations exist to communicate decisions on their campaigning priorities and the justifcations for those priorities, which are often aimed at their own supporters, as well as communicating decisions to the political system about what those in power ought to do on behalf of the victims. Understood from the perspective of systems theory, the task of any analysis of the role of victims’ organizations in such debates is therefore to understand why these organizations communicate certain decisions at specifc moments in time and also to understand how that communication is shaped by their environment. As already noted in the previous chapter, the political system is particularly salient for such organizations in the context of post-war Germany, that is to say that there is a strong structural coupling between the system of protest and the political system. In some instances, however, victims’ organizations can seek to address their communications on the issue of compensation primarily to the system of the mass media, although this ultimately amounts to a strategic attempt to elicit a productive irritation in the political system. Since the state retains a privileged position in terms of its ability to mobilize the necessary fnancial resources for compensation and the administrative structures required to deliver that compensation to victims, the political system remains the primary addressee of victims’ organizations’ communications on this issue. The state on the other hand, regardless of the political parties in government, has tended to pay lip service to the need for the honouring of victims through compensation, while at the same time framing compensation above all as a welfare measure by which former victims can be effectively integrated into German society. This can be understood in terms of the competing priorities faced by the political system, with parties seeking to gain the maximum political advantage through their (often largely rhetorical) support of victims’ organizations, while at the same controlling state budgets and bearing in mind the demands of other constituencies. In order to understand the role of the political system in the compensation of the victims of state socialism in the post-unifcation period, it is necessary to trace the history of compensation legislation back to its origins in the 1950s, when a frst scheme was developed specifcally to deal 148 D. CLARKE with the case of former Soviet Zone internees and victims of both Soviet and GDR political justice. At the time, the Federal Republic had to address the claims of many other citizens who had suffered losses of various kinds during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, who often organized themselves into highly effective lobby groups. The solutions that politicians found to these claims were conditioned by the political competition between parties in the Federal Republic’s post-war democracy and, more broadly, by the need to promote a general acceptance of the new democratic system among the population. While the compensation scheme that is in place today can be defned as a measure of transitional justice in relation to the post-unifcation period, it also refects principles for dealing with the victims of state socialism that were established in the wake of the Second World War in the Federal Republic.

Compensating the Victims of the Second World War in the 1950s The newly emerged political system of the Federal Republic in 1949 faced the prospect of addressing the needs of a range of interest groups who could claim to have suffered harm because of the National Socialist regime and the war (Gregor 2008, p. 135). These included the war wounded, dependents of the war dead, the approximately 16 million ethnic Germans expelled from territories in the east, those who had lost property in the bombing of German cities, and German citizens who had been politically or racially persecuted under National Socialism. In addition, in the second half of the 1950s, the Federal Republic came under pressure from its Western allies to compensate the victims of National Socialism in Western Europe (Schrafstetter 2003). Whereas the compensation of Jewish and non-German victims of the National Socialist regime was closely linked to the Adenauer government’s prioritization of alliances with Western powers and recognition of the West German state as a legitimate partner, in the case of German victims of the war there were multiple reasons for providing compensation. Addressing the needs of those who had suffered specifc harms in comparison with the general population allowed such groups to feel that the democratic system was sensitive to their needs and open to the infuence of its citizens where they were prepared to engage with democratic 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 149 institutions through peaceful lobbying and campaigning. This helped to legitimize the system in the eyes of a signifcant proportion of the population (Hughes 1994, p. 10; Ahonen 2005, p. 3). Given that some of these groups, such as the German expellees, numbered in the millions, politicians also had pragmatic reasons for addressing their suffering: they were important constituencies that no politician wanted to alienate (Ahonen 2005, p. 5). The Soviet internees and those who had been sentenced by Soviet Military Tribunals were a not insignifcant, but nevertheless smaller group. When formulating legislation such as the Law on Maintenance for War Victims (Bundesversorgungsgesetz, or BVG) in 1950 or the 1952 Equalization of Burdens Law (Lastenausgleichsgesetz, or LAG) that compensated expellees and others who had lost property as a consequence of the war, lawmakers were guided by principles of social and economic reintegration and rehabilitation, on the one hand, and the identifcation of need, on the other. The underlying principles of these various forms of compensation were based on a notion of welfare as a mechanism to support individuals in their progress towards economic autonomy and social integration. Such thinking was determined by the need to cement fundamental principles in the newly founded social order of the Federal Republic, in which the “social market” model was quickly established under the political dominance of the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Adenauer’s approach to social policy was determined, on the one hand, by the need to demonstrate that the ordoliberalism of the social market economy could still provide citizens with acceptable levels of material security, which in turn related to the need to demonstrate that this system was superior to that of the GDR (Hockerts 1980, p. 285). On the other hand, however, Adenauer and other leading Christian Democrats sought to defend the values of self-reliance and hard work against the development of an intrusive welfare state, which had danger- ously socialist overtones (pp. 229–230). The country’s increasing economic success in the post-war period seemed to persuade many West Germans that they could overcome their material and other losses in the war as part of a liberal economic order, without relying on the state to do this for them (Hughes 1999, p. 116). The German welfare state since its emergence in the late nineteenth century has traditionally provided three different kinds of fnancial support: Versicherung (insurance), Versorgung (provisioning), and 150 D. CLARKE

Fürsorge (welfare) (Böckh et al. 2004, pp. 162–163). Versicherung offers benefts to those who pay regular contributions, for example, the health care provided by the Krankenkassen (health insurance funds). Versorgung provides benefts for those who have made no fnancial contribution, but who have contributed in some other fashion to the community or who have been affected by unusual circumstances beyond their control; for example, the war wounded who are covered by Kriegsopferversorgung (provision for war victims) (Hockerts 1980, p. 13; Stolleis 2013, p. 93). Fürsorge, however, supports individuals according to their needs, testing their means to assess how far they can overcome the consequences of their misfortune themselves. Fürsorge is justifed by the key principal of solidarity inherent in the German welfare system, which recognizes that the state is responsible for protecting individuals from the consequences of social ills over which they have no personal control. However, Fürsorge does not imply the same honouring of a sacrifce or acknowledgment of a contribution to the community as would be the case with Versorgung. By testing means, Fürsorge essentially puts the onus on those affected to overcome their disadvantage as far as they are able. While the post-war legislation to address the needs of the various constituencies outlined above contained elements of both Fürsorge and Versorgung, the bias of the government’s approach was clearly towards measures focused on present need, seeking as far as possible to return affected individuals to a situation in which they could fend for themselves both economically and socially. Benefts paid to many groups were therefore means tested (Hughes 1999, p. 87). Although those who were considered worthy of Versorgung experienced favourable treatment in relation to recipients of welfare, this was not meant to be a substitute for economic independence. For example, for war invalids, provision of benefts was accompanied by an emphasis on individuals earning as much of their own living as possible, so that pensions were scaled according to the percentage of physical impairment (Diehl 1985, p. 185). This approach chimed with the ruling Christian Democrats’ social and fscal conservatism (Heineman 1996, p. 30), but also asserted the fundamental principle that compensation for victims of the war and National Socialism was not driven primarily by the desire to confer a special symbolic status on specifc groups, but rather to facilitate well-integrated lives in the new economic and social order of the Federal Republic. 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 151

Nevertheless, the various potential approaches to compensation for those affected by the war carried with them different moral implications, to which some groups took exception (Gregor 2008, p. 139). As Michael Hughes (1999, p. 96) points out, for example, those who had lost assets in the war, whether through bombing or when they became refugees, regarded compensation based on welfare principles (i.e. on current need, rather than on a recognition of a sacrifce) as degrading, since it denied their previous social status and the achievements expressed through the property they had accumulated. Implicitly, to be reliant on means-tested welfare measures (even if these were presented as a kind of Versorgung) implied that the state and the wider society were not interested in one’s previous deeds, but only in one’s present circumstances. This contrasts sharply with the principle of insurance, the mainstay of the German welfare system, in which previous individual economic achievement is expressed in the accumulation of entitlements through contribution, conferring dignity on the recipient of the subsequent pension or other benefts (Hockerts 1980, p. 237). The concern that welfare as Fürsorge might degrade the recipient (Wenzel 2008, p. 207) was already a factor in the various compensation schemes introduced for the war wounded and their families in the wake of the First World War, which sought to differentiate support to those who had made sacrifces from other measures for the less “deserving” poor; even if as time went on the practical outcomes of these different kinds of support became increasingly indistinguishable (Stolleis 2013, p. 100). Like groups representing those who had lost assets in the Second World War, the Association of the Victims of Stalinism (Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus, or VOS) began lobbying the Federal Republic for a suitable compensation scheme from its founding in 1950. For the initiators of the organization, this had an existential dimension: as they stated in their initial working plan for the group, its offcials were, for the most part, unemployed and surviving on welfare payments (BArch B137/203). A key initial aim of the VOS was therefore to be taken out of the normal run of welfare measures and be subject to a variety of Versorgung that would honour their perceived self-sacrifce in the name of democratic values. Writing to the Federal Ministry for All-German Affairs (Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen, or BMG) in November of 1950, VOS offcials pointed out the discrepancy between their members’ perceptions of their political role and their treatment at the hands of the state: 152 D. CLARKE

The sacrifce of the individual must be recognized […]. The activists of the old parties are disappointed when at last they are released from incarceration that they are only offered the bare minimum to survive after their fight. To the extent that they have remained politically active, they are annoyed by this and eventually give up political engagement altogether. … Those who have made a real sacrifce must be offered more than the bare minimum to survive … Only in this way can an active force of political activists against Stalinism be maintained. (BArch B137/203)

It is important to note here that the VOS was keen to point out the difference between its own members and others who had fed the GDR under threat of persecution, but who had not actually been imprisoned. In a context in which the federal government wanted to encourage Germans in the East to stay put and resist communism, as discussed in the previous chapter, the VOS attempted to construct its members’ own suffering as an active contribution to such resistance, and thus in a different category to those who had merely escaped persecution. The federal government did respond to these claims by including the former prisoners in measures of Versorgung that sought to improve their material circumstances. An initial solution was to include them in the Law on Returnees (Heimkehrergesetz), a piece of 1950 legislation that allowed former prisoners of war access to unemployment beneft (Widmaier 1999, p. 77). Then, in the summer of 1953, the Federal Law on Expellees and Refugees (Bundesvertriebenengesetz, or BVFG) included provisions for those who had been forced to leave the Soviet Zone or the GDR because of political persecution, which covered the prisoners released in the early 1950s. Those identifed as having suffered political persecution in the Soviet Zone or the GDR were, in fact, given integration assistance (Integrationshilfen) at a higher rate than other refugees feeing state socialism. However, this legislation made no distinction between different kinds of persecution, so that the formerly imprisoned were not distinguished as a special group who had made valuable sacrifces (Widmaier 1999, p. 77). Also, in common with the other laws passed at the time, the emphasis of the BVFG was squarely on the professional, cultural and social integration into the Federal Republic. Such integration ultimately sought to remove the need for any special status for the various categories of those “damaged” by the war: they would become normal citizens like any others (Heidemeyer 1994, p. 97). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 153

The passing of the BVFG coincided with the events of 17 June 1953, when Soviet tanks put down an uprising against SED rule in the GDR, with hundreds sentenced to prison terms and many executed. This provided a window of opportunity for the VOS, which submitted a petition to the federal government in July 1953 making the case for separate compensation for former political prisoners, as the VOS defned its members. The BMG, however, despite emphasizing the esteem in which the Federal Republic held the former prisoners, initially resisted this claim and argued that their needs were already met by the provisions of the suite of laws put in place to deal with the consequences of the war in general:

In response to your petition, I can assure you that the admirably heroic sacrifces that many Germans have made under the Soviet occupation, in the name of the unity of the country, freedom and our people’s right to exist, have earned the respect of all Germans and that they impose upon us all a duty to help those who have suffered as far as we are able. … The many laws that have been passed in recent years, which are designed to help the former political prisoners and their families to overcome the damage that was done to them, should be understood as a sign of the government’s understanding for the particular situation of the political prisoners. (BArch B136/437)

The BMG’s response, underlining the notion that the help already in place should allow the former prisoners to “overcome” their experiences, points to the priority of the principle of reintegration in the government’s thinking about compensation for victims of political persecution in the GDR. Nevertheless, in line with the VOS’s wider strategy in the 1950s of presenting its members as an asset to West Germany in its continued fght to roll back communist occupation, the organization continued to make a case for their special status. VOS leaders argued that the payment of welfare that only guaranteed the “minimum necessary to live” would produce disillusion among the “political fghters” of the VOS’s membership, who would turn away from active engagement in the struggle against the communist threat (BArch B137/203). Here, in one of the very earliest exchanges between organized victims and the state, we already see victims’ demands for a form of compensation that would recognize their heroic sacrifce and 154 D. CLARKE distinguish them from other groups who had suffered harm as a consequence of the war and its aftermath. At the same time, we can also observe the state’s strong preference for integration via existing welfare measures. The government’s reluctance to consider further measures for the former prisoners was based partly on the judgement that existing legislation already offered benefts that were adequate to the needs of this group (Heidemeyer 1994, pp. 246–247). Nevertheless, despite the BMG’s initial resistance, the VOS’s arguments appear to have had some purchase, to the extent that moves were soon underway to formulate separate legislation to address the needs of those represented by the association. The fact that the liberal FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) and the Social Democrats (SPD) took up the cudgels on behalf of this group, in which both parties saw a potential clientele (p. 244), may have also been a key motivation for the government. Only a year after the passing of the BVFG, the government was facing questions in the Bundestag from the parties of its own coalition, who (perhaps sensing the threat of the SPD making this topic its own) demanded to know why it was not possible to offer further aid to those who had been released from imprisonment in the Soviet Zone and the GDR (BT-Drs. 2/700). Other commentators have argued that this new pressure on the government was a result not only of the events of 17 June 1953, but was also a response to the arrival in the Federal Republic in the spring of 1954 of many individuals who had served out sentences imposed at the Waldheim Trials of 1950, in which those interned by the Soviets were fnally put before courts (Widmaier 1999, p. 78; Vollhans 2016, p. 128). Faced with a debate on this question in the Parliamentary Committee on All-German Affairs, representatives of the responsible ministries were asked to state their position on the matter by the Federal Ministry for Refugees and Expellees (BArch B144/763). After protracted discussions, the proposal the government eventually brought forward to the Bundestag in June 1955 showed a marked resistance to the notion of compensating the former prisoners for their incarceration. In fact, the draft law identifed the chief problem as the lack of provision for those whose health had been damaged, but who could not get the same access to the disability pensions provided to former soldiers and prisoners of war under the BVG of 1950 (BT-Drs. 02/1450, p. 6). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 155

The frst version of the Law on Aid to Former Political Prisoners (Häftlingshilfegesetz, or HHG) sought to provide access to these benefts, but apart from this the government only promised to set up an additional hardship fund for those who found themselves in diffculty. Such payments would be at the discretion of the government, not a right enshrined in law, and would depend in any case on the “worthiness and need” of the individual (Widmaier 1999, p. 79). Even here, the relatively small sums (of between 30 and 60 Marks per month of incarceration, depending on the length of imprisonment) were still framed as an integration measure, and therefore essentially as a form of welfare, not as a reward for heroic resistance. The BMG, which had by this point clearly sympathized with the arguments put forward by the VOS, feared that the proposed legislation would have the effect of leading to the disengagement of the former prisoners from the fght against communist control of the GDR, which was of course a specifc responsibility of the BMG. Writing to the Ministry for Refugees and Expellees, senior BMG offcial Franz Thedieck put the case as follows:

There are signifcant political objections to the creation of a hardship fund. The proposed solution neither addresses the justifable claim of the former prisoners to recognition of the injustice done to them, nor is it likely to give the population of the Soviet Zone the certainty they need that the sacrifces they are making in the service of German unity and the re- establishment of the free democratic order in the Soviet Zone are being honoured by the authorities of the Federal Republic of Germany. … [We] cannot overlook the fact that the population of the Soviet Zone has a right to know how victims of communist dictatorship are recognized in the Federal Republic. (BArch B136/437)

The SPD also identifed this apparent lack of recognition for the special sacrifce of this group as a weakness of the proposed law and argued for the introduction of a legal right to compensation payments for time spent in incarceration (BT-Pl. 02/95, pp. 5393–5394). Ultimately, the new law was subject to a series of revisions in the years that followed, all of which helped to bolster the implied recognition of the former prisoners without altering the underlying features of the legislation. First, only a little over a year after the original HHG, the Bundestag voted in December of 1956 to make the provision of payments from the fund set up by the law into a legal right for those 156 D. CLARKE affected (BT-Pl. 02/177, p. 9851). This had not originally been the CDU-led government’s intention. In fact, Minister Theodor Oberländer sought to resist the notion that the HHG represented compensation (Entschädigung) at all, given that those responsible for the suffering of the former prisoners were in fact the authorities in the Soviet Zone and the GDR. He also expressed doubts about whether the experiences of the former prisoners could truly be compensated in monetary terms (BT- Pl. 2/164, p. 9065). Nevertheless, the SPD was able to argue successfully in the relevant parliamentary committee to have the new version of the law revised to include this legal right. The SPD, and to an extent the FDP, maintained this pressure on the ruling Christian Democrats, stressing the role of the former prisoners as individuals who had “suffered so much in the name of human freedom and therefore in the name of us all,” as SPD politician Lisa Korspeter argued in the Bundestag in October 1956 (BT-Pl. 2/164, p. 9069). Whenever the HHG was subject to further minor revisions during the SPD’s time in opposition, the Social Democrats called on the government to give the former prisoners access to the provisions of the Federal Compensation Law (Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, or BEG; i.e. the law compensating the victims of National Socialism) rather than the less generous measures afforded by the law compensating former prisoners of war. Korspeter, herself a political refugee from the Soviet Zone, underlined what she believed to be the comparability of the victims of Nazism and of state socialism in one Bundestag debate in February 1959:

[The current law, DC] does not provide a suffcient acknowledgement of the injustice that has been suffered. We should collectively fnd our way to a system characterized by compensation [Wiedergutmachung]. … Men and women who have been arrested because of their political views in the Soviet Zone have a right to have their suffering valued as much as the victims of the Nazi regime. … They were imprisoned for defending freedom of conscience and have sacrifced themselves for democracy and freedom in a way that goes well beyond the normal suffering brought about by the war. (BT-Pl. 3/64, p. 3472)

While the Christian Democrats continued to reject this comparability of victims of state socialism and National Socialism on the grounds that the Federal Republic could bear no responsibility for the actions of the GDR regime or the Soviet occupier, this issue was clearly attractive 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 157 to the SPD, which was able to associate its own members with a tradition of resistance to totalitarian rule. However, this equation of victimhood and resistance also arguably side-lined victims of racial persecution in National Socialism. Equally, the Social Democrats’ insistence that all those imprisoned in the Soviet Zone and the GDR could be described as defenders of freedom of conscience required them to overlook the fact that a comparable treatment for all of those eligible for benefts under the HHG with the victims of National Socialism would have meant compensating some Soviet Zone internees who had actively supported Nazism on the same terms as that regime’s victims. The CDU was able to ward off the SPD’s initiatives on these grounds (Widmaier 1999, p. 82), although compromises were eventually reached in terms of reducing the extent to which integration payments under the HHG were dependent on material need and by separating the measures under the HHG from the measures for prisoners of war and war invalids (Widmaier 1999, pp. 80–84). In summary, the legislation introduced by Christian Democrat-led governments of the early Federal Republic to address the needs of former prisoners in the Soviet Zone and the GDR, which was only minimally modifed by later SPD-led administrations, was characterized by its insistence on a number of basic principles. It certainly sought to acknowledge a sacrifce on the part of political prisoners, and therefore relied on notions of Versorgung rather than welfare in the sense of Fürsorge. Nevertheless, the government sought to achieve the recognition of this special sacrifce while maintaining its focus on the integration of those affected into West German society. The Federal Republic, the CDU maintained, was not in the business of compensating the former prisoners, but rather sought to allow them to become as far as possible independent citizens in the new social and political order. Even as the emphasis on material need was relativized in terms of payments from the HHG, these payments were still to be understood as supporting integration. In addition, although the legislation was intended to make a nom- inal distinction between former prisoners and other refugees, it did so in a relatively minimal way. The main distinction between the prisoners and the other groups was their access to a form of compensation payment for their incarceration, but this was clearly demarcated from that provided for victims of the National Socialist regime. While the Federal Republic recognized its duty to address the crimes of National Socialism, 158 D. CLARKE it rejected responsibility for the crimes of state socialism and presented measures for these victims frmly within the context of the welfare state, not in terms of the moral debt associated with provisions of the BEG. Arguably, the link between the time served in incarceration and the amount paid to each former prisoner under the HHG made this compensation in all but name (Heidemeyer 1994, pp. 260–261). However, this avoidance of the terminology of Entschädigung became a key point of dispute from the point of view of victims’ representatives. The VOS remained committed to equal recognition of victims of National Socialism and those who had been imprisoned in eastern Germany. The reasoning offered for this by VOS offcials was not consistent over time, yet as the revisions of the HHG continued throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, the VOS chimed in with the Social Democrats’ argument that both categories of victim should be treated equally. Writing in 1958 before the second revision of the HHG, for example, Walter Weber (1958, p. 11) of the VOS put the case as follows:

We have always represented the point of view that there is no political difference between the victims of National Socialism and the victims of Stalinism … The key justifcation for the HHG must be the principle that those Germans must be assisted who have suffered injury to their fundamental rights after being imprisoned while defending the spirit of freedom, and who have therefore sacrifced their lives, their health and their personal liberty in the name of democracy. From this point of view, our wishes for the revised law should not be regarded as primarily material, but rather as political and ideal.

As in the SPD’s construction of victimhood in relationship to National Socialist and Stalinist oppression at this time, which spoke to its own claim to be a party that had resisted both Nazism and SED rule, the fact of racially motivated persecution under National Socialism was de-emphasized to create a single image of the victim as defender of democracy. The link between victimhood and political activism had been enshrined in the BEG of 1953, which had defned those victims to be compensated in the frst instance as those who had actively resisted National Socialism, alongside those who had who had been persecuted for reasons of race or belief. The novelty of this law was its creation of a new category of individuals to whom the state owed compensation (Entschädigung): monetary recompense that fell outside the provisions of the welfare state (Goschler 2005, p. 8). The law conferred on the victims of National Socialism a 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 159 unique status, setting them apart from others who had suffered harm as a consequence of the National Socialist regime and the Second World War. In effect, the BEG created a special category of recognition to which other groups could aspire. Whereas the VOS had initially striven to lift its members out of the category of recipients of Fürsorge, i.e. mere welfare benefts, and into that of deserving recipients of Versorgung, after the introduction of the BEG the VOS pressed for society’s moral debt to its members to be recognized through Entschädigung. Helge Heidemeyer (1994, p. 326) interprets this strategy as cynical band-waggoning in search of more substantial payments. However, it seems reductive to ignore the signifcance of compensation in terms of the status that it allows recipients to enjoy. Throughout the 1950s, the VOS and other victims’ organizations operated in a context in which the major political parties sought to extend the status of “victim” to large swathes of the German population, including those who had supported the National Socialist regime and even committed crimes in its name: in doing so, they sought to speak to various segments of that population as potential political supporters, but also to integrate them as citizens into the post-war order (Frei 2012). This tendency to perceive all Germans as victims of the National Socialist regime and the war arguably contributed to the dwindling importance of those who had been politically persecuted in the years 1933 to 1945, whose claim to a leading political role was undermined by the major political parties’ attention to the needs of those who, far from resisting, had accepted or supported Hitler’s rule (Goschler 2005, p. 215). Despite the compensation legislation extending to such political resisters, it became increasingly common to perceive Jews as its key recipients (Goschler 2005, p. 215), thus placing them in a category apart from broader and more elastic notion of Germans in general as “victims” of Nazism. From the point of view of political prisoners from the Soviet Zone and, later, East Germany, the fgure of the Jewish victim was clearly the more attractive model under such circumstances, given that all other victims were lumped together in a general category and, furthermore, were implicitly expected to relinquish their victim status through successful integration into West German society. As the (Jewish) victim of National Socialism became perceived as a category apart in the post-war political landscape, the model provided by this fgure exerted an inexo- rable pull on those victims of state socialism who felt that their suffering was not adequately recognized. 160 D. CLARKE

As VOS offcials repeatedly asserted, the point was not (only) to gain access to further fnancial resources for their members. As the then chief executive offcer of the VOS, Fritz Schuricht (1965), put this in relation to the third revision of the HHG in the mid-1960s, the ideal outcome was not to have a “Häftlingshilfegesetz” (i.e. a law to help former prisoners), but rather “ein Häftlingsentschädignungsgesetz” (i.e. a law to compensate them). In other words, the VOS argued for the recognition of society’s moral debt to the victims of Stalinism, not just for integration into the Federal Republic. The VOS implicitly understood the BEG as a recognition of sacrifces made by those who had resisted National Socialism and therefore as an appropriate basis for the compensation of the victims of Stalinism in the GDR. Although Jewish victims were mentioned intermittently, as when Werner Köhler (1960) opened the 10th anniversary congress of the VOS with a reference to Jewish victims as “those whose fate we share,” the victim category mobilized by the VOS remained reductive in its equation of victimhood with a personal sacrifce in defence of democratic values. In fact, the BEG did not provide payments simply on the basis that an individual had been a victim of National Socialism, but only if that experience had left them physically or psychologically impaired. Even then, victims were required to prove that any such impairment was a direct result of their persecution (Goschler 2005, p. 148), often facing sceptical German doctors and offcials. As Christian Pross showed in his ground-breaking study of the mechanisms of compensation for the racial and political victims of National Socialism, while the term Entschädigung was uniquely reserved for this group, the West German state and its offcials did everything in their power to ensure that the measures were implemented in such a way that they resem- bled as closely as possible the Versorgung that other groups enjoyed (1988, p. 83). The pensions that victims of National Socialism could receive, for example, were proportionate to the level of disability they were judged to be suffering. If they appeared to be overcoming illness or trauma linked to their persecution, the help they received was duly reduced (Pross 1988, p. 303). Equally, the terms of the compensation legislation hardly encouraged a view of the victims of National Socialism as brave defenders of freedom of conscience: those who remained in Germany could have their pension payments removed if they continued to support unconstitu- tional (i.e. communist) causes, for example (Pross 1988, p. 293). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 161

Clearly, the notion that the BEG had created a special category of victim to be honoured and compensated outside of the welfare system for their defence of democracy took little account of the realities of how victims of National Socialism were treated. That being said, VOS offcials did occasionally suggest that they were less interested in achieving the same sums as victims of National Socialism, but only comparable “moral” recognition (Anon 1958, p. 5). For instance, reporting on discussions within a special committee set up by the VOS to discuss compensation in the early 1960s, VOS journal Die Freiheitsglocke seemed to suggest that, while agreeing with the principle that the Federal Republic was not actually liable to directly compensate the victims of Stalinism, the state should still confer a special status upon them comparable to that enjoyed by victims of National Socialism: “We do not want to insist upon full compensation. However, we do insist upon the fact that we have suffered the same fate as the victims of National Socialism” (Reichardt 1962, p. 15; cf. Reese 1964, p. 5). It is surely hard to separate these closely intertwined claims for greater compensation and demands for greater recognition. However, it is equally evident that the VOS’s appeals to be treated on an equally foot- ing with victims of National Socialism were not only driven by a desire for higher levels of compensation, which it was later in fact willing to renounce, but also by a claim to a special status that would have required the society of the Federal Republic to acknowledge an important sacrifce on the part of those who regarded themselves as victims of the Soviet occupation and the SED regime. The VOS’s perception that such recognition was lacking in general determined their communication about the compensation issue. In this respect, their communication of decisions about the ideal form of compensation can be understood as protest communication in the terms already set out in this study, formulated as it was as a moral demand for recognition. Nevertheless, as already observed in Chapter 3, the VOS’s relationship to the political system and its reliance on state funding tended to mute this protest communication, which seems to have functioned primarily as means of maintaining the mobilization of the membership, rather than emerging as an explicit demand directed to the political system. During the 1950s, the cause of compensation did become briefy politicizable, but the ruling Christian Democrats were able to respond to this issue in such a way as to defuse its potential as an opposition theme, while also holding fast to their overriding political ideology 162 D. CLARKE with reference to the welfare state and being careful not to give this one group a special victim status that would have singled them out from the various other constituencies of actual or self-proclaimed victims of National Socialism and the Second World War. The end of the SED regime and the GDR state, however, reopened the debate about compensation for the victims of state socialism, in which victims were able to mobilize a reformulated notion of victimhood that re-contextualized their sacrifce in terms of a heroic contribution to the eventual overthrow of the SED regime and to German unifcation.

From the HHG to the “Victim Pension” Both the frst democratically elected parliament of the GDR and subsequent post-unifcation German governments made attempts to compensate the victims of the SED, a process which culminated in January 2015 with the passing of a ffth incarnation of the rather cumbersomely named Law for the Cleansing of SED Injustice (SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz). The Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz is a portmanteau of three pieces of legislation whose origins can be found in laws passed by the frst (and, indeed, last) democratically elected parliament of the GDR: the Criminal Rehabilitation Law (strafechtliches Rehabilitierungsgesetz); the Career Rehabilitation Law (berufiches Rehabilitierungsgesetz); and the Administrative Rehabilitation Law (verwaltungsrechtliches Rehabilitierungsgesetz). One of the functions of the Criminal Rehabilitation Law is the fnancial compensation of those who were imprisoned in the GDR for political reasons, based on a lump-sum payment calculated according to the number of months they were held, in a similar fashion to the HHG. The primary function of the Career Rehabilitation Law has been to provide increments in old age pension provision for individuals whose own contribution levels were reduced because of their persecution (Tappert 1995, p. 189), but it also offers the possibility of accessing funds for further study for those victims still young enough to meaningfully improve their potential earnings by doing so. Finally, the Administrative Rehabilitation Law offers restitution for those against whom decisions were made by the state and its agencies on political grounds, for example, where their property was removed. Taken as a whole, the SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz in all of its iterations can be said to operate according to certain key principles. Although the process of criminal rehabilitation clearly had an element of compensation attached to it, i.e. a single cash payment for time spent 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 163 in prison, Helmut Kohl’s post-unifcation government, which formulated the original legislation, was clear from the beginning that its efforts were designed primarily to provide access for victims of the SED regime to the Federal Republic’s welfare system (Guckes 2008, pp. 14 and 64). Wilhelm Tappert (1995, p. 74) suggests that post-unifcation politicians preferred this approach as it gave them the freedom to limit the commitment to victims of the East German regime, as the constitutional principles underpinning welfare measures in Germany allow governments to weigh up the need for solidarity with the disadvantaged against the needs of the population as a whole, which would have to share the burden of whatever measures were introduced. Remaining within the context of welfare therefore potentially provided legitimate arguments for the lim- itation of the costs at a time of fnancial pressures brought about by the unifcation process. Nevertheless, by taking this line the government found itself in something of a quandary, having already agreed to the inclusion of a clause in the Unifcation Treaty that promised the victims of the SED “appropriate compensation,” which implied going beyond limited welfare measures (Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Deutsche Demokratische Republik 1990, Article 17). On presenting the frst Unrechtsbereinigungsgetz to the Bundestag in December 1991, Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel (FDP) stated, there would be no “all-encompassing fnancial support” (BT-Pl. 12/64, p. 5369). Not only would the costs of extensive compensation be too high for a country struggling to come to terms with the challenges of unifcation, Kinkel argued, but it would also be impossible in principle to “make good” the suffering of the victims, which could not “be undone” (BT-Pl. 12/64, pp. 5370 and 5372). Kinkel’s arguments, which would be echoed down the years by both Christian Democrat-FDP and SPD-Green coalitions, are questionable. To offer compensation is not necessarily to claim that any suffering can literally be “undone” by a cash payment. This was certainly not the purpose of the BEG of 1953, for example, which offered compensation to German nationals who had been persecuted under National Socialism, as well as benefts to bereaved families, because they had “suffered an injustice” (Bundesregierung 1953, p. 1388). Compensation in the case of the victims of National Socialism had had a strong symbolic element, pointing to a recognition of a wrong committed and a responsibility accepted (Hockerts 2001, p. 168). The post-unifcation legislation for victims of state socialism, however, was not initially characterized by such 164 D. CLARKE symbolism. Instead, apart from the payments provided for periods spent in prison, the legislation largely sought to compensate victims by providing them with access to already existing welfare arrangements, or to assist them in making their own way in post-unifcation society. The governing centre-right coalition emphasized repeatedly during the initial phase of debate and legislation from 1991 to 1993 that the principles to be applied were those of Sozialstaatlichkeit (the welfare state) rather than Entschädigung (compensation). As Rainer Funke, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Justice, explained in the debate on the second version of the Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz in 1993: “The principles of the welfare state oblige the parliament to mitigate the most drastic consequences of injustice in so far as they still have an effect today” (BT-Pl. 12/165, p. 14293). What this meant in practice was that key benefts were made dependent on there being a direct correlation between past persecution and the current fnancial situation of the individual in question. In this respect, we see a signifcant element of continuity between the debates over the introduction of the HHG in the 1950s and the introduction of new legislation in the 1990s, and indeed with the principles underpinning compensation to victims of National Socialism, which had their origins in the same era. On passing the frst version of the SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz, the Bundestag was keen to make clear that its provisions were not intended in themselves to honour the victims of persecution in the GDR using the instrument of fnancial compensation. In a key symbolic gesture, the Bundestag decided to accept the proposal put forward by the Legal Committee to begin the fnal debate on the frst Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz with a “Declaration of Honour” to the victims of the SED, which paid tribute to “all victims of communist dictatorship” and expressed gratitude to all those “who, through their personal sacrifce, have contributed to the unifcation of Germany in freedom after over 40 years” (BT-Drs. 12/2820, p. 4). In making such a declaration, the Bundestag explicitly set the issue of honouring or providing recognition for the victims outside of the scope of the legislation. There were attempts to improve the provisions of the Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz under Kohl’s governments of the 1990s, chiefy via petitions and proposed amendments from the opposition SPD and the Green Party, which had absorbed signifcant sections of the GDR’s civil rights movement. However, we only really see a shift in the parameters of the debate about compensating the victims of SED rule after the advent 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 165 of the frst SPD-Green government in 1998. The coalition agreement had stated the need to improve the situation of the victims, which was congruent with the SPD’s advocacy of compensation throughout the early post-unifcation debates, when it had criticized the Christian Democrats’ performance in this area (Widmaier 1999, pp. 187–188). The SPD’s Gerhard Schröder also met with victims’ organizations both before and after his election as Chancellor to promise such improvements (Strunz 1998, p. 1; Kuo 1998, p. 1). Nevertheless, the new coalition was relatively slow in addressing this issue. On 28 April 1999, the terms of the debate among the political parties shifted dramatically with the Federal Constitutional Court’s decision to reject some of the limitations placed on pensions to former functionaries of the GDR regime. In tune with the largely perpetrator- focused approach of the post-unifcation Kohl government’s attempts to come to terms with the GDR, the Law on the Transfer of Pensions (Rentenüberleitungsgesetz, or RÜG) of 1991 had sought to restrict the advantageous pension rights of functionaries who had perpetuated the SED dictatorship (Heine 2003, pp. 99–113). Following the partial over- turning of these measures by the Constitutional Court (Bouma 2017, pp. 165–166), Christian Democrats were keen to put the new coalition under pressure to respond to the apparent favouring of the perpetrators of the dictatorship over its victims. At this point a group of Christian Democrat members of the Bundestag, including Angela Merkel, introduced a proposed law whose preamble made an explicit link between the Constitutional Court judgement and the need for a “monthly supplementary income” for all those of who had been persecuted for political reasons for at least three years, independent of their current income. This supplementary income was designed to address not just the situation of former political prisoners, but also to encompass all kinds of victims who still suffered disadvantages in the present, including, for example, young people whose education had been interrupted because of their persecution by the GDR regime (BT-Drs. 14/1001, p. 2). Responding to the CDU, the SPD and the Greens proposed their own draft law, and the two were debated side-by-side. Representatives of the CDU emphasized the signifcance of the Constitutional Court judgement on SED functionary pensions and used the term “honorary pension” to describe the proposed monthly payments, which they suggested at around 200 to 300 Deutschmark (BT-Pl. 14/45, p. 3711). 166 D. CLARKE

Hans-Joachim Hacker, speaking for the SPD, rounded on the CDU for having created the situation they now sought to rectify, but reiterated the principles on which previous legislation had been founded, namely that the united German had a responsibility to help the victims as far as possible to “improve their current situation,” while asserting that no compensation could undo the harm caused by years of persecution (BT- Pl. 14/45, p. 3712). The legislation brought in by the SPD-Green coalition in response to the CDU proposals did not fundamentally change the principles by which the victims were compensated, although rates of compensation were improved. In subsequent years, two further opposition bills were proposed, the frst in 2001 under the auspices of CDU member of the Bundestag Günter Nooke. Nooke is a former GDR civil rights activist who was originally elected to the GDR parliament in 1990 as a representative of the new party Bündnis 90 (Alliance 90), a grouping of former GDR opposition activists that had later entered an alliance with the Greens. He has been a signifcant voice in the campaign for the introduction of an honorary pension for the victims of the SED regime and has played an important role in shifting the terms of the debate around this issue. For example, introducing his proposed draft legislation for such a pension in May of 2001, Nooke insisted that the issue at stake was one of “memory”:

The members of this House must decide today what the memory of the dictatorship is worth to them. And not only that: we must decide how seriously we are going to take the engagement of citizens. (BT-Pl. 14/17, p. 16763)

Here the failure to honour the victims with a special pension was presented not only as an issue of properly remembering the past, but also in terms of its consequences for contemporary German society, in which the democratic engagement of citizens might be undermined if they were to see how little reward it brings. This was a new argument for the post-unifcation period, but one which Arnold Vaatz, also a Christian Democrat and a former member of the civil rights movement in the GDR, equally drew upon when he introduced a similar draft law calling for a pension in the winter of 2003– 2004. Here again, the decision not to grant a pension was portrayed in terms of the message it conveyed about the value of democracy and the democratic legacy of those persecuted in the GDR: 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 167

The message we are sending out today is this: democracy is betraying its mothers and fathers. That is the reality. … Ladies and gentlemen, with this decision today, the parliament of our democratic state is expressing the following: it was a great mistake to stand up for democracy and human rights. (BT-Pl. 15/88, p. 7788)

The response of victims’ organizations to these debates was complicated by the emergence of a new plurality in terms of victim representation in the post-unifcation period, with a number of new groups being founded. Some of these were relatively short-lived or primarily local (Siegmund 2003, pp. 66–77). The VOS, as detailed in the previous chapter, emerged from the Cold War as the largest, longest-established and most widely recognized of the victims’ organizations, but was by its very nature a West German organization. Although the VOS opened itself to potential members from the east, some victims in the former GDR preferred to establish their own organizations, most prominently the League of the Victims of Stalinist Persecution (Bund der stalinistisch Verfolgten, or BSV), which originated in Leipzig in January 1990 (Siegmund 2003, p. 66). What is striking about the coverage of the compensation issue by offcials of the VOS in Die Freiheitsglocke throughout the 1990s is their ambivalence towards the notion that any further fnancial compensation measures would be necessary at all. In November 1990, in the frst post-unifcation issue of the magazine, editor Eberhard Reese (1990a, p. 2), perhaps with a view to potential new readers from the former GDR, underlined the benefts that former political prisoners from the east would now be able to enjoy according to the newly implemented HHG, but warned against calls for further compensation:

There is not enough money to compensate everyone adequately. The same is true here as for many other issues (confscation of property, expulsions, career disadvantages): What the SED regime has done over decades can only be “made good” to a small extent. Unifed Germany cannot just print money to meet all demands. The consequence of this would be infation – all money would become worthless. A responsible legislature … cannot spend more money than it can collect from taxpaying citizens. … It is important for us all that the state does its calculations like a good “head of the household.”

However justifed such fscal concerns may have been at the time, the initial line taken by Die Freiheitsglocke tended to emphasize the benefts 168 D. CLARKE already secured for former political prisoners, and thus by implication by the VOS itself, thereby staking a claim for the organization to continue to represent their interests. As Reese (1990b, p. 1) wrote cholerically in the following issue:

The way that certain eccentric groups in the new federal states shout about is senseless and shows their lack of understanding. Some of their members dream about compensation of 1,000 or even 10,000 Deutschmark for every month spent in prison. Every fool gets behind them.

Nevertheless, the editor’s stance of insisting on pre-unifcation positions with regard to compensation was soon modifed, particularly in articles published by the leaders of the organization, once the plans for the frst version SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz were on the table. In April 1991, for example, the leaders of the VOS published their own draft law, which (in continuity with its pre-unifcation position) established a key theme for the discussion of compensation in the victims’ organizations, namely the comparison with victims of National Socialism:

The real damage that was done in the past and that is still felt today naturally cannot be made good, but there must be a certain “appropriate” monetary recompense, as the Unifcation Treaty states. Although the conditions of imprisonment in the frst years after the end of the war were comparable to those in a concentration camp …, we nevertheless demand less compensation than that offered by the Federal Compensation Law [BEG]. (Knöchel and Pieper 1991, p. 8)

Further articles and position papers produced by VOS offcials in this period drew comparisons with former SED functionaries and other GDR functionaries, as it became clear that they would continue to receive substantial pensions, despite the reductions implemented in the RÜG of 1991. The VOS, or at least its senior representatives, were attempting to defne more clearly that rather vague notion of “appropriate” compensation from the Unifcation Treaty, primarily by assigning a meaning and value to their own experiences in relation to two other groups: on the one hand, the victims of National Socialism and, on the other, perpetrators of the SED dictatorship. Although they were careful not to set 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 169 themselves on a par with victims of National Socialism, they nevertheless presented their case in relation to those victims. At the same time, their ambivalence towards the very idea of compensation never entirely disap- peared, as evidenced by Richard Knöchel’s parting article on retiring as chairman of the VOS in April 1994:

I am continually surprised that former political prisoners often create the impression that the most important thing in their lives is to get generous compensation for their suffering from the Federal Republic, which is in no way responsible for that suffering. They clearly do not even realize that this is grist to the mill of the hypocritical SED, or the Party of Democratic Socialism as it now calls itself. (Knöchel 1994, p. 1)

The VOS was apparently wary of giving up hard-fought-for pre-unifcation positions and admitting that there might have been more to struggle for beyond the provisions of the HHG. This would could be interpreted as a matter of the organization’s self-preservation, given that the many cor- respondents to Die Freiheitsglocke evidently wanted more than the VOS has previously advocated (Reese 1991) and that the rival BSV was already demanding a substantial pension of 300 Deutschmark a month per year spent in prison as early as the summer of 1992 (BSV-Landesvorstand Berlin 1992). Furthermore, the fact that the VOS continued to call for better compensation despite these reservations is a sign that unifcation had not brought the recognition for the victims the VOS might have hoped for in a more general sense. In fact, other groups, including their former oppressors, appeared to be treated better by the state in fnancial terms and, in the case of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) as the successor party to the SED, were allowed to participate in the political process. This lack of recognition in comparison with others seems to have pushed the VOS in the direction of overcoming their basic suspicion of fnancial compensation as an appropriate response to their members’ situation. From the point of view of the VOS, the Kohl government’s attempt to separate compensation from political recognition in the early 1990s had failed. Despite the Federal Parliament’s “Declaration of Honour,” the insuffcient delegitimation of former GDR functionaries and what victims’ organizations perceived as the continued preferential treatment of victims of National Socialism was understood as being expressed in 170 D. CLARKE fnancial terms: GDR functionaries still had relatively high pensions and, because the Federal Republic had taken on special honorary pensions arrangements for Victims of and Resisters Against Fascism (Opfer des Faschismus and Kämpfer gegen den Faschismus) largely unchanged from the GDR, the lack of esteem the victims of the SED felt came to be perceived by them in relation to the amount of compensation they received. It is unsurprising that the fnancial situation of these two other groups was interpreted in terms of honour or recognition, since the entitlements they gained in the GDR were very much bound up with such notions. The welfare system in the GDR was, at least in part, an instrument by which the SED rewarded or encouraged the loyalty of certain groups, so that the pensions system became an expression of the state’s values (Goschler 2005, p. 384). While these former state functionaries and the victims of fascism who had lived in the GDR continued to access such payments, previously so closely attached to their status within the now defunct regime, not only did victims of state socialism feel that this status was in some way maintained, but that they themselves appeared to be excluded from any comparable status because of their unequal fnancial treatment. Turning to the publications of the BSV in its magazine Der Stacheldraht in the same period, we see a clear reframing of the role of the victims of the SED regime that harks back to the positions of the early Cold War, while simultaneously adapting those positions to a new context in which the division of Germany has been overcome. The BSV re-emphasized the role of the victims of the regime as resisters to it, as in the BSV chairman Harald Strunz’s offcial Christmas message for 1992, which presented BSV members as “the representatives of the resistance against communism and simultaneously its victims” (Strunz 1992). However, the BSV also emphasized that this resistance had had a direct effect on the ending of state socialism and the reunifcation of Germany. This was a point Strunz put in the strongest terms to representatives of the CDU following the passing of the second version of the Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz in 1993, asserting that “the victims have, after all, signifcantly contributed to German unity and freedom with the time of their suffering, their physical and mental anguish” (Strunz 1993). Rather than treating the victims of the GDR as “welfare cases,” he emphasized the following year, they should be seen as victims in the same category as those of National Socialism (Strunz 1994). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 171

Such arguments not only rejected the welfarization of the victims that underlies the legislative measures undertaken in the early 1990s by the Kohl government; they also established a new logic for the recognition of victims of the Soviet occupation and the SED, which was based on their heroic role in helping to overcome the SED dictatorship. We see further echoes here of the early Cold War period, in which comparisons with victims of National Socialism presented both groups as heroic resisters who contributed to the overthrow of the system in question, which is at best a selective reading of the experience of persecution under National Socialism. This discourse of heroism also harked back to nineteenth and early twentieth century traditions, in which heroic acts were understood in terms of selfess sacrifce in the service of the nation (Frevert 2009, p. 806). After the failure of the SPD-Green coalition to satisfy the demands of the victims’ groups with its revision of the SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz in 1999, this discourse of heroicization became dominant among victims’ organizations in general, including the VOS, the BSV, and the umbrella organization, the Union of the Victims’ Organizations of Communist Dictatorship (UOKG), which was founded in October 1991 to coordinate the work of the various smaller victims’ organizations that sprang up in the years immediately following German unifcation (Sachse 2012, pp. 37–42). In the pages of Der Stacheldraht, which the Berlin BSV and the UOKG have published jointly since 2001 (Siegmund 2003, p. 98), offcials of both organizations responded particularly to efforts from within the CDU by the likes of Günter Nooke and Arnold Vaatz to introduce an “honorary pension.” This expression, which evidently originated with Vaatz’s proposal for a third SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz, was quickly taken up by the victims’ organizations, as in the following joint statement from 2000:

The honorary pension would be a clear sign of esteem and honour from German society for those who risked their freedom, health and opportunities in life under communist dictatorship, and who were willing to stand up for justice and democracy. (Neubert et al. 2000)

Whereas the leaders of the VOS, for example, had earlier drawn distinctions between resisters and “mere victims” (Bundesvorstand der VOS 1994), a broad consensus across the victims’ organizations now defned all victims of the SED as resisters whose suffering had contributed to the 172 D. CLARKE overcoming of the SED dictatorship and to German unity. In doing so, they presented the victims, to use Vaatz’s term, as “mothers and fathers of democracy” who were now being betrayed by the democratic and unifed nation in whose name they had fought. The advent of a “grand coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in 2005 gave victims’ organizations reason to hope that the honorary pension that had become central to their campaigning would now become law. However, while the coalition agreement included a promise to improve their situation through “the introduction of a victim pension” (CDU, CSU, and SPD 2005, p. 81, my emphasis), this notable shift in vocabulary would soon become signifcant. At a meeting of the leaders of the coalition parties in Werder on 23 January 2007, a three- point plan was drawn up for reforming the compensation of victims of the SED regime, with the “victim pension” as its key new measure. In contradistinction to the CDU’s original proposal for a pension for all kinds of victims of prolonged persecution, this pension focused specif- ically on those who had been incarcerated for a period of longer than 180 days, therefore reinforcing the focus on political imprisonment that had been central to the HHG. What shocked the victims’ organizations most, however, given the hints at pensions of up to 500 Euro that had been heard from the CDU, was that this extra income was again to be means tested. The three-point-plan explained as follows:

In recognition and honour of the resistance of former political prisoners against the SED dictatorship, a victim pension for those in fnancial need will be introduced. This will recognize the disadvantages and damage suffered in a way that is not only symbolic. It will be a visible expression of the special value that our society attributes to the actions of those who resisted the SED dictatorship and who fought for democracy with their lives and their freedom. (CDU, CSU, and SPD 2007)

In spite of this praise for the victims, the stipulation that the new payment would apply only to those “in fnancial need” meant that, in practice, the new pension of 250 Euro per month would only be paid in full to those whose income fell below a certain level, calculated on the basis of the basic provision (Regelleistung) as defned in the Welfare Code (Sozialgesetzbuch). Here the coalition drew on the rhetoric of honour and gratitude for services to democracy to describe what was basically still a welfare 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 173 measure, at best a measure of Versorgung, but not Entschädigung as the victims’ organizations had come to understand it. This stood in contrast to earlier attempts by politicians of all major parties to separate verbal acknowledgements of the value of the victims’ sacrifce from the arguments for the payments made to them. It was this apparent blurring of the distinction between honorary payments and welfare payments that led the victims’ organizations to reject the proposals as “alms” and express dismay at the removal of the term “honorary pension” from the political debate (e.g. Schüler 2007a). In the following months, as the victims’ organizations protested against the proposed law, their main argument again focused on the comparison with victims of National Socialism (e.g. Schüler 2007b). Such comparisons were also central to the discussions in the Legal Committee of the Bundestag when the draft law was debated there. Those witnesses who supported the cause of the victims of the SED made repeated references to the situation of victims of National Socialism as a justifcation for a non-means-tested pension for victims of the SED. However, as a representative of the Reinland-Pfalz Compensation Offce pointed out, the widespread belief in high honorary pensions for victims of National Socialism was somewhat misplaced. In fact, as already noted, the BEG had only provided pensions to those whose health was damaged, and then only in a minority of cases: “payment of pensions was more of an exception to the rule” (BT-Rechtsausschuss, Protokoll 16/59, p. 14). The source of this confusion about the payments received by victims of National Socialism was doubtless the continued payment of the GDR’s honorary pensions, in slightly modifed form, to former GDR citizens. This measure, set out in the Compensation Pension Law (Entschädigungsrentengesetz) of 1992, affected around 12,000 surviving victims of National Socialism who had lived in the GDR. However, the decision to continue the payment of these pensions was born of the desire not to reopen applications for the West German BEG. The purpose had certainly not been to create a precedent for honorary pensions in the Federal Republic (Goschler 2005, p. 427). If honorary pensions were to have been granted without means testing to all former political prisoners who had suffered under the SED regime, this might have represented, so the concern from the CDU’s coalition partner the SPD, a privileging of SED victims over those victims of National Socialism who had been compensated under the BEG. 174 D. CLARKE

Indeed, this objection appears to have been the chief reason why the CDU, represented by Vaatz, was forced to compromise over the issue of the “honorary pension” for victims of the SED regime in the coalition’s negotiations (Anon 2007). The victims’ pension was hailed by Vaatz as “an important signal for democracy” and as an “honouring” of those who fought for it (Erb 2007). However, speaking on behalf of the VOS in response to Vaatz’s statement, Roland Lässig insisted: “If you want to symbolically honour the victims, you cannot means test the compensation” (Erb 2007). What can these developments tell us about the relationship between victims of the Soviet occupation and the SED dictatorship, on the one hand, and democratic politicians in the post-unifcation period, on the other, especially in terms of how both sides interpreted victimhood and the role it should play in the political life of the nation? During its period in opposition from 1998 until 2005, the CDU, or rather particular politicians within the party such as Günter Nooke and Arnold Vaatz, who themselves came from the civil rights movement in the GDR, embraced the issue of coming to terms with the GDR past more forcefully than before. There are a number of reasons for this, apart from the doubtless hon- ourable desire of individuals in the party to see justice done to the victims of the SED regime. It is notable that the early 2000s saw not only attempts by the CDU at the federal level to advocate the “honorary pension,” but also initiatives in Saxony and in the Bundestag to rewrite laws on the funding of museums and memorial sites so as to give more equal weight to both “German dictatorships” (König 2007, pp. 72–87; see also Chapter 5). While these proposals met with considerable resistance from Jewish groups, they were also indicative of a growing emphasis in the CDU since the turn of the millennium on the threat presented by the successor party to the SED, renamed frst PDS, then Linkspartei and, since 2007, DIE LINKE. While the CDU suffered heavy losses in the east of Germany in the 1998 federal elections and continued to be weaker there than in the west of Germany, the PDS/Linkspartei was able to enter an important coalition with the SPD in Berlin after the 2001 state elections (see Chapter 5), and (for a time) grow into the role of the third “big” party in the east (Lühmann 2009, pp. 205–206). Equally, the increasing “normality” of the party that became known as DIE LINKE and its growing strength in the west undermined the CDU’s status as a natural party 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 175 of coalition government at regional level, and potentially even at federal level. However, within the SPD, the party with most to gain from potential coalitions with the post-communists, debates continued over the suitability of such cooperation (Hanisch and Kohlmann 2009, p. 34). In this sense, a renewed emphasis on the human rights abuses of the GDR past and a valorization of those who resisted the SED served in the early 2000s both to delegitimate the PDS and to put pressure on the SPD to reject cooperation with it. Furthermore, as in Angela Merkel’s speech to the Dresden conference of the CDU in December of 2001, the CDU was expressing concern at this juncture that during its time in government it had been unsuccessful in promoting the values of “democracy, the rule of law, and the social market economy” in the east (Rachart-Dreyer 2002, p. 82), values which Merkel implicitly claimed as key political territory for her party. Efforts to promote the victims of the SED regime as those who fought for such values, in direct competition to the party associated with their former oppressors, were therefore closely linked to the party’s perception of its electoral weakness in the east at this time. The discourse of heroicization, which sought to harness memories of persecution in the GDR to a perception of need to overcome the left- wing threat in the present, was also symptomatic of an increasing equation of the victims with those civil rights activists who had been active in the internal opposition to SED rule in its fnal years. These groups had emerged in the GDR in the 1980s, making use of the relative freedom afforded by the niche of the East German Evangelical Church (Neubert 1998). In the main, these relatively small groups focused on themes such as human rights, peace, environmentalism and women’s rights, drawing on left-wing, anti-fascist and also Christian traditions (Torpey 1995, p. 90; Elvers 1994, pp. 224–247). They were particularly infuenced by notions of grass roots or partici- patory democracy (Basisdemokratie; Rucht 1995; Richter 2007, p. 161), which appealed to both Marxists and Christians within the GDR (Franke 1994, p. 24). However, they looked sceptically on the Federal Republic’s liberal capitalist democracy. Writing in early 1989, for example, following a brief period of enforced exile in the Federal Republic and the UK, leading civil rights movement campaigner Bärbel Bohley rejected what she saw as the political passivity of a consumerist society in the West that reduced the autonomy of the citizen as much as the state socialist system did, albeit by different means: 176 D. CLARKE

If a sense of what it means to be free could really grow in our minds, it might be possible to by-pass Coke and hot dogs, this whole predeter- mined life [in the West, DC]. We wouldn’t need to simply follow the West. Instead, we could make our own lives. (Bohley 2011, p. 141)

With the founding of the frst oppositional political parties in the GDR, differences began to open up between those leading fgures in the civil rights movement who favoured a democratic reform of the GDR as a socialist state, and those who moved towards the centre-right, embrac- ing a non-socialist future. Prominent civil rights activists who remained politically engaged after unifcation found a home initially either in the SPD or worked with the Greens as Bündnis 90 (Probst 1995). By the end of 1996, however, a number of these fgures, among them Günter Nooke, had defected to the CDU in protest at the increasing willingness of the Greens to consider the Linkspartei as a viable coalition partner. The closer association between the Christian Democrats and those who saw themselves as keepers of the legacy of the civil rights movement was foreshadowed by the founding of the civil society organization Bürgerbüro (Citizens’ Bureau), a civil society group aimed primarily at supporting the victims of the SED regime, by former GDR opposition activists in June of 1996. This initiative came about as the result of discussions between Helmut Kohl and former GDR opposition fgures, who had written to the then Chancellor to complain that the subject of the SED dictatorship was increasingly being side-lined in unifed Germany (Behrend 1997). The founding of the Bürgerbüro was part of a wider push among the former GDR opposition to reassert its relevance for contemporary politics, which included a new emphasis on their role as champions of the victims of state socialism. During the 1980s, GDR civil rights activists had not conceived themselves as victims of the system, even where they were subject to repressive measures. Indeed, where they did become the subject of persecution by the Ministry for State Security (MfS), as Detlef Pollack argues, this was interpreted by some activists as positive evidence that they were having an effect on the political situation (Pollack 1994, p. 290). At the same time, the traditional representatives of victims of SED repression in the Federal Republic tended to regard the alternative groups in the GDR of the 1980s with suspicion: their left-wing tendencies were noted (Löwenthal et al. 2002, p. 307) as was their resemblance to the long- haired radicals of the West German student movement (Soden 1988). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 177

Even after German unifcation, suspicions remained on both sides, with the two groups seeming to lack a shared means of framing their disparate experiences in such a way that they could understand each other as part of the same tradition (Templin 1999). Nevertheless, during the 1990s some former civil rights activists began to claim the right to represent victims of the SED regime to “sensitize the public … to the consequences and long-term effects of dictatorship” (Bohley and Neubert 1998, p. 123). This move can be understood in terms of their own struggle for recognition and political relevance in the post-unifcation period. At the same time, the focus on coming to terms with the GDR past among those activists, who now became more closely aligned with the CDU, was also part of a struggle for ownership of the legacy of the GDR’s opposition movement. In the aftermath of collapse of the SED regime, GDR civil rights activists became closely involved in key projects that both focused on the repressive nature of the SED regime and that also arguably served as monuments to the movement itself. This focus on SED repression was dominated by the subject of the MfS. During the unifcation process, former civil rights activists were prominent in pressuring the West German government both to preserve the MfS archives and to make it possible for individuals to access their fles (Torpey 1995, pp. 190– 191). The civil society organization that took over the running of the former MfS headquarters at Normannenstraße in Berlin also identifed itself strongly with the civil rights movement (Rudnick 2011, p. 479). Similarly, well-known fgures from the former GDR opposition were active in criticizing public fgures who were suspected of having collabo- rated with the MfS (Torpey 1995, p. 192; Behrend 1997). Whereas the civil rights movement entered the political transformation in the GDR with a relatively reconciliatory stance on the issue of the MfS and its unoffcial collaborators (Knabe 1995, p. 45), important fgures in the movement later adopted positions that insisted on the difference between perpetration and victimhood, proposing themselves as advocates of the victims, who they regarded as having been forgotten by German society (Torpey 1995, pp. 192–193). Given the CDU’s focus on remembering the crimes of the SED, this approach on the part of former civil rights activists clearly created an alignment of interests that later expressed itself in Kohl’s support for the Bürgerbüro and the defection of prominent fgures from Bündnis ’90 to the CDU. 178 D. CLARKE

Although their faith in Kohl was shaken in 2000–2001 by his successful attempt to suppress access to his own MfS fle through the courts, a case that had signifcant consequences for public access to the records more generally, the activists were able to direct their anger primarily towards the incumbent SPD. In March 2002, SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder commented publicly on the Kohl affair by pointing to what he believed was an over-concentration on the MfS archives, which had led to a reductive division of former GDR citizens into victims and perpetrators. This was taken by former GDR civil rights activists as further evidence of the SPD’s unwillingness to champion the cause of the victims of the SED regime and also, as they made clear in a volume of responses to Schröder’s comments (Ahrberg et al. 2002), as a symptom of the danger posed to the democracy of the Federal Republic by a failure to recognize the danger still posed by the far left. Although by no means uniform in their argumentation, the Chancellor’s refusal to insist upon a clear distinction between perpetrators and victims was interpreted in the contributions to this book largely in terms of his failure to honour the courage of those who fought against a dictatorial regime, a stance that allegedly ignored the dangers to the current democracy of the Federal Republic. In this framing, the victim is presented not only as a heroic fgure, i.e. as one of the few who were willing to resist totalitarian power, but also as a potential guarantor of the resilience of contemporary democracy. By championing the memory of victimhood, former civil rights activists were assuming for themselves an important role in the political culture of the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, as already noted, there were others who drew different conclusions about the legacy of the civil rights movement in the GDR. Rather than focusing on the politics of memory, there were also former oppositionists who maintained a more anti-capitalist stance and saw the role of former civil rights movement as one of critiquing those problems that liberal capitalist democracy, as represented by the Federal Republic, had failed to solve. This view was expressed most powerfully in the Erfurt Declaration of 1997, which criticized growing economic inequality and high unemployment (especially in the east of Germany) and sought to establish a line of left-wing tradition between 1968, 1989 and the coming federal election of 1998. Although leading fgures in the Declaration, which was later signed by 18,000 citizens, came from the left-wing of the GDR civil rights movement, fgures close to the PDS (such as authors Daniela Dahn and Stefan Heym) and trades unionists 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 179 were also involved (Behrends 1997). Furthermore, the Declaration sought to establish connections between the civil rights movement’s focus on grass roots democracy and the traditions of the West German “extra-parliamentary opposition” of 1960s, condemning the Federal Republic for reducing citizens to the status of passive spectators to the political system (Erfurter Erklärung 1997). In this broadly socialist or social democratic view of the legacy of the GDR civil rights movement, there was apparently little room for talking about historical victimhood and concomitantly greater room for focusing on experiences of economic hardship and social exclusion in the present. In the light of these debates within the former civil rights movement in the 1990s and 2000s, the increased emphasis on the compensation of victims of state socialism after 1998 within the CDU can be seen in relation to right-leaning former dissidents’ attempt to use the party as a vehicle for increasing the recognition of their own political contribution in the past and present. Nevertheless, the CDU’s efforts to “honour” the victims of the GDR and to improve their status in relation to the victims of National Socialism, as well as in relation to former GDR functionaries, can still be regarded as an issue of power for the party, in that this agenda helped to promote a set of values it perceived as more likely to work to its own electoral advantage. The late 1990s saw a convergence of the desire for recognition in united Germany on the part of former dissidents and the CDU’s political strategy. This can be seen, for example, in a specially organized congress of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the CDU’s nominally independent party think tank, in June of 1998 in the lead-up to that autumn’s federal elections. At this event, signifcant fgures from the GDR civil rights movement such as Bohley spoke about the legacy of their activism for contemporary Germany (Neubert and Rinsche 1998). The then Federal President, Roman Herzog (CDU) introduced the congress with a statement that made clear (if largely implicit) links between the need to remember the contribution of the civil rights movement as “those who made the peaceful revolution possible” (Wegbereiter der friedlichen Revolution) and the threat from those who preferred that the repressive aspects of the GDR should be forgotten (Herzog 1998). In the post-unifcation period, we see gradual alignment between the importance of victimhood in the discourse of former dissidents who had moved to the centre-right of the political spectrum and the political agenda of the CDU, with some former civil rights activists in fact becoming 180 D. CLARKE integrated into that political party. Their construction of victimhood as a heroic contribution to the overcoming of the SED dictatorship and as a warning of the contemporary dangers of post-communist politics provided former dissidents with continued political relevance as defenders of the victims against those who would blur the lines between victimhood and perpetration. At the same time, it chimed in with the CDU’s overall attempt to isolate the PDS/Linkspartei as a potential coalition partner for the SPD and the Greens on the left of the political spectrum and to promote conservative values in eastern Germany. It also offered to victims’ organizations a framing for their claims for further compensation. In the early 2000s, victims’ organizations responded positively to the CDU’s rhetoric, which presented them as the “mothers and fathers of democracy,” but the results of the debate on the third SED- Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz clearly showed the limits of the victims’ infuence. Although the CDU might have wished for a better solution for the victims in fnancial terms, it was nevertheless able to present the new law as offering the necessary recognition to the victims as fghters against socialism, thus still allowing the party to use the legislation to delegitimize the post-communists. In subsequent discussions around the introduction of revised versions of the law, however, claims for a truly honorary pension, framed purely as compensation rather than as a welfare measure, continue to be expressed by victims’ organizations (Wagner 2014, p. 9). The very existence of such claims is evidence of the continued perception on the part of victims’ organizations that appropriate recognition in Honneth’s sense (1992) has not been forthcoming. Representatives of victims’ organizations, such as the recently elected chair of the VOS Detlef Chilla, continue to express the sentiment that they should be “perceived as honorary citizens” and “not as mourning victims, not on the edges of society, but at its centre” (Anon 2017). Victims’ satisfaction with all kinds of restorative measures, including compensation, has been shown to be strongly infuenced by their perception of the ways in which former perpetrators are treated (David and Choi 2009), a fnding borne out by the dynamics of the compensation debate discussed above. However, what is also evident is that the rhetoric of politicians and others who have sought to champion the victims’ cause has played a signif- icant role in reshaping the construction of their victimhood, both in the political system and for the victims’ organizations. 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 181

Victims of state socialism (and of political injustice more generally) can only hope to achieve such recognition in relation to other groups if they can fnd advocates in the political parties “who recognize and makes use of their suffering as political capital” (Bock 2000, p. 448). In this context, the presentation of victimhood by the victims themselves as a contribution to resistance to the SED and to the fght to preserve democracy in the present may be regarded as an attempt to politicize their situation for the purposes of achieving greater recognition; speaking to an agenda that some politicians fnd attractive (Horway 2010, p. 193). In this sense, we again see the extent to which the construction of victimhood by victims’ organizations is dependent upon the political system, which both provides opportunities for victims of historical injustice to make themselves heard and simultaneously circumscribes the meanings of victimhood that can be heard. This reading might appear to place victims in a largely passive role. However, as I will show in the remainder of this chapter, victim organizations nevertheless seek to use the opportunities that the political system creates in order to actively shape the dominant construction of victimhood, within certain limits.

Compensating Young Victims of the SED Regime: Reframing Victimhood By the time of the second post-unifcation “grand coalition” between the CDU and the SPD at the federal level from 2013, the Christian Democrats’ heroic construction of victims of state socialism had not only achieved broad acceptance among other political actors, but could even be mobilized by opposition parties, who sought to question the decision to apply the “victim pension” only to needy individuals who were imprisoned in the GDR on political grounds for more than six months. In debates around the ffth and thus far fnal revision of the compensation legislation in December 2014, for example, it became clear (rather iron- ically) that even DIE LINKE had adopted an interpretation of victims of persecution in the GDR as “those who fought for freedom, democracy and a unifed Germany” (BT-Pl. 18/73, p. 7045). Along with the Greens, it was now the post-communists who called on the governing parties to remove the means test on the victim pension and to grant the pension to other groups who could be regarded as victims of the SED dictatorship. By insisting that those victims of the MfS’s psychological persecution who were not subject to imprisonment (BT-Drs. 18/3145), 182 D. CLARKE schoolchildren expelled for political reasons, or victims of the GDR’s sports doping programme should also be included in this particular compensation measure (BT-Drs. 18/3453), the opposition parties attempted to undercut the coalition’s claim to represent the interests of the victims of state socialism, appropriating the CDU’s own rhetoric. Whether we regard DIE LINKE’s approach as cynical points-scoring or a genuine attempt to confront its own past is probably irrelevant here. What such discussions point to more generally is the way in which the political debate in the post-unifcation period about compensation for victims of state socialism had ultimately created a privileged category of victimhood (the political prisoner) whose suffering was conceived as a heroic prefguring of the struggle for the end of the SED dictatorship and the reunifcation of Germany. As Tappert argues, the desire to restrict compensation measures to a delimited group was determined from the beginning of the 1990s by the desire to contain the fnancial liabilities of the Federal Republic in this area (1995, p. 233). The concentration on political prisoners who had endured longer sentences clearly also served this purpose. However, the equation of victimhood in relation to state socialism with the fgure of the political prisoner was already well-established in the Federal Republic from the 1950s, when the VOS and other groups successfully lobbied for recognition of that status through the HHG. Since the introduction of the victim pension, it has proved diffcult for other kinds of victims of state socialism to gain access to this symbolically privileged status of recipients of this form of compensation, with individuals who were subject to forcible removal from the GDR’s border areas, victims of forced adoption and schoolchildren expelled on political grounds all striving unsuccessfully to be acknowledged with a pension of this kind, although some of these groups do continue to have access to other kinds of welfare measures (st. 2015, p. 12; Behr and Laake 2014). In the following, I will discuss the case of those young people who were committed to special children’s homes in the GDR, and who have subsequently achieved some degree of success in having their victim status recognized by the state. What is instructive about this example is the way this group ultimately drew on a discourse of victimhood that evolved outside of the debate on compensating the GDR’s political prisoners, which did not provide a good ft in terms of framing the experience of the survivors of the GDR’s care system. Ultimately, it was the emergence of an unconnected scandal about child abuse in comparable West German institutions that provided this group with the means to stake its claim. 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 183

The GDR’s care system was divided from 1952 between two varieties of institution: the “normal” children’s homes (Normalheime) and the “special homes” (Spezialheime). The former were designed to care for children who could not be looked after by their parents, whereas the latter were designed to discipline children and young people who were considered “diffcult to educate” (Schwererziehbare) (Zimmermann 2004, p. 243; Sachse 2010, p. 35; 2011, p. 39). This latter category was divided according to the age of the young people in question: until the age of 14, children who were “diffcult to educate” were placed in special children’s homes, then from 14 to 18 in youth detention centres called Jugendwerkhöfe (literally, youth work centres; also known as JWH). Following a reform of the GDR’s child support services in 1964, a further institution, the notorious Closed Juvenile Detention Centre Torgau (Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau, or GJWH Torgau) was opened as a form of disciplinary incarceration for young people who failed to conform to the expectations of their JWH. Detainees stayed in Torgau for months at a time before being returned to their original JWH. These young people were not subject to any legal judgement as a basis for what amounted to a particularly harsh form of imprisonment. As commentators on the special homes and JWHs have pointed out, their aims represented a distillation of the SED’s views on the education not just of young people, but of the population in general. The GDR regime sought to create a new kind of socialist citizen whose personal needs and desires would be in harmony with those of the collective (Zimmermann 2004, pp. 48–49; Laudien and Sachse 2012, p. 147; Benz 2016, p. 189). Where children and young people demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to conform to the state’s conception of appropriate socialist values and behaviour, educationalists identifed the sources of any deviance in the infuence of West or parents’ attitudes as hangovers from fascism and capitalism (Zimmermann 2004, pp. 29 and 35; Gatzemann 2008, p. 48). Where such challenges were encountered, those in charge of the GDR’s children’s services were strongly infuenced by ideas from Soviet pedagogy that placed great faith in the ability of the collective to “re-educate” those who displayed deviant behaviour. The key infuence on GDR pedagogy in this regard was the work of early Soviet educationalist Anton Makarenko, who had written about running camps for delinquent youth in the 1920s. Makarenko’s theories stressed discipline through collective work, military drill and so on, as a means of teaching young citizens to accept their place within the social hierarchy. He also emphasized the educative function of the 184 D. CLARKE collective, in which citizens learned to know their place (Jöns 1997b, p. 260; Zimmermann 2004, pp. 62–69; Benz 2016, p. 189). Widely infuential in the GDR’s educational establishment, Makarenko’s theories had a deep impact on the special children’s home and JWHs, which sought to fll their charges’ time with disciplined work, sport and highly structured “leisure” activities (such as watching and discussing the offcial GDR news on television). Children and young people were formed into collectives in which, following Makarenko’s model, favoured individuals would be given authority over others. Such collectives were often treated collectively in terms of rewards for good behaviour and punishment for misdemeanours. Such a system clearly left itself open to abuse. Often, the practice of “education by the collective” expressed itself in violence among children and young people, which was tolerated and even encouraged by the personnel (Jöns 1997b, p. 259; Zimmermann 2004, pp. 345 and 404; Sachse 2010, pp. 112–114). Also, the largely underqualifed staff of the special homes and JWHs tended to react to any infringement of discipline with even harsher disciplinary measures, including humiliat- ing punishments (Laudien and Sachse 2012, p. 154), extended periods of isolation (p. 233) and physical violence (pp. 254–255). The GDR’s children’s services made little use of psychological support or counsel- ling (Zimmermann 2004, p. 240), relying on an escalation of disciplinary measures to break the will of non-conforming subjects, regardless of the causes of their behaviour (p. 192). The ultimate expression of this was approach the GJWH Torgau, where before the demise of the East German state some 5000 young people were subjected to a regime of forced physical activity, violence and intimidation that drove some to self-harm and even suicide, and left survivors traumatized. It seems that GDR offcials were well aware that Torgau was unacceptable as an institution, evidenced not least by their decision to close it down during the collapse of the regime and attempt to remove the physical and documentary traces of the events that took place there (Jöns 1997a, p. 126). Numerous victim accounts testify to the long-term psychological effects of the treatment that young people experienced in this institution (e.g. Puls 2009; Glocke 2011; Gueffroy 2015). The experiences of those who had been through the GDR’s care system, and in particular its special children’s homes and JWHs, initially received scant attention in the post-unifcation period. What little attention there was focused on Torgau, undoubtedly the most egregious 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 185 expression of the GDR’s policy on “delinquent” youth. One early intervention took place in the autumn of 1990, when a group of local civil rights activists in the town gained access to the premises and carried out interviews in order to produce an initial report for the local council (Unabhängiger Untersuchungsausschuss 1997). This report, which characterized the GJWH Torgau as a refection of the GDR’s social model as a whole (p. 177), attracted some limited media coverage (Jöns 1997a, p. 126). What became clear in subsequent years, however, was the diffculty of fnding a place for the victims of the GJWH and the GDR’s care system more widely alongside other victims of the SED regime. Despite the commitment of the Saxon regional government since 1994 to turn the site of the GJWH into a memorial museum (Beyler 2015, p. 94), the buildings, which had passed into the ownership of the Federal Republic, were sold off in 1996 to an investor, who turned the greater part of the structure into private fats. The decision to sell the property seems to indicate that preserving the GJWH as a memorial was not deemed to be a national priority in memorial politics at the time. In spite of this, a group founded in 1996 by local civil society activists, the Initiative Group Closed Juvenile Detention Centre Torgau (Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau) created a Site of Memory and Encounter in the Former Closed Youth Detention Centre Torgau (Erinnerungs- und Begegnungstätte im ehemaligen Geschlossenen Jugendwerkhof Torgau), renting the part of the building that had not yet been converted into private accommodation. A frst exhibition was created, which focused exclusively on the GJWH Torgau and did not seek to engage with the phenomenon of children’s homes in the GDR more widely.1 The Initiative Group was able to open the site for visitors in March of 1998, with the help of start-up funding from the Saxon Social Ministry (Beyler 2015, p. 95), but then had to rely on project funding from various sources without a secure funding stream for the running costs of the memorial museum (p. 95). In parallel with these developments, victim activists representing those who suffered in the GDR’s care system, for whom the memorial museum in Torgau has been a key site of organization (Benz 2016, p. 218),

1 I’m grateful to Ingolf Notzke of Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau e.V. for discussing these developments with me. Needless to say, the interpretation presented here is my own. 186 D. CLARKE have fought to have their status as victims of the GDR regime recognized alongside that of political prisoners, particularly in terms of gaining access to the existing compensation regime. This project has faced challenges in terms of the wider societal recognition of this experience in terms of victimhood. As Verena Zimmermann (2004, pp. 417–418) points out, the social values of order and discipline propagated by the GDR enjoyed a good deal of consensus among the population. Equally, prejudices remain that those who were held in such institutions must have been delinquent or criminal and therefore deserving of their treatment. Furthermore, the belief in the need to discipline wayward youth through hard work and integration into hierarchical structures is hardly specifc to the GDR and continues to enjoy some measure of popularity in contemporary society. This is particularly clear from a video project carried out by the Initiative Group in 2006, which found ample evidence of such attitudes among the inhabitants of Torgau itself (Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau 2006). The perception of the GDR’s treatment of allegedly “deviant” youth as normal or acceptable contributed to a context in which it was diffcult for victims to access the compensation reserved for those deemed to have suffered political persecution. By the early 2000s, activism by victims of the GDR’s care system, which was largely concentrated around a small group of individuals connected with the Initiative Group in Torgau, focused on claiming a comparable status for their victimhood to that achieved by former political prisoners. This strategy was pursued largely through the courts. Although the second version of the SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz had recognized the possibility that incarceration in Torgau could be subject to rehabilitation and compensation, this was only deemed to apply in cases where imprisonment was politically motivated (Reininghaus and Schabow 2013, p. 52; Beyler 2015, p. 97). A number of victims sought to challenge this approach, most notably the activist Ralf Weber, who undertook a series of legal challenges in order to have his time in the GJWH Torgau and in another JWH recognized as grounds for rehabilitation and compensation, despite not being able to demonstrate that these measures were taken against him on the grounds of his political opposition to the SED regime. Although he was able to achieve the recognition of his incarceration in Torgau as incompatible with the rule of law (rechtsstaatswidrig) in December 2004, and thus as automatically subject to rehabilitation and compensation regardless of the motivation 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 187 for his imprisonment, the time Weber spent in another JWH was deemed by the courts not only not to be an example of political persecution, but also as fundamentally lawful, despite the treatment to which he was subjected there (Glocke 2011, pp. 150–154). However, a further decision by the Federal Constitutional Court in June of 2009 opened up the possibility that such compensation might be forthcoming for those sent to other special children’s homes or JWHs in the GDR, but (again) only if they were able to demonstrate that there had been specifcally political reasons for the authorities’ decision (DPA 2009). In the meantime, in an attempt to create greater clarity, the government sought to widen the potential circle of those eligible for rehabilitation and compensation to include inmates of all GDR children’s homes, but again only in as far as they were able to demonstrate that they had been held in these institutions on political grounds (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kinder- und Jugendhilfe 2012, p. 50; Reininghaus and Schabow 2013, p. 56). In effect, as subsequent cases showed, the interpretation of what constituted a “political” reason for incarceration in a children’s home in the GDR was open to question and could vary from court to court, meaning that victims could by no means be certain that they would be able to access compensation (Reinighaus and Schabow 2013, p. 57). The case of those held in the special children’s homes and JWHs of the GDR was also not an easy ft with the political system’s dominant conception of victimhood as resistance to state socialism. Whereas political prisoners were compensated for their political imprisonment, which was understood as a form of heroic resistance against the SED regime, victims of the GDR’s care system were primarily seeking compensation for how they were treated in the institutions themselves. Although it was also the case that some young people were held against the will of their families, it was not always easy to identify a political motivation for their initial integration into the care system: Ralf Weber, for example, whose case had been so important to the development of the jurisprudence on this matter, was originally taken into care because his mother, who had left an abusive relationship, had diffculties caring for him while working (Glocke 2011, pp. 15–20). As memoirs by former victims show, diffculties within the families of those who became part of the care system (including abuse within the family) did lead to behaviour that the state’s social services might reason- ably have sought to address (e.g. truancy, petty criminality, running away from home). However, it was the GDR state’s authoritarian response to 188 D. CLARKE these diffculties that was at fault, not so much the fact that it responded at all. It was therefore arguably the treatment of young people in the GDR’s care system that needed compensating, not the fact that children were in that system. This ran counter to the logic of the existing compensation legislation, which took no account of the nature of the individual’s experiences inside prison, compensating them only for their incarceration on political grounds. The mass media played a particularly signifcant role in the process of achieving compensation for victims of the GDR’s care system. Luhmann understands the mass media as performing an important function for contemporary society as a whole. They create a shared informational background against which the various functional systems formulate their communications; in other words, the mass media act as a kind of social memory, highlighting that information that the other functional systems must regard as relevant at the present moment (Luhmann 1996, p. 176). However, the mass media (and Luhmann is thinking here particularly about the news media) are also a functional system in their own right, selecting their communications according to the medium of information, that is to say according to a binary of code of information/not information (Luhmann 1996, p. 36). Their focus is therefore on information that can be considered novel (Bechmann and Stehr 2011, p. 144). The mass media allow the various other social systems to make assumptions about a supposedly shared reality (Bechmann and Stehr 2011, p. 145). However, the mass media have no power to determine the responses that the various functional systems will formulate against this common informational horizon, so that this shared social memory nevertheless maintains an openness in terms of each system’s communications about the future (Luhmann 1996, p. 179). For the political system, the mass media take on the function of a kind of “internal environment” (p. 185), that is to say that the political system’s need to respond to public opinion is met not by addressing the views of citizens directly (which are in any case diverse and diffcult to pin down with any certainty), but rather by responding to the constant irritation produced by the mass media and the novel topics they thematize (p. 174). What the mass media report is not selected on the basis that it refects the consensus of public opinion, which the media have no reliable mechanism to capture given the speed at which they must work, but rather on the basis of novelty: the information communicated is shocking, unexpected, confictual, often moralized, and demands a response from the other 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 189 functional systems, in particular from the political system (Luhmann 1998, pp. 1100–1102). The mass media are nevertheless useful to the political system in terms of formulating its political communication, in that they provide an image of that social environment that the political system is unable to observe directly. Furthermore, the mass media provide the political system with a means of observing the effects of its own communications, so that they function as a kind of mirror for the political system in which it observes itself (Marchinowski 2002, p. 91). In 2003, a process of scandalization around the Federal Republic’s children’s homes in the 1950s and 1960s provided an opportunity for victims of the GDR’s special children’s homes and JWHs to put their suffering back on the political agenda. In January of that year, Peter Mullan’s flm The Magdalene Sisters (2002), which detailed the mistreatment of young women in institutions run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, went on general release in Germany. The showing of the flm in Germany led to Peter Wensierski, a journalist at the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, being contacted by a German woman who claimed to have experienced similar mistreatment in a Catholic children’s home in Dortmund in the 1960s. Wensierski began researching the subject, publishing a series of articles and then a book detailing the experiences of young people in a variety of Catholic and Protestant homes in the 1950s and 1960s (Wensierski 2007). The narrative that Wensierski constructed around the forgotten suffering in West German children’s homes criticized a false nostalgia for the early years of the Federal Republic and emphasized the liberating effect of the student movement of the late 1960s, which had led to protests against and eventually reform of the system of children’s homes (Wensierski 2007, pp. 9–10). Crucially, he also underlined the fact that, despite these reforms, the stories of abuse and the continuing suffering of victims had been silenced. Wensierski’s take on the issue therefore had all the hallmarks of a classic media scandal, founded as it was on the successive revelation of “new” details of the abuse that had taken place. The publication of Wensierski’s book contributed to an ongoing media debate, with ever greater numbers of victims coming forward, to the extent that the political system came under moral pressure to respond. A series of hearings before the Bundestag’s Committee for Petitions concluded with an expression of regret for the treatment of children and young people in West German homes from 1949 to 1975 and called upon the Federal Government to set up a Round Table that 190 D. CLARKE should put in place compensation measures (Deutscher Bundestag Petitionsausschuss 2008). The Round Table’s subsequent deliberations, however, excluded an examination of the situation in GDR children’s homes, prompting activists to turn to the media to point to their apparent treatment as “second-class victims” compared to those who had suffered in West German homes (Schlegel 2011; Popp and Winter 2011). An inter-party group within the Federal Parliament responded to these complaints by proposing the creation of a separate investigation into the situation in the GDR (BT-Drs. 17/6143), which reported in March of 2012 (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kinder- und Jugendhilfe 2012), rec- ommending that children and young people who had suffered in East Germany’s special children’s homes and JWHs should have access to similar compensation to that of their West German counterparts. This clearly represented a raising of the profle of the East German victims and a signifcant move forward in terms of their recognition with a dedicated compensation regime, originally fnanced with a fund of 40 million Euro. The concerted lobbying of victim activists, particularly those connected with the Initiative Group in Torgau, had succeeded in scandalizing the abuse they had suffered and the government’s failure to address its consequences, speaking to a mass media that was receptive to further stories of unresolved cases of historical child abuse. In an important sense, the stories about Torgau and other institutions were not new. Previous investigations, such as the 1990 report discussed above, but also a project by the Brandenburg Ministry for Education in 1997, had achieved some limited media attention (Ministerium für Bildung, Jugend und Sport des Landes Brandenburg 1997). However, the West German child abuse scandal had allowed activists to approach a media that was ready to reframe their experiences as a cause of contemporary concern. In Luhmann’s terms, communications about these experiences were selected by the mass media as “information” and their presence in the media made them perceptible to the political system as a matter of public importance. This strategy entailed a marked shift away from attempts to present the experience of children and young people in the GDR’s residential institutions primarily in terms of resistance to state socialism. The discourse around children’s homes and JWHs in the GDR, as adopted both by activists and the political system, now de-emphasized the political motivation of incarceration and adopted a new focus on its victims, reframing the GDR’s care system as one example of the much wider 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 191 phenomenon of authoritarian attitudes to raising children in the post- war period. Summing up the parallels between the GDR and the Federal Republic, for example, the fnal report of the working group on East German homes concluded:

The consequence of [the GDR’s educational ideology, DC] was the treatment of the child as a mere object, sowing the seeds of many of the experiences of injustice in the children’s homes of the GDR. In practice, the treatment of children in those homes led to situations that were shockingly reminiscent of the situation in homes in the Federal Republic in the 1950s and 1960s – even if the social and moral ideas of those running the homes and the wider society were different. (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Kinder- und Jugendhilfe 2012, p. 57)

This reading of the history of abuse in GDR special homes for children and young people effectively set aside the different causes of that abuse to focus on the similarities in victims’ experiences. Here “experiences of injustice” counted more than the ideological reasons for that injustice. While acknowledging the specifcity of the GDR’s political system, the report downplayed the notion that the GDR’s children’s homes were a product of political oppression and framed them primarily in terms of a set of attitudes that the GDR failed to overcome in the way that the Federal Republic had by the 1970s. Following the line of Winsierski’s infuential book on the subject, the GDR was presented as having failed to overcome an authoritarian tradition that the Federal Republic had grappled with in the period of cultural transformation sym- bolized by the student movement. The notion of the GDR’s care system as one expression of an authoritarian tradition that had also been evident in the Federal Republic was one actively promoted by the Initiative Group, as can be seen in the development of the memorial museum in Torgau. Until the advent of the West German abuse scandal, the memorial site relied on funding from a number of local, regional and federal sources, but without a clear commitment to ongoing support (Lohre and Pabst 2006). A second exhibition, presented at the site from 2003, had maintained the same clear focus on the suffering of young people at the Torgau site that was evident in the original 1998 exhibition (Initiativgruppe Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau 2002). However, from 2007 to 2009, as the West German abuse scandal unfolded, the Initiative Group undertook 192 D. CLARKE the development of a third permanent exhibition, which is still in place today, with the title “I was born as a human being and I want to leave this place as a human being: the Closed Juvenile Detention Centre Torgau in the education system of the GDR.” As the subtitle of the exhibition suggests, this new display seeks to present the GJWH in the broader context of the GDR’s educational practices. However, it also seeks to make links to authoritarian approaches to juvenile delinquency in Germany and beyond, thereby speaking to the new context that the renewed public attention for the question of child abuse in children’s homes has created. Consequently, the new exhibition places the GJWH in the context of international trends of pedagogical thought, contrasting a child-centred approach with the “black pedagogy” of discipline and harsh punishment exemplifed by the site. Alongside details of the GDR system and its educational principles, the exhibit today refers to the reform of West German children’s homes in the 1970s, draws comparisons with National Socialist treatment of deviant youth, the training undergone by US marines, religious schools in Ireland, and Catholic-run children’s homes in the early Federal Republic. Far from emphasizing the situation in the GDR as a specifc phenomenon of state socialist oppression, the exhibition presents the GJWH and the SED’s approach to delinquent youth as part of a broader cultural history in the Western world. Finally, it confronts the visitor with a central passageway in which the walls are covered with a series of statements and questions related to the disciplining of young people in society, including references to contemporary debates in which stricter disciplinary measures and the incarceration of young people are called for, or in which the use of corporal punishment is defended, for example. The intention here is clearly to open the issue of youth and delinquency to the contemporary context, thereby insisting on the issues raised by the memorial museum as concerns of continuing relevance to society. However, that relevance is framed not in terms of the contribution of the victims to the overcoming of an undemocratic regime, but rather in terms of the lessons to be learned about the dangers of the kind of “black pedagogy” practised at the GJWH Torgau and elsewhere. While the Federal Republic is given credit in the exhibition for having reformed its children’s homes in the 1970s, references to contemporary attitudes stress that liberal democratic societies are not free of the prejudices that can lead to the oppressive treatment of young people. On 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 193 one level, this discourse makes a claim for the continued relevance not only of the victims but of the memorial museum itself. Not only does the recognition of past injustice serve a contemporary purpose, but the honouring of the victims’ suffering is posited as potentially informing the values of today’s society, as in Honneth’s conception of recognition. On another level, however, this claim to contemporary relevance can be seen as an aspect of the memorial museum’s ongoing struggle to secure long- term funding from the federal and regional governments, which it did in fact achieve in October 2014. In summary, we can see that the exhibition developed by the Initiative Group at the memorial museum sought to reposition the debate about the GJWH and the GDR’s care system more widely, shifting it away from an exclusive focus on the SED regime, in response to the evolving public debate about authoritarian educational practices in children’s homes in the post-war period, both in Germany and elsewhere. Although the Initiative Group as a civil society organization it is not run by victims, but rather by what Jenny Wüstenberg calls “pragmatic memory activists” (Wüstenberg 2017, p. 226), it nevertheless understands itself as having an important advocacy role and provides a space in which victims’ groups can meet and organize. In its combination of victim advocacy, the facil- itation of victim activism, and its educational function as a memorial museum, it has become a “hybrid” institution (Wüstenberg 2017, pp. 263–288) taking on many of the functions of a victims’ organization in terms of its protest function. In adapting its framing of victimhood in relation to the GDR’s care system in its memorial museum, the Initiative Group was able both to make a more convincing case for the regulari- zation of its own state funding, and to support a construction of victimhood that proved to be advantageous for those seeking compensation for their experiences in the GDR’s children’s homes. As noted above, victims’ organizations affliated with the Torgau site were also successfully able to lobby for bespoke compensation for their suffering, in effect abandoning their focus on gaining access to the victim pension afforded by the legislation for political prisoners. They now have access to a fund that allows former victims to apply for the purchase of items to improve their quality of life, including the fnancing of various treatments and therapies, up to the value of 10,000 Euro. Some victims have continued to push for a monthly pension that would make good the outsider status that has marred their subsequent life chances (Münch 2012) and have complained that the abandonment of the cause of equal 194 D. CLARKE treatment with political prisoners effectively created an unacceptable hierarchy of victimhood (Reininghaus and Schabow 2013, p. 59). In general, however, many activists accepted the settlement while continuing to seek further parallels with other victim groups beyond the GDR context. This was particularly the case in relation to victims of sexual abuse, a topic that emerged in the wake of the original children’s homes scandals. From around early 2010, media interest began to grow in the sexual abuse of children and young people within institutions, both religious and secular, including the reform-pedagogical Odenwald School (Baader 2015, p. 316). Whereas the media had focused largely on victims of violence and oppression in various institutions up until this point, victims of sexual abuse now began to come forward, shifting the terms of the debate and forcing the federal government to set up another Round Table in 2015 to deal specifcally with sexual abuse. In response, the Initiative Group were particularly active in soliciting accounts of sexual abuse, appealing to former inmates of the GJWH and other institutions to come forward with their stories (PI/seb 2016). Sexual abuse had already been thematized by victims in frst-hand testimonies (e.g. Puls 2009), but the Initiative Group’s solicitation of such testimony represented an attempt to stake a further claim for East German victims in a debate that, once again, was originally focused on West German institutions. This is not to claim that it was illegitimate of the Initiative Group to seek out such accounts: it simply recognized that the current media and political debate would allow victims to speak of their experiences in new ways and be heard as they had not been before. This strategy proved to be successful: in September 2016 over 140 victims of sexual abuse in GDR children’s homes and JWHs were brought together by the Initiative Group in Torgau to meet with representatives of the new Round Table on sexual abuse, whose chair stressed the “great importance” of these GDR experiences to the overall work of her group (DPA 2016). It was now clear that sexual abuse in GDR children’s homes would be part of the investigation and any forthcoming compensation associated with its outcomes. Activists working on behalf of those abused as children and young people in the GDR have clearly been successful in drawing on constructions of victimhood that originated beyond the established paradigms of the victim status that is usually associated with the GDR’s political prisoners. Initial attempts to accede to a comparable status to that of former 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 195 political prisoners by largely judicial means were only partially successful, as the experience of these individuals could not be easily framed in terms of the dominant understanding of political oppression and resistance to state socialist rule. The advent of the abuse scandals in the west of Germany in the 2000s, however, provided an opportunity to construct the experiences of victims of the GDR’s care system in ways that brought new recognition. Although some remained disappointed at their lack of access to the highly symbolic victim pension reserved for former political prisoners, this reframing nevertheless allowed the victims access to some form of compensation and, as a concomitant factor, allowed them to become a recognized group with whom the political system was morally bound to engage. The identifcation of further forms of as yet unaddressed exploitation, for instance in cases of sexual abuse, arguably becomes necessary to maintain this position: while there are unresolved issues, organizations such as the Initiative Group can continue to emphasize their role as spokes- people for those whose voices must be heard. In doing so, they fulfl the necessary function of victims’ organizations to keep producing communications of relevance not only to the political system, but also to a mass media that provides opportunities for the scandalization of particular themes. It is notable, however, that the power of organizations to orches- trate such scandalization is limited. The Torgau Initiative Group and those victims associated with it were successful in making links between GDR victims and West German victims that attracted considerable media coverage and a response from the political system. However, victims and their advocates were essentially in a reactive position in this instance, responding to a media-led agenda that offered them new opportunities. As I will show below, this continued search for new themes not yet addressed by the existing compensation regime is also a feature of activism by organizations representing former political prisoners.

Fighting for Compensation for Forced Labour In April of 2012, the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA found itself confronted with allegations that during the 1970s and 1980s it had sourced products from frms in the GDR that had employed prisoners, including political prisoners (DPA 2012). The Swedish TV station SVT announced its intention to broadcast a documentary featuring this allegation, pick- ing up on reports that had already featured in a programme by German 196 D. CLARKE regional broadcaster WDR (Anon 2012). As in the case of the victims of the GDR’s care system, the media attention attracted by this revelation provided an opportunity for victims’ organizations, in this case primarily the UOKG, to promote claims for further compensation. However, unlike the campaign for young victims of the SED’s care system, the UOKG’s campaign on forced labour did not fundamentally seek to reframe the meaning of victimhood, but rather to add further weight to already existing claims. The as yet unsuccessful demand for further compensation for forced labour by political prisoners in the GDR’s jails nevertheless demonstrated a more systematic engagement with the media on the UOKG’s part, showing a clear awareness of the need to scandalize the ongoing revelations about forced labour as a means to create pressure on the political system. The commonly used German term for forced labour (Zwangsarbeit) is primarily associated with the history of National Socialism. From the beginning of the Second World War, Germany had not only recruited, but also drafted and deported civilian workers to Germany from Czechoslovakia and Poland. When the German advance on the Soviet Union came to a halt in 1941, ever more acute labour shortages on the home front led to an expansion of this practice, with prisoners or war, concentration camp inmates and deported civilians all made to carry out forced labour under poor and often murderous conditions in Germany (Spoerer and Fleischhacker 2002, pp. 6–7). Compensation of these individuals had been ruled out until the signing of an offcial peace treaty between the Allied powers and Germany, which did not take place until the end of the Cold War. Under threat of class action law suits from surviving forced labourers in the United States, the German government set up a foundation in 2000, to which German industry, which had prof- ited from slavery, promised to contribute so that surviving victims could receive compensation payments and other benefts (Fassbender 2005; Borggräfe 2014, pp. 426–467). At the time of the intense public debate surrounding the implementation of these measures (Borggräfe 2014, pp. 25–26), the larger and more prominent victims’ organizations representing former GDR political prisoners, including the VOS and the UOKG, did not seek to highlight forced labour as an issue that required separate compensation. This reluctance had nothing to do with a lack of awareness of the basic historical facts about the work that victims had carried out in East German prisons: the issue of political prisoners producing goods for both 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 197 domestic consumption and for export had, in fact, been raised periodi- cally in West Germany well before the end of the SED regime (Wölbern 2015, pp. 6–7), not least by victims’ organizations and other activists such as the International Society for Human Rights (IGFM) (Wunschik 2014, pp. 257–273). In response to this apparent unwillingness of victims’ organizations to make use of the debate around compensation for forced labour under National Socialism to launch claims on behalf of those who had worked in GDR prisons, a small splinter group was formed in 1998 by a former member of the VOS, Jürgen Schmidt-Pohl. His Association of Victims of Political Repression and Resisters to the Soviet Occupation and SED Dictatorship in the GDR (Vereinigung politisch Verfolgter und Widerständler der SBZ/DDR-Diktatur DDR, or VpV) had a relatively small number of members and relied for the most part on the energies of its founder, who set up his own small press to publish books on forced labour in the GDR’s prisons and political repression in East German more generally. Schmidt-Pohl’s (2003, p. 8) stated aim was to achieve equal recognition of victims of the National Socialism and political prisoners under state socialism. The issue of equal compensation for forced labour under the two different dictatorships was framed as means to achieve this, with Schmidt-Pohl developing a strategy that closely echoed the approach taken by those making claims on behalf of victims of forced labour under National Socialism: for example, by proposing a class action-style lawsuit, or at least test cases, against the federal government, and even the creation of a special commission to oversee the distribution of compensation along the lines of the Jewish Claims Conference. Schmidt-Pohl originally aimed to call this body the Central Council of Victims of Communism (Zentralrat kommunistisch Verfolgter), clearly borrowing from the name of Germany’s leading Jewish organization, the Central Council of Jews in Germany (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland) (Schmidt-Pohl 2003, pp. 42–44; Siegmund 2003, pp. 87–88). The VpV had some success in attracting media attention with a conference on forced labour in Schwerin in 2002 (Schmidt-Pohl 2003, pp. 188–196), for which they managed to engage conservative historian Ernst Nolte, noted for his views on the comparability of National Socialism and state socialist dictatorship, as a keynote speaker. Nevertheless, the VpV had diffculty establishing a legal basis for its proposed claims. Apparently frustrated by this impasse, its texts increasingly 198 D. CLARKE focused on comparisons between the compensation paid to forced workers under National Socialism and the compensation of political prisoners in the GDR, claiming that the “politically correct” culture of the Federal Republic had given priority to Jewish victims, for whom the Holocaust had allegedly become a “speciality” and a means of securing exclusive victim status (p. 232). This line of argument neglected the fact that signifcant numbers of those receiving funds from the new foundation for forced labourers under National Socialism were not, in fact, Jewish, but rather non-Jewish citizens of countries occupied by Germany during the Second World War. Despite vigorously rejecting potential claims of anti-Semitism (p. 235), this drift towards arguments suggesting that Jews were somehow gaining unfair advantage would (quite rightly) have been rejected by mainstream politicians, to whom claims for improved compensation were chiefy addressed by the larger organizations for victims of state socialism. The VpV’s position on forced labour, which was largely ignored by other victims’ organizations, points to a fundamental diffculty with demands for compensation for work in GDR prisons at this stage. While the public debate around forced labour in National Socialist Germany provided an opportunity to point to parallels with persecution in the GDR, anyone making such arguments potentially ran the risk of formulating a position that could be interpreted as relativizing the crimes of National Socialism. It is notable that the only other organization to take up the issue of forced labour at this time, the Bürgerbüro, both explicitly acknowledged that the debate around forced labour in National Socialism had been a key motivator for its own research project, and ultimately remained equivocal about whether it was actually necessary to develop a compensation scheme to match that for victims of the Nazi dictatorship. While in the wake of the debate over compensation for forced labour under National Socialism the Bürgerbüro had organized a study of victims’ experiences that set out to demonstrate that forced labour in the GDR and under National Socialism amounted to the same phenomenon, that study also had to acknowledge that criminal prisoners were subject to the same conditions as political prisoners in the GDR, which rather weakened the claim that only political prisoners deserved to be compensated (Bastian and Neubert 2003, pp. 4 and 106). By 2010, one of the study’s authors had reached the view that it might be better simply to give more prominence to the issue in the relevant memorial museums, rather than seeking a new form of compensation (Neubert 2010). 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 199

By 2012 it seemed unlikely that further major innovations in the compensation regime, particularly with regard to a higher honorary pension, would emerge in the near future. However, when the IKEA scandal broke, the UOKG sought to take up the issue of forced labour as a means of reopening the compensation debate. In doing so, the UOKG and its constituent organizations were careful to distance themselves from any comparison with the issue of forced labour under National Socialism, preferring instead to make comparisons with the tradition of forced labour in the Soviet Union and its satellite states (Wölbern 2015, p. 5). This strategy can be seen, for example, in the touring exhibition later produced by the UOKG in cooperation with the regional government of Saxony-Anhalt, which took care to place the “destruction through work” (Vernichtung durch Arbeit) practised by the National Socialists in a category apart from the global history of forced labour and slavery (Sachse 2015b, p. 21). The UOKG’s approach focused not on claims of parity with victims of National Socialism, but rather on seeking to maintain the stream of revelations about forced labour in the GDR with the maximum possible impact in the media, thereby maintaining pressure on the political system and on the businesses that had profted from the work of political prisoners. While fgures such as Hildigund Neubert, the former GDR civil rights activist who had co-authored the Bürgerbüro study of 2003 and who was at that time Thuringia’s Commissioner for the MfS Archives, or Hubertus Knabe of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum were quick to demand compensation from IKEA (Anwar 2012), the UOKG under the chairmanship of Rainer Wagner sought to enter into discussions with the Swedish frm without making an explicit claim for compensation (Kellerhoff 2012a). This also contrasts with the attitude of the VOS, which immediately supported claims for compensation. The UOKG’s strategy paid off, in that it was able to persuade IKEA to provide funds for a project to investigate forced labour among GDR political prisoners more widely (Kellerhoff and Berlin 2012), which took up its work under the direction of historian and former GDR civil rights activist Christian Sachse in March 2013 (Sachse 2014a). As was noted when Wagner was interviewed by German news programme Tagesschau on November 16, 2012, after the funding of the new research project had been agreed, some victims’ organizations were unhappy with this approach, which seemed to present compensation as a long-term goal to be achieved once the necessary historical research was completed. 200 D. CLARKE

The report that Sachse and his team produced provided an overview of the work performed by political prisoners in the GDR and pointed to the involvement of West German frms, stressing that further research would be required to understand the full extent of the pre-unifcation Federal Republic’s exploitation of political prisoners’ labour (Sachse 2014b, p. 328). The study’s emphasis on the unresolved nature of the historical account and the question of forced labour as a political issue that demanded a solution was pronounced, explicitly echoing the UOKG’s demand for a “round table” between victims, German businesses and the government in order to put a compensation scheme in place (Sachse 2014b, p. 407; UOKG 2014). Despite using the methods of academic history, the study frames itself above all as offering evidence for the necessity of further action, rather than as a neutral historical investigation. It can therefore also be understood as a form of protest communication, pointing as it does to the failure (thus far) of other systems to address the moral problem of forced labour in the GDR and proposing specifc measures to resolve this issue. In the months before and immediately after the publication of the UKOG study, its fndings were taken up by the television news magazine programme Report Mainz, one of the most watched current affairs programmes on Germany’s main public television channel, ARD. Report Mainz produced a series of items featuring Sachse. Presenting the outcomes of his research as exclusive revelations, the journalists sought to scandalize various aspects of the treatment of political prisoners in the GDR, conforming to the conventions of the system of the mass media as described by Luhmann. In this sense, the UOKG had been able to speak successfully to the need of the mass media to present “new” and shocking information, that is to say that the UKOG had maintained the news- worthiness of the issue of forced labour after the initial revelations about IKEA. This engagement culminated in the UOKG’s cooperation in the production of a 45-minute documentary on forced labour in the GDR, which was broadcast on regional and national television in the summer of 2016 (Sachse 2016a, p. 2). As the campaign for compensation continued into 2015 and 2016, Sachse, who was employed to continue this work for the UOKG, underlined the importance of media contacts:

Without public pressure, we cannot achieve our aims. It is not enough to rely on the (undoubted) good will of politicians and representatives 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 201

of business. For this reason, we are working intensively with journalists. (Sachse 2015a, p. 4)

In pursuing this strategy, which focused on the function of the UOKG in researching the ramifcations of forced labour in the GDR and then communicating the results to a receptive media, the organization had to cope with the scepticism and frustration of some of its members who feared that they would not live to see compensation achieved (Sachse 2015a, p. 4; 2016a, p. 8). As already noted elsewhere, the UOKG’s protest communication therefore had to fnd a balance between producing messages that would elicit a useful reaction in the other functional systems and maintaining the motivation of the members it claimed to represent. The UOKG’s efforts to maintain the presence of the question of forced labour in the public sphere were aided to a certain extent by the Commissioners for the MfS Archives in the individual regions and at the federal level. The holders of these posts have as a rule been former members of the GDR’s civil rights movement and in some cases have also been victims of the SED regime themselves. They have taken on responsibility for promoting public engagement with the history of the SED dictatorship, as well as managing citizens’ access to the MfS fles. In relation to the issue of forced labour, the Commissioners broadly supported the claims of the victims. A particularly prominent voice was Roland Jahn, the Federal Commissioner, who set up a research project in his institution to investigate the involvement of frms from the Federal Republic in the exploitation of forced labour. Speaking to the journalists of Report Mainz in January 2014, Jahn had expressed the need for compensation for the victims from a fund supported by the relevant frms, thus closely following the model of the fund set up to compensate victims of forced labour under National Socialism. Nevertheless, the published version of the research carried out on his behalf, which appeared as a monograph just before Sachse’s account, threw doubt on the validity of the term “forced labour” (Zwangsarbeit) in the context of the GDR. The study’s author, historian Thomas Wunschik, rejected the term Zwangsarbeit, which he deemed to be too “politically and historically loaded” (Wunschik 2014, p. 11) due to its association with National Socialism. He therefore preferred the term “coerced labour” (erzwun- gene Arbeit) or simply “prison work” (Häftlingsarbeit). Although refusal of forced labour in the GDR’s prison system was punished, Wunschik 202 D. CLARKE reasoned, it was not punishable by death as it would have been in the Third Reich, so that a distinction needed to be drawn (Wunschik 2014, p. 11). Sachse’s study rejected Wunschik’s more neutral terminology because it would imply that the International Labour Organization (ILO) defnition of forced labour, which is also the UOKG’s preferred defnition, did not apply to the GDR (Sachse 2014a, p. 4; 2014b, p. 17). Further doubts were raised about the use of the expression Zwangsarbeit by historian Justus Vesting, whose study on forced labour in the GDR’s chemical industries appeared in the midst of the IKEA scandal (Vesting 2012). In an article in the magazine Gerbergasse 18, which deals with historical topics relating to the East German dictatorship, Vesting (2014) contributed to a debate with Sachse and Wunschik, warning against the “infationary use” of the term Zwangsarbeit. In Vesting’s view, any application of the termed to the GDR represented a dangerous relativization of the fundamentally racist nature of the use of forced labour under National Socialism. Repeating a point made in his earlier study (Vesting 2012, pp. 128–129), he also went on to point out that many of the worst aspects of the working conditions suffered by political prisoners equally affected prisoners guilty of non-political crimes. Such ordinary criminals had just as much right to be protected from injury as political prisoners, Vesting (2014) pointed out. Implicitly, then, if political prisoners were to receive special compensation for forced labour, non-political inmates might be equally entitled. This terminological dispute points to a wider diffculty for the UOKG that was magnifed rather than resolved by its strategy of seeking to promote detailed research on forced labour in GDR prisons. While it carried out that research itself, its fndings could be framed in relation to an agenda of protest aimed at making a case for further compensation. Although Wunschik’s project evolved in a related context, it suggested that there was no straightforward defnition of forced labour on which all parties could agree. Vesting’s criticism also pointed to the fact that wider research on the phenomenon of forced labour in the GDR was likely to lead to a greater complexity in historical understanding that would not necessarily back up the UOKG. Historians are in agreement that the SED regime sought to exploit prisoners’ labour for economic gain, setting them to work in areas avoided by civilians because they were dirty, dangerous or monoto- nous (Wunschik 2014; Sachse 2014b; Wölbern 2015; Kopper et al. 2016, p. 69). GDR frms paid wages directly to the state for the use 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 203 of prisoners, but did so at low rates that were good for their balance sheets, so that both parties profted (although there is some debate about whether the GDR prison system actually made a proft on the deal once the cost of running the prisons is considered; Wölbern 2015, pp. 28–29). Clearly, apart from the fact that they were not unjustly imprisoned on political grounds, such conditions also applied to criminal prisoners in the system, as Vesting also points out. This presented a diffculty for the UOKG in terms of its ability to make a convincing case for further compensation on the grounds of forced labour, in that it made the distinction between those prisoners who deserved compensation and those who did not less certain. Sachse’s insistence on the reservation of the term Zwangsarbeit for political prisoners, rather than allowing their forced labour to be subsumed under the general category of “prison work,” is symptomatic of the desire to maintain this distinction. The political reaction to media reports on forced labour in the GDR and the UOKG’s campaign was muted. One Christian Democrat member of the Bundestag, Kai Wegener (2014), associated himself with the UOKG’s efforts, and the FDP’s Patrick Furth also organized an expert consultation on the matter in the Bundestag (Kellerhoff 2012b). Speaking on behalf of the government at the launch of Sachse’s report, however, the government’s Commissioner for Eastern Germany, Iris Gleicke, stressed that the UOKG’s project, although valuable, had not yet provided a complete picture of the forced labour of political prisoners in the GDR. Gleicke also rejected the terminology of Zwangsarbeit, which she preferred to see reserved for the context of National Socialism, although she acknowledged that the application of the term to the political prisoners in the GDR was now widespread (Gleicke 2014). The motivation for this further research seemed less than clear. However, it should be noted that the UOKG’s IKEA-funded project had not only met with support. For instance, former GDR civil rights activist Markus Meckel, who was also the chair of the advisory board of the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, argued publicly that the exploitation of GDR prisoners had affected all inmates, not specifcally political prisoners, and thus could not be grounds for further compensation (Decker 2014a). Richard Schröder, a prominent theologian who had been active in the newly founded East German SPD in the last months of the GDR, was even more forthright in his criticism, accusing victims of seeking to create an artifcial scandal as leverage for further compensation. Like the UOKG, Schröder 204 D. CLARKE

(2014) took his defnition of forced labour from the ILO, but insisted that the work of political prisoners in the GDR was permissible, on the grounds that they had been sentenced by a court. It was also reported that unnamed sources within the federal government remained sceptical in relation to the possibility of compensating political prisoners for forced labour, due to the diffculty of distinguishing between the conditions imposed on political prisoners and criminal inmates (Decker 2014b). The study produced at Gleicke’s behest, written by Jan Philipp Wölbern of the Center for Contemporary History (Zentrum für zeithistorische Forschung) at the University of Potsdam, refects this ambivalence towards the use of the term Zwangsarbeit in relation to political prisoners in the GDR and the concern to make clearer distinctions between political and criminal prisoners. Wölbern rejected the ILO regulations as a framework for interpreting work carried out in GDR prisons, on the grounds that the relevant ILO treaty was never signed by the East German state. Instead, he preferred to take account of the GDR’s own legislation on the treatment of prisoners and other international agreements it entered into (Wölbern 2015, p. 6). Wölbern’s report argued that existing research had been unclear in the distinctions it had made between political and non-political prisoners, suggesting that it had tended to describe only prison work in general, as opposed to the specifc measures targeted against political prisoners (p. 8). His approach emphasized throughout that the poor and dangerous working conditions, sanctions against those refusing to work, and low pay affecting prisoners working in the GDR penal system applied both to criminal offenders and to political prisoners. However, he did point out that many of these negative factors would have affected political prisoners to a greater degree, given that they were at the bottom of the prison hierarchy (e.g., pp. 66, 74, 82, 86, 89, 96) a point echoed in another study carried out for the national railway company, Deutsche Bahn (Kopper et al. 2016, p. 95). Wölbern (2015, p. 96) also noted that political prisoners were on average better educated and more unused to physical labour than many of their criminal counterparts. Even so, Wölbern (2015, p. 96) was careful to point out that there was no evidence that political prisoners were generally assigned to harder or more dangerous jobs as a matter of policy. He did eventually reach the conclusion that the term Zwangsarbeit was appropriate, given that the political prisoners were unjustly made to carry out this work (p. 98), yet his argument served on the whole to undermine further claims for compensation. If the key element distinguishing the work of political 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 205 prisoners from convicted criminals was that the former were incarcerated unjustly, it might be inferred, then this element (namely the fact of imprisonment itself) was one that had already been the subject of compensation. Otherwise, the differences Wölbern highlighted between the conditions experienced by the two groups of prisoners seemed relatively marginal and even uncertain. In this sense, Wölbern’s study could be read as supporting those who had argued that prison work was not in itself further grounds for compensation. Responding to Wölbern’s analysis on behalf of the UOKG, Sachse (Sachse 2016b, p. 1) disputed the claim that the GDR’s failure to sign up to the ILO convention on forced labour meant that it could not be accused of having imposed Zwangsarbeit on political prisoners, arguing (not unreasonably) that neither National Socialist Germany nor the Soviet Union, whose use of forced labour is acknowledged, had ratifed the ILO regulations. On the whole, however, Sachse’s responses emphasized that the new study only confrmed the results of his own, adding a few additional insights to the historical picture (pp. 1 and 4). In presenting the results of the study to the public, however, Gleicke placed quite a different emphasis. While stressing the injustice perpetrated on the victims, who had earned “respect” and “empathy,” Gleicke underlined that Wölbern’s study

fnds no historical evidence that the political prisoners were treated less well than other prisoners because of orders that came from the top. This was because the constraints of the GDR’s declining economy took prece- dence over the need to “educate” prisoners. Meeting the needs of the economic plan was the top priority. (Gleicke 2015)

This interpretation of Wölbern’s report failed to mention the possibility of further compensation. While stressing the continued need to conduct further research into forms of injustice in the GDR and calling for empathy with its victims, Gleicke appeared to argue that forced labour, interpreted in the loaded context of Zwangsarbeit, had not been deliberately imposed as a political punishment by the SED regime against those who opposed it. Furthermore, Gleicke was keen “not to raise false hopes” about the possibility of compensation, stressing the existence of the victims’ pension and the need to focus on commemorative activity, for example, through the setting up of a memorial museum in the former prison at Naumburg, where many political prisoners had carried out 206 D. CLARKE forced labour (Scholz 2015). This latter move could be interpreted as a concession to the UOKG, which had already raised the possibility of such a memorial (Wagner 2014). The UOKG remains committed to campaigning for specifc compensation for forced labour in GDR prisons and, in June 2016 under its new chair Dieter Dombrowski, sought to establish its own foundation for the distribution of payments to former prisoners in the hope that frms such as Deutsche Bahn, which had recently produced its own research on the use of political prisoners as labour by the East German railways (Kopper et al. 2016), would contribute (UOKG 2016). However, its original aim of using the revelations about forced labour in the GDR and the involvement of Western frms as leverage for a revision of the existing compensation legislation seems at the time of writing in summer 2018 to have fallen by the wayside. Unlike those lobbying for the victims of the GDR’s children’s homes, the UOKG has ultimately been unable to make use of a media scandal to bring pressure to bear on the political system to revisit the compensation regime. As noted above, the UOKG’s strategy on the emergence of the original allegations against IKEA was to focus in the frst instance on further research in the hope of bringing material to light that would magnify and maintain the scandalization of the issue in the mass media, aiming to work closely with journalists. This focus on historical research as a means to build political pressure echoes the strategy adopted by activists campaigning for the compensation of victims of forced labour under National Socialism. As Henning Borggräfe points out in that case, however, it is in the nature of historical research, as an ongoing process of revision and refnement without a defnite end point, that it can both stimulate and retard such action:

On the one hand, political consequences could be demanded on the basis of historians’ fndings. On the other, the necessity of further research could be emphasized in order to put off political decisions. (2014, p. 165)

A similar dynamic can be observed in the case of the GDR’s former political prisoners. While victims’ organizations could mobilize historical research in their protest communication, politicians such as Gleicke could appear to respond to these demands with calls for further historical research, which in this case only seemed to make the case for compensation less clear as it revealed increasing historical complexity. 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 207

Furthermore, in comparison with the nationwide child abuse scandal that the victims of the GDR’s children’s homes and JWHs could draw on, the public resonance of these issues was never so great that it achieved a threshold of politicization signifcant enough to provoke changes in the compensation legislation. A small number of politicians briefy took up the cause of the UOKG, but ultimately the government sought to contextualize the claims of the victims’ research project by commissioning an independent report that was not interpreted by government representatives as providing suffcient grounds for further action. Whereas the victims of the GDR’s care system had successfully found new contexts in which their suffering could be understood by both the media and the political system, the UOKG had failed to achieve this shift in perceptions in relation to the question of forced labour. Its only limited success was, arguably, to have contributed to the lifting of the taboo on applying the term Zwangsarbeit to the work of GDR political prisoners (Dreier-Horning 2016, p. 23).

Conclusion Although there is little empirical research into the material situation of victims of state socialism in Germany (an exception is Jenaer Zentrum für empirische Sozial- & Kulturforschung 2008), it is clear that the process of providing compensation for these victims has not been concluded to the satisfaction of victims’ organizations. Whereas these organizations have continued to demand an honorary pension paid to all victims (not limited to political prisoners who meet the current criteria) and argue for a clearer distinction between this pension and the welfare system, they are nevertheless heavily reliant on the political system to achieve these goals. While there have been phases when the issue of victim compensation has become more highly politicized, the ability of victims’ organizations to maintain or promote such politicization, as we see in the case of debates over forced labour in the GDR, is relatively limited. Victims’ organizations have recognized the need to mobilize scandalous revelations of suffering in order to attract media attention, but have little control over the wider context in which the political system responds. In the case of victims of the victims of the GDR’s care system, victims’ organizations responded with relative success to a wider media scandal, which they were able to draw upon to reframe the signifcance of their own victimhood. In the case of the UKOG’s response to the revelations 208 D. CLARKE about IKEA’s relationship to forced labour in the GDR, the organization’s attempt to maintain the pressure on the political system via the mass media was ultimately unsuccessful. In the case of the GDR’s political prisoners and others who were persecuted under state socialism, a shift towards a heroic discourse of victimhood, framing themselves as resisters who paved the way for the overthrow of the SED regime, chimed in particular with the anti- leftist rhetoric of the Christian Democrats. This framing of victimhood has persisted and has also now been taken up by political parties across the spectrum. The widespread currency of such a construction of victimhood in the political system, however, means that the need to honour victims has become part of the mainstream consensus and thus inherently less politicizable in the context of inter-party competition. In this context, and especially when the two main political parties have entered into a series of grand coalitions, it is diffcult to fnd political allies who will go beyond expressions of the wish for greater recognition of victims of state socialism and translate this rhetoric into action on improved compensation. As Clemens Vollhans (2016, pp. 154–155) observes, this can lead to the impression that politicians are more interested in the pathos of verbal recognition of the situation of the victims than in investing further resources in their compensation. This chimes in with Luhmann’s (2011, p. 124) observation that the nature of the political system encourages politicians to substitute words for action where political advantage can be achieved by rhetorical means. As the vice chair of the UOKG, Roland Lange (2014, p. 5), summed up the situation in 2014: “We’re good enough for a mention in politicians’ Sunday speeches or for a few friendly words, but not for anything more than that.” As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the literature on transitional justice has proposed a number of social functions for compensation schemes that address the situation of victims of historical injustice. While I have not set out to test these claims for the utility of compensation schemes, whether for the victims themselves or for the wider society, it seems clear from the debates I have examined above that the actual outcomes for victims are highly contingent on the political system. Not only do victims’ organizations have to fnd ways of talking about their members’ situation that speak to the need of relevant parties to politicize their fate, but even where they construct their victimhood in terms that are amendable to that need, this is no guarantee that they will achieve 4 COMPENSATING THE VICTIMS OF STATE SOCIALISM 209 their goals. While victims’ organizations may also seek to scandalize aspects of their experience to speak to the priorities of the mass media, thereby attempting to exert indirect pressure on the political system, this is also by no means a guarantee of success.

Archival Sources BArch Bundesarchiv, Koblenz. = BT-Drs. Drucksache des Deutschen Bundestages. = BT-Pl. Plenarprotokoll des Deutschen Bundestages. = BT-Rechtsausschuss Rechtsausschuss des Deutschen Bundestages. =

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Memorial Museums for the Victims of State Socialism Controversies and Conficts

The Memorial Museum as an Instrument of Transitional Justice and Memory Politics Following the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Germany underwent a reassessment both of its own national history and of the memorial sites designed to convey that history to future generations. On the territory of the former GDR, important memorial sites relating to National Socialism, such as the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, required overhauling to replace exhibitions that had propagated the discourse of antifascism, which had been a key ideological legitimation of the state socialist regime (Reichel 1999, pp. 99–146; Niven 2002, pp. 19–24). In addition, the federal government increasingly took responsibility for part-funding memorial sites relating to the Soviet occupation and the GDR regime, creating new federal competencies in an area of policy that had previously been devolved to the regions (Länder) as a cultural matter. The criteria for receipt of federal funding, which is normally given in conjunction with funding from regional government, are set out in the Federal Memorial Concept (1999 and 2008), which stresses both the national importance of those memorials to be funded, but also the “authenticity of the site” (BT-Drs. 16/9875, p. 3). As Paul Williams (2007) has argued, the “memorial museum,” which both commemorates the victims of oppression and provides historical information to the visitor, has emerged as an important

© The Author(s) 2019 221 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4_5 222 D. CLARKE global cultural phenomenon in the last 30 years or so. In Germany, the term Gedenkstätte, which is often translated as “memorial museum,” is reserved for commemorative museums that are site-specifc, and this specifcity of location and the use of original buildings in constructing the memorial is a key source of potential confict between the various stakeholders. Much academic research on such conficts in the German context has adopted a normative approach, in which the eventual move to a historicizing presentation of sites of persecution is affrmed as appropriate to a democratic culture. This historicizing approach is understood as providing the visitor with a contextualized understanding of the function of the site. It also offers multiple perspectives and presents a range of evidence, downplaying emotional responses and encouraging independent judgement. In relation to the memorial at the former prison at Bautzen in Saxony that was once run by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (MfS), for instance, Marcel Thomas sees it as a positive development that the resolution of the confict between victims’ groups, on the one hand, and museum professionals and historians, on the other, led to an approach that contextualizes the experiences of the former and presents these in a mediated and objective fashion. This strategy, Thomas argues, allows visitors to enter into a dialogue with the site that is personal and individual, rather than simply accepting a ready-made interpretation of the past (Thomas 2014, pp. 701–702, 710). Carola S. Rudnik makes a similar argument in relation to the Bautzen prison site, and in relation to memorial museums that commemorate the victims of the regime of the GDR more widely, arguing that historians should work towards the creation of conditions for a public engagement with such sites in which visitors take responsibility for their own interpretation of history based on the material presented. This involves the communication of multiple viewpoints, not just those of the victims, and excludes any emotionally overwhelming communication of their experience (Rudnik 2011, p. 201). Rudnik’s study, which is the most substantial available in terms of its coverage of the various memorial museums on the subject of communist rule that have developed in Germany since 1989, also reads the confict between victims’ groups and historians at these sites in ideological terms. Where victims have too much of a say in the presentation of memorial museums, she argues, we see the dominance of a conservative view of history in which the National Socialist and state socialist dictatorships are 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 223 presented as equivalent, whereas left-liberal historians tend to argue for a more open, historicized presentation (Rudnik 2011, 2013). While it is undeniable that such political affliations can correlate with preferences in terms of the presentation of memorial museums, Rudnik’s approach frames the confict between victim groups and historians as motivated by “diametrically opposed value systems” (Rudnik 2013, p. 197) and thus in moral terms, even while emphasizing the need for a supposedly objective and apolitical presentation of the past. In contrast to these concerns about the over-dominance of the victim voice in memorial museums, international scholars of transitional justice have emphasized the function of such institutions as a means of symbolic reparation (de Greiff 2007, p. 155) that have the potential to re-write a society’s historical memory (Naidu 2014, pp. 33–34) in favour of the victims of oppression. The nature of this potential in terms of repairing harm to victims remains largely unexplored, however (Hamber et al. 2010, pp. 398–399). In contrast to these competing normative approaches, the analysis in this chapter will follow the systems theory model already elaborated earlier in the study, seeking to understand memorial museum initiatives as “long-term social, economic, cultural, and political processes” (Barsalou and Baxter 2007, p. 3). It will examine the emergence of memorial museum projects in post-unifcation Germany as products of the interaction between the political system, the system of protest (represented by victims’ organizations and their activists), and the system of science (Wissenschaft), represented by the heritage organizations that stake a claim to specialized expertise in proper presentation of histories of oppression in memorial museums. Rather than assuming an ideal outcome of the encounter between these three functional systems at memorial museum sites, this chapter will seek to understand how those interactions have produced a variety of practice in different contexts in terms of the presentation and framing of oppressive histories at different locations. More specifcally, the differing constructions of victimhood and its relevance to post-unifcation German society that emerge from these processes will be highlighted. Given the wide range of memorial museum sites dedicated to the commemoration of state socialist oppression, including former National Socialist concentration camps that were later used as Soviet Special Camps between 1945 and 1950, it will not be possible to provide a comprehensive overview of all of these developments. The purpose of the 224 D. CLARKE analysis will therefore be to establish the nature of the interaction of the three functional systems at exemplary sites, in order to better understand the reasons for particular outcomes, and also to understand how those outcomes imply competing constructions of victimhood and its social signifcance.

Museum Professionals, Historians and System of Science The term “science” in the Anglo-Saxon context is not commonly one that would be applied to the museums and heritage sector. In the specifc context of Luhmann’s analysis of the functional system of science (Wissenschaft), however, the term applies to any feld of academic research, including the humanities and social sciences. As I will show below, the historians and museum professionals who are charged with establishing, presenting and managing memorial museums in Germany frequently appeal to the principle of Wissenschaftlichkeit, claiming for their approaches the status of science; or (in terminology more appropriate in the Anglo-Saxon context) insisting on their academic rigour. Luhmann’s account of the scientifc system stresses that its social function is to produce new knowledge (Luhmann 1992, p. 298). To achieves this, it produces communications in the medium of truth, using the binary code of true/untrue; that is to say that the communications it produces distinguish between what is and what is not the case (p. 285). This social function of the system of science does not imply that other systems do not make claims about the nature of reality. However, Luhmann argues that modern science’s communications about the true and the untrue are produced in a fashion unique to that system, namely through the implementation of programmes of two kinds: theoretical and methodological (pp. 427–429). These programmes should be understood as series of operative pro- cedures that the system follows to produce its communications in the medium of truth (Luhmann 1992, p. 418). Theories are propositions about the nature of reality that claim to be applicable across different cases. In other words, they are generalizations that produce a reduction in complexity (pp. 406–410). Theories alone, however, do not produce a viable communication that distinguishes truth from untruth. This requires the application of methodology (p. 415). Methodology 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 225 provides a series of operative steps that can be pursued to arrive at such a communication (p. 418). The scientifc system as a whole, however, cannot formulate such theories or methodologies, or implement the latter in order to produce scientifc communication. This requires not only a segmentation into different disciplines (p. 451), but also the creation of scientifc organizations (p. 675). These can be universities, but are not restricted to this form (pp. 478–479). Organizations identify projects (presented as problems that require solutions) (p. 427), select and employ researchers according to professional criteria of qualifcation, expertise and reputation (p. 657), and communicate the results of research to their environment (p. 672). The communications produced by scientifc organizations serve the needs of other social systems (Luhmann 1992, p. 637). However, in line with Luhmann’s general theory of the interaction of functionally differentiated systems, this service role of the scientifc system to other systems does not imply that, for example, politicians confronted with scientifc evidence will produce policy that will simply implement the recommen- dations formulated by researchers. Rather, the political system will communicate about such research fndings politically (p. 666). The following discussion of heritage organizations responsible for creating, presenting and managing memorial museums in the German context attributes their communication largely to the scientifc system. They are described here as academic or research organizations, albeit ones with a specifc task. However, as I have already noted in the discussion of victims’ organizations in Chapter 3, organizations can produce communication in more than one system and can potentially move between systems. In one of the case studies that will be discussed in more detail in this chapter, I will examine a memorial museum that is run by a victims’ organization, but which nevertheless negotiates a path between protest communication and scientifc communication. It is more conven- tional in the German context, however, for memorial museums in receipt of ongoing state funding (whether regionally or at the federal level) to select staff on the basis of academic training and relevant expertise, and to develop methodologies for the research and presentation of the sites in question that are grounded in an academic discourse to which historians and museum professionals also contribute in scientifc publications. Employees of these heritage organizations are themselves frequently involved in research projects and publish their results. 226 D. CLARKE

The key point of contention between victims, on the one hand, and historians and museum professionals, on the other, relates to the presentation of the authenticity of the sites that are to become memorial museums. While historians and museum professionals equally value the authenticity of the sites (Haug 2015, pp. 43–44), they also make claims over the appropriate presentation of such authenticity in ways that often differ from the preferences of victims. When formulating approaches to presenting such authenticity, historians and museum professionals who work at memorial museum sites in Germany call upon a set of academically grounded theories and methodologies that have come to prominence since the 1990s. As Patrizia Violi (2012, p. 39) has pointed out, the notion of authenticity in relation to such sites is paradoxical. Despite the inherent “indexicality” of the site itself, in which the materiality of the place acts as a kind of witness to the injustice committed there, it is nevertheless necessary to present the site in such a way that this indexicality can be experienced by visitors. The link between the place and historical events is not naturally given, but has to be constructed by the exhibition that is created there (Assmann 2002, pp. 200–203; Jones 2014, pp. 109–112). The Federal Memorial Concept requires of funded memorial museums that they develop a plan for their site that is adequate to the aims set out by government, which include the need to make the public aware of the importance of human dignity, freedom and the basic principles of Germany’s democratic system (BT-Drs. 16/9875, pp. 1 and 3). However, a close reading of the debates that have taken place among historians and museum professionals since German unifcation reveals the extent to which the search for appropriate forms of presentation has been closely bound up with the imperative to maintain the priority of academically rigorous methodologies. This imperative is also rooted in the history of memorial museums for the victims of National Socialism in West Germany before unifcation. In the years immediately following the Second World War, it was common for sites of National Socialist persecution to be used for other purposes or to be abandoned. It was frequently the activism of victims themselves that led to the setting up of memorials (Haug 2015, pp. 31–32). While these contained exhibitions in some cases, such as at Dachau, they were strongly focused on the suffering of victims and the barbarity of Nazi perpetrators, providing relatively little historical context, which was arguably unnecessary so close to the events themselves 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 227

(Marcuse 2005, pp. 122 and 132). In the 1970s and 1980s, a broadly left-wing culture of civil society engagement emerged in West Germany and West Berlin, which led to an increased involvement of non-victims in commemoration of the Holocaust and the concentration camp system, including but not limited to the rediscovery of previously ignored sites of persecution (Haug 2015, pp. 34–39; Wüstenberg 2017, pp. 76–126). Despite the presence of non-victims as activists, exhibitions were nevertheless developed in close cooperation with victims and foregrounded their testimonies. However, from the late 1980s, many of these new memorial museum practitioners, some of whom became increasingly professionalized, began to debate existing practices in terms of the presentation of sites of persecution through exhibitions (Knigge 2002, p. 384). Following unifcation, historians and museum professionals who either work at memorial museums sites benefting from new forms of state funding, or who take a strong interest in the politics of memory, have increasingly stressed the need for a new approach to sites of National Socialist persecution and to sites of political oppression under state socialism; an approach that moves away from an emphasis on emotional impact through a confrontation with victims’ suffering and towards an emphasis on historical context. This development is understood in terms of a new emphasis on scientifc or academically rigorous approaches in the presentation of memorial museum sites (Pampel 2007, p. 53). A key theme of this new discourse on memorial museums is the alleged shift in perspective brought about by the deaths of many witnesses to the Holocaust. One of the most prominent representatives of this argument has been Volkhard Knigge, the historian in charge of the overhaul of a series of memorials located at Buchenwald. Knigge has written of the disappearance of the victims of National Socialism in terms of the end of their “power of veto” over presentations of concentration camp sites (Knigge 2001). Knigge (2010, p. 10) presents this generational change as an opportunity to overcome “the self-satisfaction of memory, … its lack of connection with historical research and method- ologically sound reasoning, its transformation into unquestioned historical revelation.” The renowned historian of the National Socialist period, Norbert Frei (2002, p. 370), supports Knigge’s assertions, emphasizing that the historiography of Nazi Germany can become a “normal” object of investigation for researchers now that the victims’ “veto” is becoming less and less pronounced: “When the victims are gone, contemporary 228 D. CLARKE history loses those who are both its source and who also exercise that power of veto that distinguishes it from ‘normal’ history.” Equally, Harald Welzer, who has researched extensively on National Socialism and questions of historical memory, suggests that the “disappearance of the witnesses is … an opportunity to fnd new ways of using history and memory” (Giescke and Welzer 2012, p. 75). This discussion of the limitations that the living presence of witnesses places on the historian is also taken up by historian Martin Sabrow. While not directly involved in the management of memorial sites, Sabrow has been a signifcant voice in debates around memory of the GDR, and was appointed, for example, to lead a commission that debated the revised version of the Federal Memorial Concept in 2006 (Sabrow et al. 2007). Sabrow has pleaded strongly for a historicization of the GDR past, in the name of offering a multiperspectival account of that history, including experiences of normality and everyday life alongside the experiences of victims of state oppression. In a contribution to a volume on the role of the historical witness, which he edited with Frei, Sabrow (2012) emphasizes the dangers for the critical interpretation of the past represented by the testimony of those who have directly experienced historical events, which he sees as contributing to the historian’s loss of authority. This discussion has taken place not only in academic publications, but also in articles published in the Memorial Museums Newsletter (Gedenkstättenrundbrief) produced by the Topography of Terror memorial museum in Berlin on behalf of the Forum of Memorial Museums (Gedenkstättenforum), a professional organization set up to exchange ideas among historians engaged at memorial museum sites in Germany. A number of Knigge’s texts have appeared there, and several other authors have used its pages to emphasize a shift away from the design of memorial museums around the emotionally overpowering depiction of the horrors perpetrated on victims, and towards a presentation of history that has much in common with that in other historical museums. As early as 1992, Wulff E. Brebeck (2001), a historian working in a local museum in Paderborn, was advocating in the Gedenkstättenrundbrief for a “conscious musealization” of such sites, in which the element of “accusation” against the perpetrators, which emphasized the suffering of the victims, would be replaced with the use of objects and documents that communicated the historical facts. Such professional discourse refects a perception that, as Detlef Hoffmann (2002) observes, the dividing line 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 229 between museums, with their classical functions of collecting, researching and displaying objects, and that of memorial museums with their primarily commemorative function, is becoming eroded as the reality of National Socialist persecution becomes both more widely accepted and more historically distant as the last living victims pass away. This development is further stressed in a doctoral dissertation written by Thomas Lutz, director of Berlin’s Topography of Terror memorial on the site of the form Gestapo headquarters, and editor of the Gedenkstättenrundbrief. Based on interviews with his colleagues at other memorial museums, Lutz (2009, p. 205) notes that, while there is a tension between the need to honour the suffering of victims and the need to “convey historical knowledge, the interpretation of which is not dictated to the visitor,” there is a strong tendency among museum professionals and historians responsible for memorial museums to avoid direct representations of crimes committed against victims (e.g. through pho- tographic evidence). This preference, Lutz argues, avoids overwhelming the visitor in a way which would not enlighten, but would only provoke emotion (p. 253). Since unifcation, and especially since the turn of the century, we can therefore observe among museum professionals and historians directly or indirectly involved with the creation and management of memorial museums a discourse of professionalization in which emphasis is placed on appropriate techniques of presentation grounded in methodologies that claim the status of academic rigor. Such techniques focus on the explanation of historical context, the presentation of authentic material and documentary evidence underpinned by academically respecta- ble research, and the indirect presentation of human suffering. Driving the emergence of such methodologies is a theoretical programme that hypothesizes a relationship between autonomous visitors, who are allowed to confront the historical evidence provided by professionals and reach their own conclusions, and the social function of the memorial museum. Some of those who have promoted a historicizing approach have justifed their museological preferences in terms of the principles of political education (politische Bildung) in the Federal Republic. Such political education, which in the Anglo-Saxon world we might understand in terms of citizenship education, is carried out by schools, but also by state-funded institutions such as the Federal Centre for Political Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) and the Regional 230 D. CLARKE

Centres for Political Education (Landesstellen für politische Bildung), as well as via a range of cultural institutions that include memorial museums. Defenders of a presentation style for memorial museums that de-emphasizes shock and emotional impact point out that these principles are in line with the dominant consensus in political education, also known as the Beutelsbach Consensus (Haug 2015, pp. 76–79; von Borries 2011, pp. 136–139; Rudnick 2011, pp. 731–741; Sabrow, n.d.; Siebeck 2013). Although the historians and museum professionals who now defend this consensus can be broadly attributed to the left-liberal portion of the political spectrum, it originally emerged in 1976 as a result of debates within the teaching profession about the infuence of young left-wing pedagogues after the collapse of the student movement of the late 1960s. Faced with the potential indoctrination of their children, parents’ groups pressed for a set of guidelines in political education that encouraged young people to weigh up the arguments on all sides, free from any confrontation with emotionally “overwhelming” material (Gagel 1996). For commentators who support the Beutelsbach model today, however, its provisions imply the education of a particular kind of democratic citizen: namely, one who is able to reach independent judgements based on the evidence presented to them. In terms of historical education, this ability to reach critical judgements on the past can also be understood as a kind of training for a critical engagement with one’s contemporary environment (Moller 2011, p. 151), designed to make citizens “capable of an independent critique of today’s Federal Republic, in other words to make them capable of democratic engagement” (Pasternak 2004, p. 184). This theoretical position makes a claim to distinguish between what is and what is not the case (i.e. between truth and untruth), aligning such communication with the system of science: a link is established between principles in the presentation of the past (historicization, interpretative openness, de-emphasizing emotional responses) and expected outcomes (better democratic citizens), staking a claim to methodologies that will demonstrate the truth of this thesis. As Luhmann observes, however, scientifc communication is scientifc communication because it fulfls these systematic criteria, not because the conclusions that it communicates are the truth in any objective sense. Relatively little research has been conducted into the effects of visits to memorial museum sites in Germany (alongside Haug’s work, Pampel 2007 and Thomas 2014 are 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 231 other exceptions), and the claims made for the democratic effects of the presentation of those sites advocated by heritage organizations are not usually backed up with empirical research into visitor reactions. The discourse of historicization around the authenticity of these sites makes a claim to truth within the scientifc system, but that is not the same thing as communicating an objectively verifable truth. Luhmann (1992, p. 677) notes that, while remaining within the scientifc system, research organizations nevertheless produce communications in which the code true/untrue can actually take on a secondary signifcance. What is, in fact, often at stake is the ability of that organization to convincingly produce scientifc communication that persuades another system that it is fulflling the terms of its commitment to sup- ply specifc services. For example, heritage organizations in Germany depend for their existence on providing services to the educational system via school visits or to the political system via their claim to combat the emergence of anti-democratic views that threaten the reproduction of democracy in the Federal Republic. In formulating theories and methodologies about the appropriate presentation of sites, heritage organizations make claims for the legitimacy of their own status within the scientifc system and thus for the legitimacy of the services they provide to other systems. This is not to say that the scientifc system can abandon its theories and methods to produce the output demanded by whoever is providing its resources (p. 638). However, in this particular case, there is no reason why memorial museums must be run by academic historians and museum professionals. Where those heritage organizations are part of the scientifc system, historians’ and museum professionals’ interest in maintaining the authority of their communication is also bound up with their interest in maintaining authority over the sites in question. As Tiffany Jenkins (2011) has observed in another context, debates over appropriate museological methodologies among those responsible for historical institutions of all kinds are simultaneously processes of establishing professional authority. By drawing on a discourse that presents itself as academically rigorous, historians and museum professionals seek to draw a line between those qualifed to make decisions about the presentation of history and those who are not. At the same time, such claims are always vulnerable. Scientifc authority is generated within the scientifc system itself and accrues to individual researchers and research organizations (Luhmann 1992, p. 442). However, that authority can also be bestowed by organizations external to the scientifc system, for 232 D. CLARKE example when organizations of the political system give funding to a research organization or individual researcher in order to carry out particular tasks on its behalf. Such authority is often dependent upon the political system and can be withdrawn or redirected to other organizations along with the funding that it entails (p. 631). If other systems, in this instance the system of protest, launch a challenge to the authority of heritage organizations, they do so from outside the scientifc system. Heritage organizations will in turn seek to maintain their authority over the sites they have been tasked with managing and will assert the scientifc validity of their approach to achieve this. Nevertheless, as will become clear from the frst two case studies dealt with here, in Germany at the current time heritage organizations within the scientifc system have a structural advantage in defending themselves from such challenges, in that national memory policy makes it a pre-requisite for funding that a memorial museum site possesses a “scientifcally and museologically … informed concept” (Bt-Drs. 16/9875). There are clear advantages for the political system in adopting such an approach, which outsources the design and management of memorial museum sites to the scientifc system. In this respect, it is necessary to modify Luhmann’s (2002, p. 215; 2011) critique that the political system increasingly tends to seek legitimacy by making itself responsible for all problems, in what he calls a “universalization” of the political. In fact, by handing over the creation of memorial museum sites to the apparently apolitical academic authority of historians and museum professionals the political system can consign the question of the presentation and management of memorial museum sites beyond day-to-day political contestation. The favoured legal form of many memorial museums sites currently operated in Germany today is that of independent foundations (Stiftungen), which are often incorporated into regional foundations comprising multiple sites, and which are then funded at arm’s length by the regional and federal state. Interference in the running of such independent cultural bodies would necessarily come at a high political price, especially given the post-war Federal Republic’s constitutional emphasis on the autonomy and decentralization of the cultural sphere in light of the history of the National Socialist and state socialist regimes (Burns and van der Will 2003, p. 134). In spite of this in-built tendency to de-politicize the creation of memorial museums, there are particular circumstances in which politicians and 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 233 political parties can fnd it opportune to re-politicize the presentation of history at these sites. This re-politicization can occur in response to initiatives from the system of protest, which at times seek to challenge the authority of heritage organizations within the scientifc system in order to propose a different function for memorial museum sites: namely, to fore- ground their suffering and to underline the need for social recognition of that suffering as a contribution to the defence of Germany’s democracy today. In this way, victims’ organizations not only challenge the scientifc authority of heritage organizations, but also the construction of victimhood that the latter’s theory and methodology imply. Victims’ organizations in the post-unifcation period continue to emphasize a construction of the social and political function of victimhood in terms of a heroic sacrifce that contributed to the eventual overcoming of the state socialist dictatorship in the GDR. The commemoration of that sacrifce, as outlined in Chapter 4, is presented by such organizations as a necessary contribution to the defence of democracy in the present. The academic and museological standards espoused by historians and museum professionals are incompatible with this view, in that they emphasize the autonomy of the citizen as visitor to the memorial museum site, who must come to their own conclusions about the meaning of the past. While by no means ignoring victim experience, historians and museum professionals do not construct victimhood as central to the democratic mission of the memorial museum. Instead, this “pluralist” stance, as Jenny Wüsternberg has termed it, stresses the democratic value of allowing citizens to confront various perspectives on historical sites in order to then reach their own view. However, such pluralism tends (iron- ically) to “espouse rigid frameworks and standards, determining what may be recognized as acceptable commemoration” (Wüsternberg 2017, p. 271). In the following, I will show how this constellation of social systems can play out in the creation of specifc memorial museums. As already noted, this analysis makes no claim to be comprehensive in terms of its coverage of such memorial museums, but rather focuses on three examples dealing with different aspects of the legacy of state socialism in the German context: namely, the Soviet occupation, the division of Germany, and the experience of political imprisonment. The sites chosen also have the advantage of covering the period from the early 1990s until around 2012, in terms of the chronology of the memorial museums’ development. This will allow me to refect upon the effect of shifting 234 D. CLARKE trends in memory politics and German politics more broadly during a period of nearly a quarter of a century. In each of the examples, I will pay attention to the interaction of the political system, the system of protest and the system of science, identifying the factors that have led to differing presentations of victimhood and its historical signifcance at the sites in question.

Commemorating the Victims of the Berlin Wall The example of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum (Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer) in the Bernauer Straße in Berlin is an especially fruitful case for studying the complexities of these systemic interactions, given the challenges to professional museology at this site that were mounted by victim activists and others who claimed to represent the victims’ cause. A memorial was originally commissioned to be built here by the Berlin Senate on August 13, 1991 (the thirtieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s construction) and fnally opened in its frst incarnation on August 13, 1998. In the early stages of its development, the project was dominated by museum professionals from existing Berlin institutions and two church groups that had a direct material stake in the site. However, this early phase failed to produce a clear narrative about the kind of history that the site was supposed to present and the means by which it should achieve this. This uncertainty provided an opportunity for victims’ groups to stage a protest against the city’s failure to properly commemorate the suffering of those who had been killed and wounded at the Berlin Wall, a topic they were able to mobilize as symptomatic of a wider lack of recognition for victims of state socialism in contemporary Germany. The pressure created by the victims in the public sphere led to a new concept for the presentation of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum site, which nevertheless also re-established the museological authority of the museum professionals. The political constellation in Berlin during this period meant that the strategies adopted by the professionals running the Memorial Museum, as is was known from 2008, were able to gain the backing of the politicians charged with addressing the issue of the commemoration of the Wall, whose priorities were also addressed by the Memorial Museum’s overall approach to commemoration. The frst impulse of Berliners and of the Berlin city authorities following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 was to remove this monstrous structure as quickly as possible (Harrison 2011, p. 79). 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 235

However, a section of Wall that remained standing in the Bernauer Straße was fenced off for preservation in the spring of 1990 by representatives of the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum, or DHM) and Peter Möbius of the GDR’s Museum for Germany History (Museum für Deutsche Geschichte), supported by Manfred Fischer, the pastor of the Reconciliation Parish (Versöhnungsgemeinde) in the district of Wedding, whose neo-Gothic parish church had stood in the “death strip” beyond the Wall until it was blown up by GDR border forces in 1985 (Knischewski and Splitter 2006, p. 282; Camphausen and Fischer 2011, p. 349). Of many possible sites for a memorial to the Wall’s victims, the site at Bernauer Straße was particularly rich in associations. In 1961, when the frst incarnation of the Wall was constructed overnight, the border between East and West Berlin ran along the front of a row of residential buildings on Bernauer Straße and some individuals had been able to make dramatic escapes by jumping out of their windows from the East into the West. Shortly after construction of the Wall commenced, Bernauer Straße was also the site of the famous escape by East German solider Konrad Schumann, a nineteen-year-old who was photographed jumping over barbed wire into West Berlin in what became an iconic image of the Cold War. In the months after the border was closed, the basements of buildings on the street were also used by groups digging escape tunnels to help East Berliners escape to the West. On August 13, 1990, the anniversary of the Wall’s construction, Fischer and representatives of the museums announced their intention to set up a memorial aimed explicitly at commemorating those who died at the Wall. Although the press release that launched this initiative focused primarily on the need for a site of remembrance, the document also talks of the diffculty of presenting “just ‘pieces of the Wall’ sprayed with graffti [that] do not do justice to the historical dimension” (Versöhnungsgemeinde 1990). At the start of the memorialization process, there was therefore already a perception among the initiators that, even if commemoration of the victims was the central function of the new memorial, such commemoration needed to be accompanied by some broader contextualization of that experience. It took another year for the Berlin Senate to approve the construction of a memorial on the site (Rudnick 2011, p. 572) and until 1994 for a competition to be launched to fnd a design. This delay was chiefy the result of a dispute between the group initiating the memorial and 236 D. CLARKE the head of another adjoining parish, the Sophiengemeinde. While the Reconciliation Parish had lost its church to demolition, its neighbouring parish had lost a signifcant area of its graveyard to the border fortifcations, which it clearly hoped to retrieve (p. 582). Pastor Hildebrandt of the Sophiengemeinde claimed that the portion of land his parish had lost had contained mass graves of those killed in the city during the fnal stages of the Second World War. Once the graveyard had been returned to the property of his church in 1993 (Camphausen and Fischer 2011, p. 363), he was only willing to let the land, along which a sizeable section of Wall ran, be used as part of the memorial if these victims were also incorporated into the commemoration. When compromise was fnally reached, so that the competition could be announced, the agreement between the Berlin Senate and the Sophiengemeinde stated not only that the victims of the Second World War should be included in the project, but also that the Senate should intervene on behalf of the parish to return the rest of their cemetery to them so that it could continue to be used for its original purpose, the assumption being that human remains were still present on the site (Deutsches Historisches Museum 1994a). According to the agreement, any development of the land would have to be compatible with this use. This compromise created a good deal of uncertainty about how these two groups of victims could be brought together and commemorated adequately. The guidelines for the design competition pointed to the

necessarily complicated dialectic between this place as a site of the dead (including the victims of the Second World War) and as a site of commemoration for the victims of German division (and not only those who were killed). (Deutsches Historisches Museum 1994a, p. 27)

The winning design would therefore have to develop a conceptualization that could make the traces of both the Second World War and the division of Germany legible. Speaking to the weekly magazine Focus, DHM director Christoph Stölzel stated that this compromise had only been reached by the Senate agreeing not to reconstruct the border regime to demonstrate its full horror, and by giving up on the idea of a documentary element to the memorial (Plewnia 1994). The entries to the design competition, which are held in the archive of the Memorial Museum’s Documentation Centre, show how diffcult it was to bring these disparate elements together. Some proposals sought 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 237 to create a single, fowing space, connecting the remaining section of double Wall with the cemetery, whereas others used gravestone-like elements to commemorate the dead of the Wall, making explicit links with the tradition of the military cemetery. These designs tended, as was perhaps implicit in the brief for the competition, to erase the differences between the casualties of the Second World War and the victims of the Berlin Wall. However, many other designs chose to construct symbols of division and its overcoming, using bridges, ramps, jagged underground passages or other elements designed to suggest enclosure (Deutsches Historisches Museum 1994b). Rather than subsuming the dead of the Wall and German division under the symbolism of war graves, such approaches chose to downplay the history of the war dead and concentrate on the division of the city and its victims. Clearly, it was diffcult to do justice to both groups of the dead in the differentiated and complex way that the design brief had suggested, as indeed the assessors of the 259 entries to the competition recognized (Deutsches Historisches Museum 1994b, p. 8). The eventual choice of the prize jury was a design by the architects Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff, which was in a number of respects a declaration of defeat with regard to the original design brief. As no designer had managed to fnd a convincing way of linking both sets of victims, the Kohlhoff design was chosen as a compromise, in that it would only incorporate the 70-metre stretch of double Wall not situated on the land of the former cemetery belonging to the Sophiengemeinde. This effectively meant that only the Wall victims would be commemorated, but only by choosing not to address the other, larger portion of the remaining Wall. The original plan was to simply remove this longer section, although this idea was later dropped, not least because Pastor Hildebrandt’s claims about the presence of human remains and mass war graves on the cemetery’s portion of the border strip eventually proved to be unfounded. What human remains had been buried there had, in fact, been removed by the GDR authorities (Knischewski and Splitter 2006, p. 284). Nevertheless, for funding reasons, the limited memorial was built as planned. The Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff design, which was completed in 1998, consists of two steel walls that close off the 70-metre section of double Wall outside the former cemetery at either end, thereby boxing in a section of the former border area consisting largely of raked sand. On the memorial’s completion, this meant that it was now impossible to see into 238 D. CLARKE the “death strip,” except by peeking through the horizontal gaps in the “hinterland wall,” which is constructed of prefabricated concrete slabs. To this day, visitors frequently leave fowers in these gaps; and looking through them, even after the construction of a viewing platform in the adjacent visitors’ centre in 2003, one can experience something of the atmosphere of the border area as a forbidden zone (Nooke 2005, p. 48), even if not on the enormous scale of the original. The ultimately artistic intervention of the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff design suggests something of the scale of the border fortifcations by refecting the preserved Wall segments in the mirror-like internal sur- faces of its two end slabs (Trotnow 2005, p. 162). The outside of these slabs has a different surface, made of Cor-Ten or weathering steel, which develops a layer of rust. At one end, this surface carries an inscription describing the function of the memorial. In addition, the surface of the west-facing “foreland wall,” which had been damaged by souvenir hunt- ers, was smoothed over and stabilized (Feversham and Schmidt 1999, p. 164). In the run-up to the opening of the memorial, victims’ organizations began to focus their attention on Bernauer Straße. First, the Circle of Victims and Surviving Relatives of Victims of the Berlin Wall and the Inner-German Border (Kreis der Opfer und Hinterbliebenen der Opfer der Berliner Mauer und der innerdeutschen Grenze) objected to the proposed dedication of the memorial, which read “To the Victims of the Second World War and the Division of Germany,” arguing that this tended to obscure the political and moral responsibility of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime for the building of the Wall and for the border’s casualties by presenting the border as an outcome of wider historical forces (Eich 1998a; Bernitt 1998; Feversham and Schmidt 1999, pp. 178–180). Second, the Circle insisted that the border fortifcations should be reconstructed as far as possible to give visitors a fuller impression of the terror they must have inspired (Rudnick 2011, p. 616). Although the victims were successful in having the inscription changed before the memorial offcially opened to include a reference to “the victims of communist despotism” (kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft) at the expense of the reference to the Second World War, they nevertheless remained dissatisfed with Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff’s artistic intervention. In a speech at the inauguration of the memorial on August 13, 1998, Circle spokesman Klaus-Peter Eich expanded on his previous criticism, claiming that the new memorial 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 239 failed to convey the full horror of the former border fortifcations or to make explicit the link between that horror and communist ideology (Eich 1998b, p. 8). From Eich’s perspective, the abstract memorial’s failure to provide details of the suffering of individual victims of the Berlin Wall lessened its impact on the younger generation, who needed to be warned of the dangers of communism, violence and injustice (Eich 1998b, pp. 8–9). Rudnick (2011, p. 616) understands these criticisms in terms of an anti-communist agenda on the part of the Circle. While it is undeniable that these victims did see their own suffering as a warning against the dangers of communist ideology, it is perhaps too easy to dismiss their interventions because they openly sought to co-opt the Memorial Museum in Bernauer Straße for this cause. Leaving aside the specifc ideology pursued by groups like the Circle, their protest communication conforms to that model already identifed in this study in relation to other victims’ organizations and in the case of other forms of victim reparation. As a protest organization, the Circle communicated decisions about its approval or disapproval of the communications of other systems on the basis of whether those communications provided adequate recognition to its own members. As with other victims’ organizations communicating in the medium of protest, adequate recognition was understood in terms of one’s own suffering taking on a central function for the rest of society, that is to say as a point of moral orientation that would underpin the values by which that society would live. The Circle’s protest communication thereby also constructed the social role of the victim as essential to the defence of the current social and political order against the threat of communist ideology. Apart from the concerns of the victims, criticisms of the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial were expressed by politicians and in the public sphere more generally even before its construction. In the summer of 1997, Pastor Manfred Fischer had already proposed that the soon to-be- completed Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial should be supplemented with a documentation centre, for which he offered a building belonging to his parish, located opposite the site of the new memorial. He also suggested that a new Chapel of Reconciliation should be built on the site of the parish’s demolished church. In the surrounding space, he proposed that the remaining material traces of the border system should be preserved. These plans were swiftly agreed by the Berlin Senate (Camphausen and Fischer 2011, p. 368) and a new private organization, 240 D. CLARKE the Berlin Wall Association (Verein Berliner Mauer), was called into being to organize the presentation of the space, including an exhibition in the proposed Documentation Centre (Camphausen 1999b). This scheme amounted to a shift away from the creation of an artistic memorial at the site and towards the design of a memorial museum in the full sense of the term, with the dual function of commemorating the dead and informing the public about the history associated with the Wall, even though it was not until 2008 that it was fnally named as a memorial museum (Gedenkstätte) with its own publicly funded foundation. Until 1997, the struggle over the use of the site at Bernauer Straße had centred on whether the Wall should be preserved or not, how much of it should be incorporated into any memorial, and to whom such a memorial should be dedicated. The relative weakening of the infuence of the Sophiengemeinde when it was discovered that there were in fact no mass graves on the Bernauer Straß site, and the willingness of the Reconciliation Parish to provide space for a memorial museum of greater scope meant that historian Gabriele Camphausen, who headed the new Association from 1998 until 2009, could assemble a team of historians and museum professionals to develop a concept for commemorating the Berlin Wall as a historical phenomenon. Camphausen had held positions at other memorial museums in Berlin and encouraged an approach very much in line with the mainstream of museological practice among professionals engaged in such work in Germany. In planning the new site, she stressed the failure of the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial to satisfy the needs of the visitor for contextual information about the history of the Wall and German division (Camphausen 1999a, p. 22). However, she also strongly implied that the expanded memorial museum ensemble would not be able to address all of the priorities of victims’ organizations, who had a particular vision of the memory that should be associated with the site:

Just as the spectrum of experiences and memories is broad, in both form and content, so the expectations of memory work are multiple and con- tradictory. There is no single formula for true and correct memory. (pp. 21–22)

This insistence on the plurality of perspectives on the past is further borne out in the strategy that Camphausen and her team developed for the expanded site. Describing their guiding principles in retrospect, 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 241

Camphausen and Fischer (who also continued to play an important role in the development of the memorial museum) have stressed their desire to situate the victims’ experiences as one element within a space characterized by “an incredible density of authentic evidence” (Camphausen and Fischer 2011, p. 375). Alongside a preference for the preservation of the fragmentary material traces of the site’s past (p. 376), they have also stressed that they sought to avoid any emotionally overwhelming content, preferring instead to confront visitors with “factual information,” while encouraging them to investigate the material remains of the past and arrive at their own judgements (p. 372; cf. Rudnik 2011, p. 617). This stance was refected, for example, in the format of the eventual Documentation Centre, which presented visitors with a range of sources, including photographs, recordings of witness testimony and facsimiles of original documents, “trusting the visitors to draw their own conclusions” (Kniechewski and Splitter 2006, p. 290). The information provided covered a range of topics related to the Wall, in acknowledgement of what members of the team considered to be the multiple pasts associated with the site, including “the unjust communist system in the GDR, … the border between the two systems and the two blocs of power in the Cold War,” as well as the Wall’s symbolic status as “the landmark for the struggle against the loss of freedom and for democracy” (Nooke 2005, p. 47). The team of historians and museum professionals who developed the overall approach to the expanded memorial museum, alongside Pastor Fischer, did so in a context defned by a political system that was divided in terms of its communication about the signifcance of the project. One of the major contexts for the development of Wall commemoration and preservation in Berlin was the interest of tourists in seeing a structure that had become synonymous with the city (Harrison 2011, pp. 83–84). Eberhard Diepgen, Christian Democrat (CDU) mayor of Berlin from 1991 to 2001, was chiefy concerned that the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial had not provided Berlin with a badly needed tourist attraction (Uphoff 1999). The discussion as reported in the press demonstrates the competing motivations at work here. Firstly, politicians, including some from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), pointed out that the monument at Bernauer Straße was simply not horrifc enough to evoke the reality of the Wall, yet claims about the edifying effects of confrontation with such horror were mixed with calculations about the expectations of tourists, who presumably also expected to see the Wall as it had been before November 1989 (Uphoff 1999; Anon 1999a; Schümann 1999). 242 D. CLARKE

Ultimately, the decision was taken to retain the city’s focus on developing the site at the Bernauer Straße, which had already received federal funding, and was therefore more likely to do so in the future: an important consideration for the cash-strapped Berlin Senate. Once the federal government had paid the 2.2 million Deutschmark necessary to construct the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff monument, the planned documentation centre was funded by the city with a grant of 500,000 Deutschmark in July of 1999 (Anon 1999b). Nevertheless, Berlin’s ruling politicians, a “grand coalition” of CDU and SPD at the time, were soon accused of paying only “lip service” to the Memorial Museum and to Wall commemoration more generally (Lojewski 1999). Although the Documentation Centre was fnally able to open in November of 1999, it was threatened with closure almost as soon as it was inaugurated due to lack of on-going funding (Soldt 1999). Despite this wavering commitment to the Memorial Museum by CDU-led administration in Berlin throughout the 1990s, the continuing debates around the commemoration of the Wall took on a new dimension for the political system once the Christian Democrats were in opposition at the federal level. Following Gerhard Schröder’s election as Federal Chancellor in 1998, the SPD in coalition with the Greens in the Federal Parliament had pushed forward with the project for a Holocaust memorial in the centre of Berlin that had been under discussion since the late 1980s. While Mayor of Berlin, Diepgen had been a major fgure in the conservative resistance to the project (Niven 2002, p. 196). After the years of Chancellor Kohl’s normalizing policy in relation to the National Socialist past, which had sought to promote a generalized category of victimhood that could include Jewish victims, non-Jewish Germans and later victims of state socialism, the Holocaust memorial project could be seen as a restatement of the centrality of National Socialism in German public memory, rather than placing that memory on an equal foot- ing with the “second German dictatorship” of the GDR (Niven 2002, pp. 197–200). It was under these conditions that national CDU politicians (including former GDR opposition activists) began to stress the importance of remembering the crimes of the GDR regime and the SED as a counterweight to an exclusive focus on memorialization of the Holocaust. This trend became particularly marked in Berlin politics after the CDU was ousted from the Senate coalition and the SPD began to govern with the post-communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 243

2001. The CDU was able to make much capital out of the PDS’s subsequent expression of regret for the deaths at the Wall, which, although not technically an apology, had become politically necessary if they were to govern in the city. In pursuit of political respectability, the PDS was forced to break with its earlier, more ambivalent stance towards the phenomenon of the Wall, in which the party had even sought to relativize the focus on the deaths of would-be escapees by emphasizing that GDR border guards had also allegedly died defending the border against Western aggression (DPA/ADN 1995). By proposing such pro-GDR commemoration, the PDS undoubtedly sought to speak to its own internal constituencies, including groups of former soldier and border guards who sought to defend their alleged sacrifces in defence of state socialism (Sälter et al. 2016, p. 12). Following the establishment of the SPD-PDS coalition, and to mark the anniversary of the building of the Wall, the CDU organized its own commemorative event at Checkpoint Charlie (Sturm 2001), distanc- ing itself from the offcial ceremony at the Bernauer Straße memorial, where the PDS would be in attendance. A number of victims’ organizations also chose to stay away from the Bernauer Straße event, although some protested at the offcial commemoration and even attacked a wreath laid by the PDS (Haselberger 2001). Klaus Wowereit, the new SPD mayor, and SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder were “booed, jeered and verbally attacked” for their cooperation with the PDS as they attended the Bernauer Straße commemoration (Knischewski and Splitter 2006, p. 292). It is from this point that we can date a convergence of the interests of the CDU in Berlin and the victims’ organizations who had been unable to make signifcant impact on the commemoration of the Berlin Wall in the city thus far. The absence of plans for further developments at the Bernauer Straße once the Documentation Centre and Reconciliation Chapel were in place allowed the CDU to accuse the so-called red-red coalition of indifference to this issue, while necessarily ignoring the Christian Democrats’ own wavering commitment to the project while in power. The SPD-PDS coalition clearly felt that it had to respond to these attacks. The newly appointed Senator for Culture, Thomas Flierl (PDS), announced in January 2002, for instance, that he would formulate a plan to improve Wall commemoration in Berlin (Anon 2002a). The future of the Memorial Museum was made somewhat more secure when the federal government took the decision to use some of 244 D. CLARKE the money realized through the sale of land on which the Wall had once stood to pay for an observation platform as part of the Documentation Centre, allowing visitors to look down into the portion of “death strip” contained in the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial. These funds also secured the operation of the Documentation Centre for a further fve years (Anon 2002b). Nevertheless, despite growing numbers of visitors at the memorial site and the gradual expansion of its offer, a feeling remained that the memorial, which was off the beaten tourist track, simply failed to appeal to a wide audience (Gessler 2004). In this respect, the memorial in Bernauer Straße appeared to fare poorly in comparison with the House at Checkpoint Charlie, a privately run, unconventional, but highly popular museum dedicated to documenting escapes over the Wall and anti-communist resistance. This institution had been set up soon after the building of the Wall next to the most famous Allied checkpoint in the city and had been run since its inception by its founder Rainer Hildebrandt, an anti-communist human rights campaigner, in the name of the Working Group August 13. After his death in 2004, the museum had been run by his wife, Alexandra Hildebrandt, who embarked on a strategy of provocation against what she regarded as the unsatisfactory state of Wall commemoration in the city. She acted independently of and in opposition to the left-wing Senate, which she claimed was unwilling to address the crimes of the East German regime on account of its own links to the GDR’s former ruling party. In October 2004, Hildebrandt’s museum began the construction of a replica section of the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, which was to form the backdrop of a memorial to those killed at the Berlin Wall. This “Freedom Memorial,” as Hildebrandt titled her “temporary art installation” (Fülling 2004), immediately became the object of much controversy, attracting signifcant media attention and thereby putting the Senate under pressure over its own plans for commemoration of the Wall. Concerns were voiced across the political spectrum: for instance, former GDR civil rights campaigner Wolfgang Templin expressed his discom- fort at what appeared to be a commercial venture designed to increase the number of paying customers in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (Templin 2004). However, as the controversy wore on, victims’ groups threw their support behind Hildebrandt, and the battle lines were drawn between those advocates of an anti-communist discourse on GDR memory that placed the suffering of the victims of state socialism at the heart 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 245 of commemoration (the CDU, victims’ groups, conservative historians) and the left-wing majority in the Senate, which was concerned primarily to wrest the commemorative agenda back from Hildebrandt. Since Hildebrandt’s memorial was taken apart under court order (when her lease on the land she was using had expired), it has often been observed that she was responsible for a renewal of the debate around approaches to commemorating the Berlin Wall (e.g. Schmidt 1999, p. 183; Harrison 2011, p. 85; Rudnik 2011, p. 632). There is no doubt that the popularity and impact of the installation caused a re-think in the Berlin Senate’s attitude to Wall commemoration, but I will argue that the eventual result did not ultimately echo the perspective of Hildebrandt’s memorial and, above all, did not take up its discourse on victimhood. One of the chief criticisms of the Checkpoint Charlie memorial was its inauthenticity. It comprised 1065 crosses set in a chained-off feld of white gravel, reminiscent of a cemetery, and therefore tended to suggest that many people had died at that spot. The area around Checkpoint Charlie was in fact best known as a symbol of the confrontation between the two Cold War blocs: particularly for the stand-off between Soviet and US tanks at the Checkpoint in October 1961, when the US sought to maintain unhindered access to East Berlin following the building of the Berlin Wall in August of the same year (Taylor 2007, pp. 412–429). Having said this, one of the most famous Wall victims, Peter Fechter had died in nearby Zimmerstraße, where he had bled to death in the death strip in full view of the world’s press in 1962 (Taylor 2007, pp. 474–478). One of the most prominent early memorials for victims of the Wall had been a wooden cross, which stood on the Western side of the Wall near where Fechter died until the 1990s, before being replaced by a pillar memorial on the exact spot where he had lain dying (Bakirdögen 1999). Hildebrandt’s memorial sought to connect with this tradition by adopting a motto (“They only wanted freedom!”) derived from the Fechter memorial’s inscription (“He only wanted freedom…”) (Kaminski and Gleinig 2016, p. 64). Nevertheless, Checkpoint Charlie was not an area that had seen the high number of casualties suggested by Hildebrandt’s installation. A second point of inauthenticity was the reconstructed Wall itself, which was produced in white to match the gravel on the foor and posi- tioned incorrectly (Gessler 2004). This apparent reconstruction did not present the Wall as it would have looked before November 1989, 246 D. CLARKE which was clearly a problem in terms of visitor understanding: one might imagine, like one young tourist, that the white gravel allowed border guards to spot would-be escapees more easily, for example (Czaja 2004). A further area of contention, which was more ideological than practical, was Hildebrandt’s comparison of her memorial to the recently-opened Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, or Holocaust Memorial, only a short work away (Freiwald and Schulz 2004), implying an equiva- lence between the two groups of victims. Despite these concerns, the “Freedom Memorial” seems to have been popular both with Berliners and with tourists: as one journalist commented, Hildebrandt’s activities were “giving people what they want” (Gessler 2004). A closer examination of the form of the “Freedom Memorial” reveals further problematic aspects, however. Anna Saunders has argued, for example, that this representation of mass victimhood

presented a polarized view of GDR society as one divided between victims and perpetrators – far from the more nuanced fndings of recent historical research which recognizes a more complex and fuid relationship between the party and the masses. (Saunders 2009, p. 19)

This is fair comment, given the Checkpoint Charlie museum’s general approach of reducing the history of the GDR to one of oppression. However, the cross motif employed here clearly also suggested a specifc historical narrative. The slogan that Hildebrandt chose for her monument (“They only wanted freedom!”) imposed a single motivation on all of those who met their deaths at the Wall. They wanted, it was implied, something that all Germans now have. This interpretation of the deaths at the Wall was complicated, however, by the Christian symbolism of the cross, which invoked associations of martyrdom and death in the name of a higher cause. As scholars of the history of martyrdom in Christian and other cultures have observed, martyrdom has no single, fxed meaning, but rather provides a symbolic resource that can be reconfgured to serve different purposes in the present (Castelli 2004; Mitchell 2012). In the “Freedom Memorial,” the use of the cross arguably took up elements of the secularized culture of national martyrdom, in which the traumatic victims of the nation’s past are transfgured either into martyrs for the moment of national renewal yet to come; or into harbingers of the victorious contemporary nation, who are honoured for their contribution to that 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 247 victory, but whose memory must also be kept alive in order to defend the nation’s future. With the emergence of modern forms of national identity, such imagery tends to fuse together the fgure of the martyr and the role of the hero (Soledad 2013, p. 697). In this way, the victim of traumatic suffering (and, in this case, death) can be converted into a heroic embodiment of the community (Giesen 2004, p. 23); perhaps even more so in the German-speaking context, where the word Opfer denotes both a victim and a (self-)sacrifce. Not only did the “Freedom Memorial” reduce the motivations of those killed to a single purpose (freedom), it also tended to suggest that their search for freedom was not merely individual, but rather representative of the GDR population’s general desire for freedom, a desire only fulflled by the fall of the Wall and German unifcation. In this respect, the “Freedom Memorial” harked back to pre-unifcation West German traditions of commemoration for those who died at the border, which presented them as “heroes of freedom” (Ullrich 2006, p. 89), often employing Christian symbols such as the cross. The “Freedom Memorial” therefore signalled a reactivation of traditional West German narratives of victimhood in relation to the border, which had become less prominent during the period of détente in the 1970s and 1980s (p. 162). The suffering of the victims of the GDR regime was co-opted into a national narrative in which fnal reunifcation represented the overcoming of Germany’s past, while at the same time the memory of that suffering had to be kept alive to guard against those who challenge the status quo of the Federal Republic from the left. Furthermore, the framing of the “Freedom Memorial” chimed in with the general heroicization of the victims of state socialism that also expressed itself in the post-unifcation compensation debates discussed in Chapter 4, particularly following the advent of the national red–green coalition of 1998. This congruence between the discourse of martyrdom expressed in Hildebrandt’s memorial and the victims’ organizations’ construction of their members’ victimhood in terms of a contribution to the overcoming of German division in this period can be seen in the engagement of victims in attempts to defend and preserve the memorial at Checkpoint Charlie. Although victims’ organizations do not appear to have been specifcally consulted by Hildebrandt when she was designing her installation, they nevertheless strongly supported her project. Activists within organizations like the Union of the Victims’ Organizations of Communist Dictatorship (UOKG) (UOKG 2005) 248 D. CLARKE and the Association of the Victims of Stalinism (VOS) tended to see the Senate’s failure to save Hildebrandt’s memorial at Checkpoint Charlie from demolition as evidence of the infuence of the PDS in the city’s coalition government (Thonn 2005a), resulting in a tendency to cosy up to alleged “well-heeled lefties” in the capital who supported it (VOS 2004; Pohl 2005). Its removal was therefore framed as a left-wing conspiracy to make the GDR seem harmless (Pohl 2005; Thonn 2005b). Some even chained themselves to the crosses in an attempt to prevent the installation from being dismantled. Taking up Hildebrandt’s cause, victim activists tended to present the Wall dead as representatives of all victims of state socialism and, indeed, all victims of communist oppression both within and beyond Germany (Pohl 2005). For example, despite their being no direct connection between the memorial and their own fate, the Waldheim Comrades Circle (Waldheim Kameradschaftskreis), which represents individuals imprisoned under the Soviet occupation, expressed its support for the commemoration of the Wall dead as representative of victims of communism per se, not specifcally as victims of the border regime (Prieß 2004). Activists resisted the criticism that the “Freedom Memorial” was not viable on account of its implicit analogy to the nearby Holocaust Memorial (Pohl 2005; Thonn 2005a, b) and sought to present their own suffering as part of the heritage of resistance to state socialism:

We respect the [victims of the, DC] National Socialist Holocaust and the new memorial. But we also demand equal respect for the suffering, the martyrdom and the resistance [of the victims of state socialism, DC]. From Stalin’s secret camps, via the people’s uprising [of June 17, 1953, DC], the exodus from the GDR, the resistance to the SED’s rule that led to the great citizens’ movement [of 1989, DC], faced with which the communist functionaries fnally had to surrender – these forty years of communist rule in the Eastern Bloc are reason enough that we should denounce them publicly and give their victims, the living and the dead, fnal satisfaction. (Thonn 2004)

While certainly anti-communist in nature, this communication in response to Hildebrandt’s memorial and its removal was protest communication of the kind that has already been identifed as typical for this kind of organization. The decision to remove the memorial and the political establishment’s apparent ambivalence towards it were taken as 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 249 evidence of the marginality of the victims’ sacrifce to the national memory culture, and therefore as a sign of victims’ lack of recognition in the contemporary Federal Republic. The victims’ organizations proposed an alternative construction of victimhood that would place their suffering at the heart of the nation’s values and its understanding of history, within a heroic narrative in which their victimhood was constructed as a contribution to fnal national liberation. The response of the Berlin Senate, and of Culture Senator Thomas Flierl in particular, was to formulate a general plan for commemorating the Berlin Wall, informed by a series of public hearings. The “Freedom Memorial” had effectively re-politicized the issue of Wall commemoration, creating a wave of media interest and allowing the CDU to make further political capital from the red-red coalition’s alleged inaction. The Senate’s plan, however, did not include the preservation of the “Freedom Memorial,” but attempted instead to secure the place of the memorial at Bernauer Straße as the central institution of Wall commemoration in the city. What is most striking about Flierl’s plan, which was subsequently adopted by the Senate, is its attempt to create a network of different sites, organized around the central point of the Bernauer Straße memorial, which potentially add a great deal of complexity to perceptions of the Wall, while also undermining the straightforward martyrological narrative contained in Hildebrandt’s memorial and supported by victims’ organizations. The Bernauer Straße memorial was to remain the central site for commemoration of the dead (Flierl 2006, p. 17), but was to be signifcantly expanded to present a variety of different stories associated with the site:

The history of this street refects the consequences of the building of the Wall in an exemplary way: the destruction of the urban space and peoples’ ways of life, the dividing of families and friends. It documents the success and failure of attempts to escape the dictatorship or to help others escape; it stands for the victims of the border regime and the dead of the Berlin Wall. (p. 18)

The planned expansion of the Memorial Museum therefore clearly marked a move from the single linear narrative implied by Hildebrandt’s installation and the discourse promoted by victim activists, stressing the plurality of experiences that could be associated with the Wall. Although commemoration remained a central aspect, the projected 250 D. CLARKE expansion nevertheless went beyond commemoration of one group of victims to include wider sections of the population who lived with and interacted with the border regime. Furthermore, as the plan was to also use Bernauer Straße as a central information point on other sites related to the Wall around the city, it was clearly conceived as a starting point for exploration, not as offering a ready-made interpretation of history. While the plan responded to the “Freedom Memorial” affair by re-emphasizing victims to a certain extent, it did so in a way that indi- vidualized the fates of those who died at the Wall. Although the detailing of individual stories could be regarded as a means of creating empathy (Flierl 2006, p. 19), in the context of debate surrounding the “Freedom Memorial,” which had named names and shown photographs of individual victims without telling their stories, this move can also be read as an attempt to work against any unifying martyrological narrative implied in Hildebrandt’s installation and supported by victims’ organizations. Not only were the numbers of victims proposed by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum somewhat infated, including suicides and unidentifed corpses found foating in the river in the border zone for example (Hertle and Sälter 2006, p. 673), they also did not seek to differentiate why and how individuals died. As part of the consultation process for the expanded memorial concept, the Senate funded research into the number of deaths at the Berlin Wall and into the background of each case. The results of this research, which identifed 136 confrmed deaths at the Wall between 1961 and 1989, were to form the basis of future commemoration at the Wall, with the individual biographies featuring in short daily services in the Chapel of Reconciliation, for example. The biographies of the individual victims were published in a commemorative volume (Zentrum für zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam 2009) and made available on a website (http:// www.chronik-der-mauer.de/todesopfer/). The texts dedicated to each victim, accompanied by photographs where available, not only give details of their death, but also of the lives of the victims and their motivations for dissatisfaction with the GDR regime. It is striking, however, that biographies are included that do not ft into a straightforwardly oppositional frame, as in the case of 69-year-old Johannes Sprenger, who entered the border zone in 1974 after a night spent drinking in East Berlin’s bars following his diagnosis with a fatal medical condition. While the border guards who shot Sprenger on the 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 251 death strip are not excused, the mysterious circumstances of his appearance at the Wall remain unexplained. Was it a suicide, an irrational act brought on by alcohol and desperation, or a genuine attempt to fee to the West? It is impossible to know for certain, but the inclusion of cases like these works against the motto of the Hildebrandt monument that all of those killed at the Wall “only wanted freedom.” This research was strongly criticized by conservative historians such as Hubertus Knabe, director of the Stasi remand prison memorial museum at Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, who claimed that it was an attempt to make the Wall seem “only half as bad” (ddp/jW 2006). Indeed, in the wake of the debate about the “Freedom Memorial,” conservative anti-communists sought to seize the initiative for their own historical agenda, holding discussions in the House at Checkpoint Charlie based on a set of alternative proposals put forward by Knabe and historian Manfred Wilke (Schoelkopf 2004). What differentiated these ideas was their inclusion of the Wall in a GDR memory concept for the city of Berlin that made explicit links with other forms of repression in East Germany. The document also drew parallels between remembering the National Socialist dictatorship and remembering the GDR regime, defning the commemoration of both dictatorships as essential for the defence of democracy by future generations (Knabe and Wilke 2005, p. 71). While Knabe and Wilke included commemoration of the Wall among three thematic “pillars” of remembrance, their concept was not entirely Wall-focussed, but sought instead to create links between political oppression, deaths at the Wall and resistance to the GDR regime. Knabe and Wilke’s concept certainly foreshadowed the idea of a network of sites contained in Flierl’s proposals, yet their position also sought to highlight the different forms of oppression in the GDR. They did not seek to include experiences of the living with the Wall that were not so easily understood in terms of victimhood or suffering. Flierl’s plan, on the other hand, emphasized the plurality and complexity of experiences related to the Wall and did not make connections between these and other forms of oppression in the GDR. It was this approach that subsequently informed the competition to design the new, expanded Memorial Museum, launched in July 2007. The area set aside for an outdoor exhibition now extended the length of Bernauer Straße, taking in the cemetery formerly claimed by the Sophiengemeinde and the underground station at Nordbahnhof, which had been a so-called “ghost station” during the time of the Wall’s 252 D. CLARKE existence. Although the competition brief stressed the centrality of victim memorialization and the need to use the new expanded site to show the brutal means that the SED used to cling on to power in the GDR (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtenwicklung 2007a, pp. 93–94 and 109), there was an equal emphasis on promoting “active” participation on the part of visitors, who should be induced to engage “thoughtfully” with the different “levels of meaning” in the site and not be presented with a “ready-made” meaning (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtenwicklung 2007a, pp. 95–96). During the discussions for the awarding of the prize for best design, the plurality of perspectives offered by the site was even further to the fore. The criteria for the discussion pointed to the many layers of meaning that needed to be addressed, including “everyday life before the Wall” and “the different perspectives of victims and perpetrators” (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtenwicklung 2007b, p. 7). The design eventually chosen went a long way to addressing these criteria, creating an open space in which the visitor could choose to move between the different elements and the different stories represented as they pleased. There was to be no set pathway through the various exhib- its, which would include, for example, a “Window of Memory” showing photographs of all those who were killed at the Wall; although, after a protest by the UOKG (2009), these faces would not include those of GDR border guards who had died. Visitors would be able to choose to seek out information on specifc events, such as the forced eviction of those living close to the Wall on the Eastern side or the escape tunnels that were built near the Bernauer Straße; equally, they could choose to leave fowers at the existing Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial or to visit a memorial service in the Reconciliation Chapel. The documentation centre would continue to provide contextu- alizing information, including details about the Cold War context, but (again) visitors would have to decide whether to include these elements in their visit. In contrast with victims’ demands that the border fortifcations should be re-created as realistically as possible, the new Memorial Museum design followed the Wall Association’s established principle of presenting the material traces without reconstruction. Where it was felt necessary to fll gaps in the remaining Wall, this was achieved with verti- cal rods of Cor-Ten steel, which visitors would be able to walk between (Klausmeier 2011, p. 399). In the completed memorial, what strikes the visitor is not only the openness of the space, but also the archaeological approach to the 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 253 material the site contains. Physical remnants of the Wall’s security apparatus (for example, wires that formed part of an alarmed fence in the border area) have been unearthed in places, but no attempt has been made to reconstruct the fence itself. The visitor sees these wires and other material remnants of the Wall in trenches like those found on archaeological sites, which also contain traces of pre-Wall material: for example, the foundations of an old memorial from the original Sophiengemeinde cemetery, or remains of original streets and houses. The relationship of these different historical layers is not commented upon, but indicates to the visitor that the Wall was built not on virgin soil, but by demolishing part of an existing community. Equally, however, one can also take this juxtaposition of different historical periods to suggest that the Wall was just one part of a longer history of the site, a history that can now be viewed with a measure of distance by the contemporary observer. This policy of taking the site as far as possible as it was found also extends to post-unifcation developments. This is particularly the case with physical remains of the activities of the Sophiengemeinde, which erected both a wooden cross on the old cemetery site and a stone memorial dedicated, in competition with the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial, to “the victims of the Second World War and the division of Germany.” Also, a modern metal gate with brick pillars built by the Sophiengemeinde at the height of the dispute over the future of the site remains in place, albeit with a clear marker highlighting its origin to visitors. The disputed Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial also remains unchanged. In sum, this approach allows the competing visions of the purpose and presentation of the site prior to the redevelopment to remain visible: they are now as much part of the site’s history as the Wall itself and relativize by their presence any potential claim to impose a single meaning on Bernauer Straße. On the whole, therefore, the expanded Berlin Wall Memorial Museum tends to implicitly reject calls for a single memory narrative focused exclusively on the deaths at the Berlin Wall. These victims are certainly part of the picture, indeed a central element of that picture. However, the memorial site seeks to avoid the reduction of history to a martyrological story of heroic victimhood, even though this would have been the presentation preferred by victims’ organizations. Indeed, just as with the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial, victims’ organizations have tended to feel excluded from the re-development of the site: when the Bernauer Straße was amalgamated into a foundation with the former West Berlin refugee camp at Marienfelde in 2008, for 254 D. CLARKE example, the constitution of the advisory board did not initially include any of their representatives (UOKG 2008). Perhaps more importantly, as Marion Detjen (2009, p. 400) argues, the “professionalization” of the memorial museum leaves only a circumscribed role for those directly affected by its history, either as providers as frst-hand oral testimony or as guides around the site. In an important sense, the underlying principles of Flierl’s plan for Berlin Wall commemoration in the city and the museological strategies subsequently developed at Bernauer Straße show a convergence between the interests of the politicians in power at the time and the heritage organization responsible for the site, supported by a broader professional and academic consensus. The scandal around the construction and eventual removal of Alexandra Hildebrandt’s “Freedom Memorial” at Checkpoint Charlie put the red-red coalition in Berlin under pressure to respond to a perceived failure on its part to address the legacy of state socialism in the city, a charge to which it was particularly vulnerable given the origins of the PDS. Victims’ organizations, and the conservative politicians and historians who supported them, saw the “Freedom Memorial” controversy as a means to assert their case for a more victim-centred commemoration of the Berlin Wall, which would not only stress the suffering of the victims of state socialism in more emotive terms, but which would also provide victims’ organizations with their preferred form of recognition as those who had heroically resisted communist rule in order to bring about a unifed Germany. In contrast, the hearings at the Berlin Senate in early 2005 that preceded the fnal formulation of Flierl’s plan showed a clear consensus among those giving evidence, who were for the most part historians and museum professionals, that there should be no radical departure from the existing museological approach to the site formulated by the Berlin Wall Association under Camphausen, even if the scope of commemoration in the city was to be expanded. The chair of the Senate’s Working Group on Wall Commemoration set up by Flierl has stressed that the response to “Freedom Memorial” controversy was not the acknowledgement of the need for a more emotive presentation of the Berlin Wall in the city, but rather a renewed call for a “scientifcally grounded” concept (Lemke 2011, p. 379). From the October of 2005, Camphausen’s team were given the task of developing new ideas for the site at the Bernauer Straße based on their existing principles, and these fed directly into Flierl’s eventual plan (Camphausen and Fischer 2011, pp. 375–376). 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 255

Clearly, the controversy surrounding the “Freedom Memorial” had failed to mount a signifcant challenge to the authority of those charged with running the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum. They quickly achieved the backing of the key politician responsible, Thomas Flierl, and enjoyed the support of other infuential historians and museum professionals in the city. Flierl’s proposal for a pluralized and historicized approach to commemoration of the Wall in the city should not be understood as apolitical, even if it ostensibly sought to counter the overt politicization of the issue at Checkpoint Charlie. Within the political system, his communication was also inevitably political, in that it advocated a model of commemoration that sought to defuse some of the negative potential of the history of the Berlin Wall for his own party as a partner in the coalition government. The open-ended and de-centred structure of the re- developed Memorial Museum site at Bernauer Straße, which puts into practice the principles outlined in Fierl’s original conceptual document, recalls in many ways a previous memorial project, namely the Denkzeichen (literally, “think-mark”) for murdered communist rev- olutionary Rosa Luxemburg that was constructed in 2006 on Rosa Luxemburg Square in Berlin. Flierl had played a key part in the campaign to have this memorial installed and had also been instrumental in formulating an approach to commemoration in this instance that stressed an openness of interpretation in relation to Luxemburg, who is a hero to the German left, but also a controversial fgure in terms of her attitudes to liberal democracy. When the plan to construct a monument to Luxemburg was included in the 2002 red–red coalition agreement, the issue was mobilized by the CDU opposition as a means to attack the new city government (Könczöl 2011, pp. 85–86). In response to this criticism, the de-centred and fragmented form of the memorial promoted by Flierl and his supporters “deliberately eschew[ed] the task of setting in stone any defnitive view of Luxemburg” (Bavaj 2010, p. 292). However, it should be noted here that an open and plural form of memorialization can also become a means of ensuring that one’s own perspective at least gets heard alongside those views hostile to it, rather than functioning as a statement in favour of plurality per se. This approach also chimes in with the calls for “critical” memory about the state socialist past that Flierl and others from the PDS/DIE LINKE have promoted, a memory that recognizes the suffering of 256 D. CLARKE victims of both dictatorships, while resisting what they see as the instrumentalization of victim memory “to justify the current form of society, without furnishing critical instruments for questioning and further development” (Flierl and Müller 2009, p. 12). Applied to the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum, such a strategy of apparent openness does allow for the expression of the suffering caused by state socialism in the GDR, but also insists that this cannot be the only perspective. The call for the expression of a plurality of views is therefore not in any way politically neutral: it is in the interest of post-communists that discourses about the GDR and state socialism more generally are not reduced to a single anti-communist narrative that stresses the heroic suffering of the victims of the SED regime. The approach preferred by the Senate, as set out in Flierl’s plan, also spoke to the discourse of the museum professionals and historians engaged in presenting the site at the Bernauer Straße. Although Flierl’s principles can be understood as political communication within the political system, they chimed with the museological principles favoured among professionals, as already discussed in detail above. The support provided by Flierl as Senator for Culture for this concept effectively allowed the Berlin Wall Association to defend an approach to the presentation of the site against the challenge mounted by the victims’ organizations and those who supported them. Whereas the victims themselves sought to promote a presentation of their suffering as central to the commemoration of the Berlin Wall, the historians involved with the creation of the Memorial Museum, while acknowledging the need for individual commemoration, preferred to see the victims’ experience as one kind of experience of the border regime; and even then, the research commissioned by the Senate on the facts of each individual death tended to undermine the notion that the experience of the victims had a univocal meaning, constructed in terms of heroic resistance to the SED regime. Following the logic of the dominant professional discourse on the public presentation of history, historians and museum professionals did not ascribe the victims a privileged role in the maintenance of the democratic order by assigning to them a martyr-like function in relation to the eventual accomplishment of German unifcation. Rather, they pursued a methodology that demanded a sober, factual, open-ended, historicizing, archaeological presentation of the site, understood as a call to citizens to exercise their democratic responsibility to reach their own conclusions. 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 257

In doing so, however, they successfully defended their professional autonomy against the encroachment of the system of protest represented by the victims’ organizations. Perhaps rather surprisingly, once Flierl’s concept had been approved by the Senate, the opposition of victims’ organizations, which by now was led by the umbrella organization UOKG, quickly evaporated. The UKOG was invited to the Senate hearings in early 2005 and initially defended the “Freedom Memorial,” insisting that it should be integrated into the proposed network of memorial sites for the Wall and its victims, while also proposing that the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial should be removed (Strunz 2005, pp. 2–3). Arguably recognizing that the hostility of the victims’ organizations stemmed at least in part from the lack of consultation with them over the building of the Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff memorial and the subsequent expansion of the Bernauer Straße site, Flierl and Mayor Wowereit engaged in something of a charm offensive with the various victims’ groups, inviting them to consult both inside and outside the hearings (Lemke 2011, p. 385). Such communication by the political system aimed specifcally at victims’ organizations arguably had the desired effect of allowing those organizations to communicate to their members that the victims’ voice was being heard by those in power. Given the limited ability of the victims’ organizations to change the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum the opportunity to achieve this kind of symbolic recognition on their members’ behalf may have made it easier to retreat from communicating outright opposition to the Flierl plan. This scenario also allowed the victims’ organizations to avoid the trap of repeating protest communications to which the other systems do not respond. As Luhmann notes (1987, p. 233), systems need to keep reproduc- ing themselves by producing new communications that are not simply repetitions, but rather responses to previous communications. Such systems are stable only as far as they are “dynamically stable” (p. 79), as opposed to merely static. This implies that, if an organization fnds itself in the situation of only being able to repeat itself, its self-reproduction is threatened. An organization’s environment’s response may provide a starting point for further communications (Luhmann 2000, pp. 71–72), even to the extent of the development mechanisms of structural coupling between the organization and segments of that environment. If, as already noted in Chapter 3 however, organizational systems keep repeating the same communication (in this case the same protest) 258 D. CLARKE without producing any irritation in their environment, they risk appearing irrelevant, which is a particularly dangerous position for protest organizations seeking to maintain the mobilization of their members. It is arguable in this case that the victims’ organizations, seeing that they would be unlikely to achieve their original aims on Wall commemoration, were willing to support the Senate’s proposals in order to be able to communicate a success to their members in terms of claiming infuence on the process and thus recognition as important stakeholders in the continued efforts to memorialize the state socialist past. In fact, Heinz Strunz, who represented both the League of the Victims of Stalinist Persecution and the UKOG (of which he was vice chair at the time) sat alongside Flierl on the podium in the Senate as the fnal “Wall concept” was presented (Lemke 2011, p. 386). In this way, the ruling parties in Berlin could co-opt the victims’ organizations into the proposals for Wall commemoration without making signifcant conces- sions to the alternative position on the importance of the memory of victimhood that these organizations otherwise represented. This did not stop the Berlin CDU continuing to criticize the plans as evidence of the PDS’s failure to come to terms with the past (pp. 389–390), however: they maintained a political communication on this issue that continued to focus on the de-legitimizing potential of Wall commemoration against the ruling red-red coalition.

The Conflict Between Victims’ Organizations and Museum Professionals at the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum in Potsdam The second case study I will examine in this chapter demonstrates the outcome of a different set of interactions between the systems of politics, science and protest in the development of a memorial museum addressing the victims of state socialism. The creation of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum Potsdam (Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Leistikowstraße Potsdam) in Brandenburg was the source of considerable controversy between victims’ organizations and the heritage organization that eventually took responsibility for the site. The building in which the memorial museum was developed after German unifcation had originally housed an exhibition created by a civil society group that sought to represent the interests of victims. However, in order to secure the long-term future of the memorial and the necessary state funding, the building was 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 259 subsequently handed over to a team of historians and museum professionals, whose methodologies were rejected by some victim activists. As in the case of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum, however, the heritage organization responsible for the site was ultimately able to defend those methodologies, despite interventions by representatives of political parties. Built in 1916 by a Christian charitable organization, the Evangelisch- Kirchliche Hilfsverein (EKH), the building in which the memorial museum is housed today was part of a wealthy suburb near the centre of Potsdam that was requisitioned and walled off by the Soviet occupying forces in 1945. The Red Army continued to occupy the area until 1994, when its troops withdrew. The buildings, for which the Soviets had paid rent, were returned to the original owners or their heirs. The building at Leistikowstraße 1 was returned to the EKH in 1994. Subsequently, the site was visited by some of those who had been held there in the immediate post-war period by Soviet counter-intelligence and who were then sentenced to long prison terms in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, or who had been deported to labour camps in the Soviet Union (Fein 2002b, p. 44). In cooperation with the German chapter of the Russian human rights organization MEMORIAL, the EKH allowed the building to be used from 1997 for an exhibition detailing the fates of those who had been imprisoned there, which was revised in 2000 and then ran until 2005. In 2003, an association was founded that included former inmates and others interested in the preservation of the building and its use as a memorial museum, the Association for a Memorial Museum in the Former KGB Prison in Potsdam (Verein Gedenk- und Begegnungsstätte Ehemaliges KGB-Gefängnis Potsdam). Nevertheless, the site remained the property of the EKH, which ran a competition for the renovation of the buildings and the construction of a visitor centre in 2006. The EKH received funds from the Ministry for Culture in Brandenburg and from the federal government. This state funding extended to the creation of a new foundation in December, with the task of creating a permanent exhibition at Leistikowstraße and managing the site. During the creation of the new exhibition from 2009, the main building was closed, although tours were made available at weekends. It was not until April 2012 that the completed exhibition opened (Reich 2012, pp. 11–12). While the memorial was closed for the preparation of the new permanent exhibition, confict developed between various victims’ groups and the historian in charge of the new memorial museum, Ines Reich, and her team. 260 D. CLARKE

The foundation set up in 2008 was not independent, but rather a sub- sidiary of the Brandenburg Foundation for Memorial Museums (Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten), which manages other sites co-funded by the regional and federal government, including those related to National Socialism. Reich had been a colleague of the head of the Brandenburg Foundation, Günter Morsch, working at the concentration camp memorial at Sachsenhausen since 1997 (Winters 2013, p. 43). One of her projects, with Morsch, had been the creation of a new museum commemorating the Soviet Special Camp at the Sachsenhausen site. To the Association and to victims’ organizations, Morsch represented “the establishment of the remembrance landscape” (Wüstenberg 2017, p. 255) and brought with him associations with previous conficts between museum professionals and victims’ groups (p. 259). However, it would be misleading to reduce the confict over the Leistikowstraße memorial museum to the level of personal animosity. As journalist Peter Jochen Winters (2013, p. 47) has observed, Morsch “represents a modern concept of memory politics, which understands … memorial museums as open sites of historical learning,” placing him within that discourse of professionalization and historicization already discussed in relation to contemporary historians and museum professionals involved with memorial sites. As will become clear from an analysis of the new permanent exhibition at Leistikowstraße, Reich’s team’s presentation of this memorial museum was in line with such an approach, with Reich herself defning the site primarily as “a modern historical museum” as opposed to “a memorial” (Mallwitz 2012, p. 17). This left little room for the victims’ organizations’ preferred construction of victimhood in terms of a suffering that should be the central or even exclusive focus of any memory of the Soviet occupation. The original exhibition created by MEMORIAL, in contrast, relied very heavily on witness testimony and foregrounded the experience of victims. This was possibly due to practical constraints. Unlike sites associated with the SED regime in the GDR, the documentary evidence on the use of Leistikowstraße 1 by the Soviet occupying forces was held in archives in the Russian Federation, not locally, and access was diffcult not only in terms of resources to travel to these archives, but also in terms of the willingness of the Russian authorities to cooperate in the mid-1990s. Furthermore, the volunteers involved in the MEMORIAL exhibition did not necessarily have training as historians or museum professionals (Fein 2002a, p. 7). The better-funded new exhibition, in 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 261 contrast, was able to work in cooperation with the State Archive of the Russian Federation using staff who were trained historians (Reich 2012, p. 16). Nevertheless, the decision of MEMORIAL to base their exhibition primarily on oral history interviews (28 German prisoners and 6 Soviet prisoners), was arguably more than a practical necessity. Beginning with an overview of the structures of the various Soviet agencies connected with the site and the practices in terms of arrest, interrogation and conviction of victims, the original exhibition concentrated strongly on the experiences of physical and mental suffering of those imprisoned. So, for example, direct quotations from interviews with witnesses on display boards emphasized the appalling nature of the conditions under which prisoners were held, as in this testimony from former prisoner Heinz Schwollius (unless otherwise stated, all details of the MEMORIAL exhibition are taken refer to its on-line re-creation, which has been available since May 2011: http://www.von-potsdam- nach-workuta.de/index.php):

Without any possibility of cleaning ourselves or receiving necessary medical help, we vegetated like outcasts, … almost eaten alive by tics and lice that left behind terrible wounds, we were literally rotting alive.

Similarly, in a text that was used twice in the exhibition, former prisoner Edith Wierschin described the sight of another inmate who was being held in solitary confnement:

They opened the door, she was lying curled up like a snail on the foor. She’d maybe been in there about four weeks, or who knows how long, in her own feces, just in a pair of boots and a pair of trousers or maybe a slip.

The remainder of the exhibition focused on the experiences of the former prisoners after their incarceration at Leistikowstraße, whether they served out prison terms in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the GDR, or whether they were deported to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Their lives after release, including the traumatic after-effects of their treatment, were also key features of the narrative. The exhibition contained panels giving full biographies of the witnesses, including those who had died before the setting-up of the exhibition, and whose testimonies were therefore drawn from existing autobiographical accounts. These victim testimonies were displayed not 262 D. CLARKE only with a curriculum vitae, but also with selected quotations detailing their experiences and their feelings about those experiences. For example, the biography of Gerhard Penzel, who spent fve years in a work camp in Workuta in the Soviet Union, was accompanied by a quotation in which he talked about the lack of sympathy he encountered after his release to the Federal Republic in 1955:

What are you going to do? The people here can’t understand it, they can’t imagine what it was like, to get 25 years for nothing. They just say to themselves, “there’s no smoke without fre, is there?”

The original MEMORIAL exhibition, while providing some historical background in terms of the working methods of the Soviet authorities, did so very much in the context of retelling the life experiences of those interviewed for the project, and the narrative of the exhibition followed those life stories from the point of arrest, to detention and questioning, sentencing, punishment and life after release. Its clear purpose was to preserve these memories, and the use of direct quotation, often about traumatizing and degrading experiences, assumed the historical validity of such accounts without recourse to corroborating documentary evidence. This is not to claim that the reminiscences of the victims were not accurate (although they may not have been in some respects), but rather to point out that the approach taken in the MEMORIAL exhibition assumed that such testimonies would speak for themselves as evidence of a typical experience. As the introductory text to the exhibition put it, in fact, “[t]hese are the fates of individuals. Yet they are exemplary representatives of the fates of hundreds or even thousands of prisoners.” In contrast, from 2009 Reich and her team followed a policy of re-orienting the planned exhibition away from this victim-centred approach and towards a historicizing methodology of the kind already discussed above. To begin with, the closure of the building restricted access of the victims to the site and there were complaints that the tours that were offered at weekends were conducted not by contemporary witnesses or others associated with the Association or MEMORIAL, but by local students (von Hagen 2010). As the new exhibition was developed, the memorial museum’s advisory committee, which did include victim representatives and members of the original Association, pointed to what they regarded as insuffciencies in the proposed presentation of the site, criticisms that fell under three broad headings. 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 263

Firstly, victims questioned the way in which the physical substance of the building would be presented in the new memorial museum. For example, because of regulations for buildings to be made accessible to the public, it was necessary to install lighting pointing to emergency escape routes. Particularly in the context of the display of former cells, remembered by former inmates as dark and oppressive, there were complaints that this failed to communicate the sense of fear and the physical suffering experienced by victims (von Hagen 2010). Secondly, it was reported that both victims and non-victim members of the advisory committee were concerned that the texts being written for the new exhibition adopted a language that was too neutral in the sense of failing to make clear the injustice of the situation experienced by prisoners. According to the leader of the Association, for example, a former inmate was referred to as having been shot for “spying,” without making clear that this charge was one frequently made by Soviet counter-intelligence on fimsy or even non-existent evidence (Büchner 2010). A spokesman for the victims who was a member of the advisory committee stated that they had demanded four re-writes of texts for the exhibition (Platt 2012) and non-victim members of the advisory board from other institutions also expressed their concern (Wüstenberg 2017, p. 257). Thirdly, by far the most signifcant complaint leveled against the new exhibition was that, in contradistinction to the MEMORIAL exhibition, it no longer focused solely on those unjustly imprisoned at Leistikowstraße. The new exhibition devotes signifcantly more attention to the workings of Soviet counter-intelligence operations than was previously the case. Instead of focusing exclusively on individuals against whom barely credible charges had been brought, the new exhibition shows a more rounded picture of the work of Soviet security personnel. This can be seen, for example, in the documentation of the case of Rafail Goldfarb, an interpreter who had worked for Soviet authorities at Leistikowstraße before defecting to the West, where he provided information on Soviet practices to the CIC, forerunner of the CIA (Reich and Schultz 2012, p. 77). Although the accompanying text stresses that it is impossible to say whether any of the cases detailed by Goldfarb involved individuals guilty of the charges against them, given the use of interrogation techniques to force confessions, the documentation of these individuals’ fates certainly leaves open the possibility that some of the punishments were not without justifcation. 264 D. CLARKE

The exhibition also includes details of individual prisoners whose relationship to the National Socialist regime is at least open to question. For example, in the case of the policeman Max Porth, accused of war crimes in present-day Belarus, the exhibition text reports the following:

Max Porth was a military policeman in local command 653, which was part of Army Group Central in White Russia. The involvement of these commands in anti-Semitic mass murders is historically documented. For the Soviets, it was enough that Max Porth had been a military policeman to prove that he was personally responsible. (Reich and Schultz 2012, p. 79)

Elsewhere, details of individual cases are included in which an involvement with the crimes of National Socialism is more certain, contrasting sharply with the fates of young inmates who were accused of belonging to pro-Nazi “Werwolf” groups on largely invented evidence. For instance, in the case of Heinrich Heindt, a recidivist criminal who had been imprisoned in the National Socialist concentration camps at Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, the exhibition cites Konrad Finkelmeier’s book Die braune Apokalypse (The Brown Apocalypse, 1947) as evidence of Heindt’s implication in National Socialist crimes:

Former concentration camp inmates such as Konrad Finkelmeier remember Heinrich Heidt as a corrupt and dangerous camp functionary, who spied on other prisoners for the “Political Department” and the Camp Commandant. His reports on others led to the most serious punishments and in some cases meant death. (Reich and Schultz 2012, p. 109)

Similarly, the case of engineer Franz Thiel, who was executed for National Socialist crimes, is accompanied by evidence that the factory he was responsible for increased its number of forced labourers from around 1000 to over 3000 during his tenure from 1941 to 1942. By presenting these cases alongside those more easily classifable as innocent victims of Soviet paranoia, the exhibition tends to imply that, while their methods are to be condemned, there were some cases in which the Soviets might have had reasonable grounds to pursue individuals, particularly those linked to the National Socialist regime. Although testimony by former prisoners, including some who featured in the MEMORIAL exhibition, is incorporated into the various 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 265 sections of the exhibition alongside other evidence, the space given over specifcally to the experience of imprisonment is comparatively limited. In the offcial catalogue, it is only in relation to the conditions of imprisonment that the victims are foregrounded as the primary source of historical evidence (Reich and Schultz 2012, p. 187). In the memorial museum itself, the cells in the basement contain video installations of twelve former prisoners whose testimony on various subjects can be listened to at the touch of a button. These eye-witnesses comment on specifc aspects of their incarceration, divided into 30 individual videos (Reich and Schultz 2012, p. 187). This separation of victim testimonies from the wider historical exhibition, however, strongly implies that it is only the experience of imprisonment and interrogation itself (or the memory of it) to which the victims can testify. In the case of the victim biographies shown in vitrines on the other foors, these do occasionally include excerpts from memoirs by the subjects in question, but generally rely on a range of documents and do not systematically privilege such testimony as was the case for the MEMORIAL exhibition. In general, in the new memorial museum exhibit, victim testimony is set in the wider context of historical information about the work of the Soviet security services. This is underscored by the fact that the exhibition is no longer organized chronologically according to the life- course of the victims. For example, the sections on the places where victims served out their sentences is much reduced compared to the MEMORIAL exhibit, and there is no discussion of life after imprisonment apart from the rehabilitation process following the end of Soviet occupation in the 1990s (Reich and Schultz 2012, pp. 95–99). As Sara Jones (2014) has argued, victim testimonies in memorial museums are necessarily subject to mediation, and it is the context in which they are placed that tends to organize the potential diversity of individual experiences into coherent narratives about the past. Whereas the original MEMORIAL exhibition at Leistikowstraße arguably ftted individual life stories to a single schema of unjust incarceration and individual yet representative suffering, not just during imprisonment but also in the present day, the new exhibition focuses on what Martin Sabrow (2009), for example, would describe as a multi-perspectival presentation of the history of this site, which offers a range of historical evidence to the visitor that cannot be easily reduced to an unequivocal condemnation of the Soviet authorities. 266 D. CLARKE

As such, the victims who criticized the new exhibition were particularly angered by what they regarded as the creation of a “spying museum,” as the head of the Association put it, which seemed to place more emphasis on documenting the work of the Soviet security services than on honouring those unjustly imprisoned (Fröhlich 2012a). As complaints from victims’ organizations about the more “harmless” presentation of the cells and the allegedly too neutral tone of the exhibitions texts also make clear, some former prisoners and others supporting their cause also felt that the presentation of oppression at the site was less likely to inspire empathy for their fate than had been the case with the victim-centred MEMORIAL exhibit. In response to these claims, Ines Reich herself, but also well-known historians concerned with the management of memorial museums, sought to defend what they saw as the necessary independence of their role as researchers and museum professionals. The sense of threat experienced by historians and museum-makers in this case was doubtless heightened by a physical attack that reportedly took place against Reich at the memorial museum in Leistikowstraße in March of 2012, not long before the offcial opening, when a former prisoner believed he was being denied access to the site (Anon 2012). However, the rhetorical counter-offensive by historians, although apparently motivated by this incident, had a more fundamental purpose. Wolfgang Benz, for example, who is a prominent academic authority on anti-Semitism, was persuaded to edit a volume of essays condemning the behaviour of victims’ organizations in their criticism of Reich and the new exhibition, including a contribution by historian and journalist Martin Jander (2013, p. 134), in which the latter sought to establish links between the protest against the new exhibition and alleged far-right elements in victims’ groups, while at the same time stressing that he was not attempting to portray such groups as right-wing extremists per se. In the same volume, journalist Peter Jochen Winters (2013, p. 41) pointed to links between one prominent protester and the right-wing newspaper Junge Freiheit (Young Freedom). Despite these attempts to morally discredit those who objected to the new exhibition, the central thrust of the argument put forward by Benz and his contributors returns us to the discourse of professionalization already discussed in relation to the role of heritage organizations in memorial museum projects and the scientifc methodologies they are qualifed to implement. Benz (2013, p. 12) argued that with “the insistence on the exclusive power of individual experience to create 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 267 knowledge, any possibility of an academically sound approach to history is condemned to failure before it gets started.” In a similar vein, Sabrow (2013) pointed to the case of Leistikowstraße as an example of two related dangers. Firstly, where victims insisted on an emotionally charged representation of suffering, they were failing to acknowledge the academic insight that such empathy does not necessarily lead to historical understanding among memorial museum visitors. Secondly, by demanding a right to infuence the work of historians at memorial museums so as to achieve their preferred presentation of the past, victims were endangering the “autonomy” of historians and museum professionals like Reich, whose exhibition had been “well received by others in the profession.” The emphasis placed by Reich (2012, p. 13) and her historian colleagues on the application of academic norms of “memorial museum pedagogy” can be understood in this context as an attempt to preserve the autonomy of their professional standards from the impositions of victims and their supporters; and, in more practical terms, to retain authority over the process of musealization. While historians and museum professionals insisted here upon their autonomy at the expense of victims’ demand to have their suffering foregrounded in the presentation of the memorial museum, victim activists regarded this subordination of victim experience to historiographical and museological methodologies as morally unacceptable. As one victim and critic of the Leistikowstraße memorial museum put it, “the biographies of human beings are not just material that young academics can exploit to raise their own profle or that should be the basis for intellectual speculation” (Meyer and Brauckmann, pp. 239–240). In summary, we can see how the pattern already identifed at the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum is repeated at the Leisitkowstraße site in terms of the communications produced by heritage organizations and victims’ organizations. Here again, victims attempted to present their suffering as key to the presentation of the memorial museum, implicitly making a claim for the value of the recognition of that suffering for contemporary society, while historians insisted on a multiperspectival and contextualized presentation of the past according to norms of professionalized museology. There were, however, some differences between the two debates. Although victim activists in the Potsdam controversy insisted on the importance of commemorating their suffering to contemporary German society, demanding that it should be the central or even 268 D. CLARKE exclusive element of the history told at Leistikowstraße, we do not see the same prominence of the martyrological narrative that came to dominate victim discourse in the case of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum, in which the victims’ suffering was framed as a contribution to the eventual overcoming of German division. It is worth noting here that, in the case of Berlin Wall commemoration, it had been a third party, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, that had introduced this narrative, which was then been taken up by victims’ organizations. This suggests that, while maintaining a focus on recognition, victims’ organizations are capable of shifting their construction of victimhood in response to local conditions and on a case by case basis. Another difference in the Leistikowstraße case was the heated nature of the confrontation, which led to a noticeable moralization of the communication of the scientifc system. While such moralizing is the norm for protest communication, here the heritage organization’s supporters within the academic community on occasion sought to establish links between victim activists and right-wing political ideology as a means of calling into question the motivations behind victims’ challenge to the authority of the methodologies that the organization had chosen to apply to the site. As in Berlin, however, the political system also produced communication about the memorial museum and the confict that arose over it. The federal state of Brandenburg has often been at the centre of controversies over coming to terms with the GDR past. Until 2002 the post of Minister President was held by Manfred Stolpe (SPD), who had formerly held an important administrative offce within the East German Evangelical Church. Stolpe was a controversial fgure whose alleged contacts to the MfS were investigated by a parliamentary committee in the early 1990s and who never shook off the accusation that his conversations with the East German security services, which he did not deny, amounted to having worked for them as an agent. After Stolpe’s departure, his successor Matthias Platzeck remained in a fractious “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats, who pushed for a politics of remembering state socialism in Brandenburg that tended to stress that system’s totalitarian nature and the necessity of commemorating its victims. For example, prominent CDU parliamentarians from Brandenburg were signatories in October 2007 of the “Cottbus Declaration,” which called upon the state-funded Brandenburg Foundation for Memorial Museums to do more to commemorate the suffering of the victims of 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 269 the Soviet occupation and the GDR. Such ideas clearly fed into the coalition’s new policy on remembrance, which was developed from 2007 and came into force in 2009. Encompassing the years 1933–1990, it placed particular emphasis on remembering the GDR as a dictatorship (DPA 2007; Landesregierung Brandenburg 2009). The Brandenburg CDU’s strategy can be understood in terms of their desire to preclude any possible coalition between the SPD and its other potential partner, the post-communist DIE LINKE. However, when the SPD did in fact shift allegiance to DIE LINKE after the Brandenburg regional election of autumn 2009, the CDU sought to undermine the new coalition by exploiting revelations of former connections between members of the new red–red administration and the MfS (Fahrun et al. 2009; Hensel 2009) and successfully pressing with other opposition parties for a new commission of enquiry into Brandenburg’s alleged failure to address the state socialist past under SPD leadership since German unifcation (Anon 2010). Although the CDU did not succeed in ending the SPD-LINKE coalition by mobilizing the politics of memory, it is nevertheless clear that they did manage to exploit this issue successfully enough for the early months of the new coalition to be consumed with MfS-related allegations. Indeed, one journalist described the coalition as being “immo- bilized by shock” (Mallwitz 2010a). The long-winded process of the commission of inquiry also proved to be an unwelcome distraction, making it diffcult for the SPD to move on from the question of the GDR past and its relationship to it. In the case of the Leistikowstraße memorial museum, the existing politicization of memory in relation to the Soviet occupation and the GDR at both national and regional level created the conditions for politicians to intervene in the debate. For example, Bernd Neumann (CDU), the federal government’s cultural representative, called on the makers of the new exhibition to take more account of victims’ views before the exhibition was opened to the public, and was instrumental in the employment of two external assessors, who were brought into make changes to the texts to be used in the exhibition. At the opening of the exhibition in April 2012, Neumann stressed that the views of the victims had therefore had an impact on the presentation of the site, while also underlining that any future suggestions from them would have to be taken into account as the memorial museum continued to develop (Presse- und Informationsdienst der Bundesregierung 2012). 270 D. CLARKE

This intervention on Neumann’s part was commensurate with his general stance and that of the CDU at the federal level in terms of the emphasis it placed on commemorating the victims of the Soviet occupation and the GDR. Neumann had been the federal government’s cultural representative, the equivalent of its minister for culture, during the debates leading up to the revision of the Federal Memorial Concept in 2007 and had rejected a number of key aspects of the fndings of the Sabrow Commission, which had made the case for a more distinctly historicized and multi-perspectival presentation of the GDR past, including aspects of “normal” everyday life under socialism. Instead, as Andrew Beattie observes, while the CDU continued to lead on memorial policy at the federal level, there was a marked tendency to see such policy “primarily as a tool for demonstrating the pervasiveness of dictatorship and thus tackling nostalgia for the GDR” (Beattie 2011, pp. 32–33). In this light, Neumann’s support for a stronger victim perspective at the Leistikowstraße memorial was of a piece with his established position and that of his party. A policy of discouraging positive associations with state socialism clearly also resonated with the CDU’s approach to the SPD-DIE LINKE coalition within Brandenburg itself, holding that coalition to account for its alleged failures in coming to terms with the GDR past. Neumann’s intervention can therefore be regarded as speaking to his party’s priorities at the regional level. However, Minister President Platzeck (2012) of the SPD was equally keen to stress the importance of the victims’ perspective, emphasizing in his speech that it had been their activism that had led to the preservation of the site. He went on to observe that the apparent exclusion of some of those victims from infuence over the form of the exhibition could “not be satisfactory for any of us in the long term.” Speaking to the press, Platzeck went as far as to suggest that the exhibition as it stood would need to be revised if it was found wanting in any way (Fröhlich 2012b). Platzeck’s (2012) support for the protesters, some of whom demonstrated at the inauguration ceremony, framed the opening of the memorial museum as an opportunity for the Minister President to emphasize Brandenburg’s commitment to coming to terms with the Soviet occupation and GDR past as an expression of its commitment to basic democratic values, which again places his intervention in the context of controversies over his party’s alleged failure to address that past adequately at the regional level. 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 271

Despite these political interventions by Platzeck and Neumann, it is questionable whether the symbolic act of criticizing the treatment of the victims at the opening of the new exhibition was likely to lead to signifcant changes to the presentation of history at Leistikowstraße in the longer term. Such criticism has not yet translated into a willingness to fund a potentially expensive overhaul of the exhibition, and the fact that the memorial museum has been integrated into the Brandenburg Foundation for Memorial Museums also limits politicians’ ability to directly infuence the representation of victims. The Foundation has a dual structure, in which representatives of the Brandenburg government have responsibility for overseeing its administration, while a committee of experts made up of historians is responsible for making judgements on the exhibitions it conceives and implements (Land Brandenburg 2013). The Foundation strongly defended itself during the debates over Leistikowstraße, insisting that a “serious” exhibition could only be based on proper research and an appropriate museological methodology, accusing the victims of rejecting any “nuance” in the presentation of the site (Wiedemeier 2010; Büchner 2010). As with the case of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum, the Leistikowstraße controversy emerged from what Sabrow has called a “liaison dangereuse between structurally distinct partners” (2008, p. 18). In taking over the site, the new Leistikowstraße foundation sought to create a memorial museum informed by academically rigorous professional standards, which do not construct the role of the victim and the presentation of their suffering as the exclusive focus of the visitor experience and the pedagogical function of such institutions. Victims’ organizations resisted this approach with a form of protest communication that stressed the betrayal of the victims’ legacy by historians. At the same time, the nature of memory politics in Brandenburg in the period provided opportunities for parties and individual politicians to openly politicize the dispute between victims’ organizations and historians. This occurred in spite of the fact that the case of the activities of the KGB at the Leistikowstraße site arguably only had an indirect connection to the SED regime and the post-communist DIE LINKE: although the Soviet occupation forces had played a signifcant role in installing the SED as the ruling party in what became the GDR, those persecuted at the Leistikowstraße site were arguably not mistreated in the name of the SED, in contrast to victims of the MfS for example. 272 D. CLARKE

Nevertheless, there were clear limits on the politicization of the new memorial museum. Here issues of property, which are often neglected in discussions of memorial initiatives (Jordan 2006, pp. 12–13), and issues of institutional authority became salient. The fact that the EHK owned the building at Leistikowstraße and then passed that property on to a foundation that was integrated into the Brandenburg Foundation for Memorial Museums meant that victims and politicians could only artic- ulate their criticism of the new exhibition within certain limits. The autonomy for historians and museum professionals inscribed into this institutional structure allowed those charged with making the new memorial museum to pursue their historicizing approach, even in the face of public controversy and attempts to intervene by politicians and victims’ representatives. For politicians to communicate threats to interfere more extensively in the presentation of Leistikowstraße would have come at a high political cost, leaving them open to criticism for a non-permissible political interference in an autonomous cultural institution. However, politicians did seek to respond to the protests of victims where they could make political capital from such interventions in the broader context of coalition politics at the regional level, when the risk of further complications of this kind was relatively low. Promises could be made to review and change the memorial museum at some point in the future if necessary without any frm commitment being made. In this way, both the CDU and the SPD could present themselves as attentive to victims’ needs without having to communicate specifc (and potentially controversial) decisions about how this would be achieved. From the perspective of victims’ organizations, there was clearly a danger that such political interventions would seem like “cheap talk,” thus alienating them further from the politicians and museum professionals charged with addressing their traumatic past. From the perspective of Luhmann’s systems theory, however, it is debatable whether this effect of the interaction between the system of protest and the political system can be avoided, even when the political system is addressing the needs of the victims of historical injustice. As Luhmann (2011, p. 124) notes, politicians can still draw an advantage from continuing to talk about problems for which they are unable to offer specifc solutions, for example by using that talk to signal their affliation to particular values, which are constructed as a social consensus that it would costly to deviate from publicly. This was certainly the case with politicians’ interventions in connection with the inauguration of the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum. 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 273

Victim-Led Memorialization at the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum As noted above, although it is increasingly the norm that memorial museum sites are presented and managed by heritage organizations that we can assign to the scientifc system, this is by no means univer- sally the case. The controversial and widely discussed Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum in the former MfS remand prison in Berlin, for example, has been noted for an approach to the presentation of this site that challenges the academically grounded methodologies applied elsewhere. Although Hohenschönhausen has been under the direction of a trained historian, Hubertus Knabe, since its establishment as an independent foundation in 2000, Knabe has advocated a victim-centred approach to the presentation of the site much like that demanded by victims’ organizations for the memorial museums examined above (Rudnik 2011, pp. 292–293). A key feature of the presentation of Hohenschönhausen is the use of guided tours by former victims, who were themselves inmates of the prison. This direct confrontation of visitors with victim testimony, which Susanne Buckley-Zistel (2014, p. 121) describes as a “shock pedagogy,” seeks to produce an emotional identifcation with victims (Jones 2014, p. 117). This approach has been prioritized over a historicizing contextualization of the site, and the strongly anti-communist message presented at this memorial museum equally contravenes the injunction to present visitors with evidence as neutrally as possible (Rudnik 2011, p. 292) so that they might draw their own conclusions (Buckley Zistel 2014, pp. 120–121). As Sara Jones (2014, pp. 126–60) has argued, not only does Hohenschönhausen focus almost exclusively on victims’ experience of incarceration and interrogation, the particular testimonies presented also tend to confrm a coherent narrative about the meaning of that experience. This approach, diametrically opposed to the professionalized discourse of the mainstream of memorial museum practice, has led to criticism from liberal historians and museum professionals (Rudnik 2011, p. 292). Nevertheless, Hohenschönhausen has been the recipient of federal and regional money in the context of the Federal Memorial Concept, which, as I have already noted, implies compliance with certain scientifc or academic (wissenschaftlich) standards in terms of the presentation of the site. Although Hohenschönhausen has moved towards such professionalization (Jones 2014, p. 101), it has sought 274 D. CLARKE to do so in such a way that the core message of the site and its victim focus is maintained. For example, although it did eventually implement a historical exhibition to supplement the witness testimony experienced by visitors in 2013, thereby giving the kind of historical context that mainstream historians and museum professionals would recommend, Hohenschönhausen has nevertheless maintained its emphasis on victim suffering in this exhibition. The design of the exhibition foregrounds experiences of imprisonment, violence and interrogation, placing individual accounts of persecution and video testimony by those directly affected at the heart of the presentation (Jones 2015, pp. 161–162). Alongside accounts of persecution, the exhibition stresses the resistance of individuals to the impositions of the regime. Furthermore, the heroic nature of victims’ continuing resistance to the dangers of communist ideology is highlighted through the inclusion of a vitrine presenting material from an incident in January 2011, when representatives of the VOS, including former civil rights activist and CDU politician Vera Lengsfeld, were reportedly attacked while protesting against a conference in Berlin on “Paths to Communism,” at which DIE LINKE leader Gesine Lötzsch was to speak (Weiße 2011). The case of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum, which has been discussed at length by other researchers (Rudnik 2011, pp. 227– 331; Jones 2014, pp. 9–160; Jones 2015; Buckley-Zistel 2014), demonstrates that heritage organizations need not be exclusively assigned to the scientifc system. Although in this instance we see the involvement of historians at the site, Hohenschönhausen has nevertheless been presented in line with the priorities of victim activists, and has arguably taken on some protest functions: for instance, by demanding recognition for the victims of state socialism, underlining the importance of their suffering for contemporary society, and stressing their continuing fght against the (neglected) dangers of left-wing extremism. However, such organizations must also operate in a context in which state funders expect of them that they will behave to an extent like the heritage organizations that are located more fully within system of science. Hohenschönhausen and Knabe as its director have enjoyed the support of a strong lobby from victims’ organizations, former civil rights activists and conservative historians (Rudnik 2011, p. 293). The site’s relative fame and prominent location in comparison with other comparable sites of persecution, as well as the media presence of its director, also appear to immunize it against attempts by politicians and historians to 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 275 infuence its presentation of history. However, not all memorial museum sites that are run by organizations that position themselves outside the system of science are in such an advantageous position. In my fnal case study, I will analyze the development of the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum, a site that has been developed by a victims’ organization. Despite the strong victim voice in the presentation of this memorial museum, I will show that there are clear differences between its approach and that of the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum. The conclusion of Rudnik’s (2011, p. 736) analysis of the involvement of victims’ organizations in such projects is that this will inevitably lead to an unscientifc and ideologically skewed presentation of the sites in question. Yet, in the case of Cottbus I will demonstrate how the need to maintain some level of congruence with mainstream museological practices, at the same time as addressing the needs of victims communicating within the system of protest, has led to a balancing of different systemic functions within a single memorial museum. The Memorial Museum in Cottbus is run by the victims’ organization Human Rights Centre Cottbus (Menschenrechtszentrum Cottbus). It is located in mid-nineteenth century prison buildings on Bautzener Straße, close to the centre of the city. In the GDR, the prison was characterized by a particularly high percentage of political prisoners (estimates vary between 70% and 80% of all inmates) (Kittan 2012, p. 32; Alisch 2014, pp. 135–136). Especially from the 1970s, an estimated 5000 of these individuals (Kittan 2012, p. 35) were imprisoned in Cottbus before being “bought free” by the Federal Republic. They were therefore living in the West when the GDR regime fell. Following German unifcation, the site remained in use as a prison, until a new facility was opened in another part of the city in 2002. At this point, the buildings at Bautzener Straße began to fall into disrepair and became vandalized, although the easy accessibility of the site did mean that former political prisoners could return to see the place where they had been incarcerated. By 1998, former prisoners had also paid for the installation of a memorial tablet on a boulder outside the prison gates (Kittan 2012, p. 11). There was little offcial interest, however, in turning the site into a memorial museum. In 2007 the state of Brandenburg sold the site to a private investor, who reportedly intended to develop it as a novelty hostel (Wilhelm 2008). Nevertheless, following protests from former prisoners, the state of Brandenburg did agree to give the city one of the buildings outside the prison wall, a block that had previously served 276 D. CLARKE as accommodation for prison personnel. This was then sold on to the newly founded Human Rights Centre, representing former prisoners, for the symbolic price of 1 Euro (Eichelmann 2007; Mallwitz 2010b). This became the site of a provisional exhibit featuring items donated by former inmates.1 CDU member of the Brandenburg parliament and former Cottbus prisoner Dieter Dombrowski, who had protested against the formation of the SPD-DIE LINKE coalition in 2009, was a particularly prominent advocate of a new memorial museum to include the whole of the original site, which was to be bought back from its investor. Dombrowski and the Human Rights Centre pursued a strategy of addressing their claims primarily to the federal level, frst by putting forward an application for funding for extensive research into the prison’s history both before and after 1945. This project was fnanced by the federal government and carried out as a cooperation between the University of Potsdam and the Research Group on the SED State at the Free University of Berlin. This research had the purpose not only of establishing the signifcance of the site, but also of creating the necessary academic basis for the creation of a professional exhibition, criteria that were essential for receiving funding from the federal government (Mallwitz 2010b). Furthermore, Bernd Neumann as Cultural Representative of the federal government took the position that it would be diffcult for any future memorial museum to make a claim for funding if it was not situated in authentic buildings, that is to say in the prison itself. Consequently, a campaign was launched to raise the money to buy back those buildings within the original prison walls, with the state of Brandenburg agreeing to fund ffty percent of the of cost of 400,000 Euro. This commitment was made by Johanna Wanka (CDU) as Brandenburg Minister of Culture in 2007 before the end of the “grand coalition” with the SPD and the advent of the new red–red coalition. The most signifcant aspect of this purchase in the summer of 2010 was that it was the Human Rights Centre, that is to say a victims’ organization, that became the legal owner of the site. This not only meant that it could apply directly to Neumann as the federal government’s Cultural

1 Unless otherwise stated, details of the development of the memorial museum in Cottbus are based on conversations with its Director, Sylvia Wähling, and its historian, Dr. Ralf Marten. I am grateful to Mrs. Wähling and Dr. Marten for taking the time to talk to me. Any inaccuracies in the interpretation of this information are mine. 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 277

Representative for project funds to renovate the buildings and set up an exhibition, for which it received Neumann’s strong support, but that it could exercise a greater degree of control over the character of that eventual exhibition. The strategy adopted by the Human Rights Centre focuses on individual biographies, 28 of which are presented in the context of the current permanent exhibition as typical illustrations of specifc themes relating to the site and to the history of the SED dictatorship more widely. One vitrine shows the biography of Joachim Kaulfuß, who was imprisoned for six months for refusing to sign a resolution in support of the building of the Berlin Wall put forward by the union in the factory where he worked. The main text in the display that features Kaulfuß focuses on his personal experience and includes a lengthy quotation from him on the conditions of his incarceration. Documents from the time, from his employer and his union, plus a reproduction of a report from an SED newspaper denouncing his refusal to sign the resolution, are also displayed. Another case, that of current member of the Human Rights Centre Manfred Krafft, who was repeatedly imprisoned for political crimes in the GDR and spent three prison terms at Cottbus, provides an illustration of the repressive methods of surveillance applied to former political prisoners by the MfS if they were released into East German society rather than to the Federal Republic. A third example is provided by Margot Rothert, whose third child, a daughter who was born during her prison term, was taken away from her for forced adoption by the GDR authorities. Her story is an occasion to offer the visitor further information on the practice of forced adoptions in the GDR. However, as with the other examples cited here, the emphasis is very much on the individual life histories, which take up most of the space in each biographical display. These displays are often illustrated by personal objects, such as the books that many of the former prisoners subsequently wrote about their experiences and the SED regime more generally. In Rothert’s case, this object is the woolen bonnet that her daughter was wearing when she was handed over to her adoptive parents by the authorities, and which she brought with her when mother and daughter were fnally reunited thirty years later. As Ralf Marten, the historian employed by the Human Rights Centre puts it, these objects are intended to make visitors stop in their tracks. Their very personal links to the individual presented, however, direct this curiosity or even emotional impact towards an engagement 278 D. CLARKE with an individual life-story, for which historical context is then provided. The purpose of the biographies is not simply to illustrate the history of the site. The exhibition also includes a white room whose walls feature elon- gated L-shaped slits. Upon entering, the visitor hears a murmur of voices, but it is only by stepping close to the walls, in fact literally putting their ear to the slits, that they can eavesdrop on the testimonies of eight former prisoners, played simultaneously as looped recordings. Apart from the personal perspective offered by these testimonies, the presentation of this material has a metaphorical function, operating at two levels. Firstly, this installation points towards the authenticity of the site, drawing on the popular notion of “if these walls could speak …” (in German, wenn Mauern sprechen könnten). As noted above, memorial museum sites have a paradoxical authenticity, at once considered inherent in their very substance, but also requiring appropriate interpretation in order for the visitor to access that authenticity. Here the recorded voices emerging from the walls perform the exhibition’s claim to “make the walls speak,” that is to say to unlock the past for the visitor through witness testimony. The essential content of the past that is to be unlocked is represented by the voices of the former prisoners. Secondly, by presenting visitors with something of an acoustic challenge, a murmuring of voices that cannot be discerned individually if the visitor stands in the middle of the space, they are placed in the position of needing to listen closely at a slit of their choice, possibly taking the time to move around the space slowly to pay attention to each record- ing in turn. Metaphorically, then, visitors are made aware of the effort required to give each life-story its full attention and encouraged to expend that effort, thereby placing value on each individual testimony and the life experience it communicates. In summary, this installation communicates to visitors the notion that what matters about this site are the experiences of individual political prisoners, assigning visitors a role in which they need to be attentive to those experiences, which would otherwise not be heard. The need for the recognition of (implicitly marginalized) victim experience by non-victims is thereby foregrounded. The second foor of the exhibition, which is housed in an original wing of cells and was accessible to the public before the frst-foor displays described above, continues this emphasis on victim experience. On the right-hand side as the visitor enters, fve cells are reconstructed with beds and other furniture, showing the layout typical of the different 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 279 periods of the prison’s use after 1945, including one cell that is in dis- order, demonstrating the after-effects of a search by prison guards. The cell representing the 1970s contains a large number of bunk beds, several stories high, indicating the over-crowding of the prison at this time. Since my initial visit to the site in November 2013, a series of life-size fgures in prison uniform by the artist Gino Kuhn, himself a former inmate, have been added to this cell to create a clearer impression of the inhumane conditions experienced by prisoners. On the left-hand side of this foor, the space is given over to a display entitled “Cottbus Prisoners Remember,” a mixed-media presentation that includes copies of biographical books written by individual victims, paintings and poems, a touch-screen offering video interviews, and a row of illuminated, rotating displays with hand-written thoughts, accompanied by photographs of the authors. According to the sign describing the contents of this room, these hand-written testimonies are “unfltered,” and it is clear that the former political prisoners have chosen to write about a variety of topics. For instance, one uses the space to condemn communism as a political philosophy, one talks about how the time in prison made him the person he is today, one describes acts of brutality he endured at the hands of prison guards. Combined with the works of art and literature, as well as the interviews, this room leaves the impression of having created a space for former inmates to express themselves in whichever way they fnd appropriate. Although there may be a therapeutic impetus to this, it also has the symbolic value of positioning the memorial museum in a very different role to that of the “historical museum” advocated by the heritage organization responsible for the Leistikowstraße memorial, for example. Here again, the life experiences of the victims are not illustrations of a historical context, presented alongside historical evidence that is then left open for the visitor to interpret. Rather, the memorial museum in this case positions itself as a space within which former prisoners can express their thoughts and feelings about their persecution directly and share that self-expression with visitors. This approach is echoed in the construction of a memorial to the victims of the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border that is situated near the main entrance to the Memorial Museum, inside the prison walls. This is another work by Gino Kuhn, which is constructed of bricks representing each of those killed at the border. Donors can sponsor one of these bricks in order to fnance the completion of the memorial. There is 280 D. CLARKE certainly a link between stories of unsuccessful escape attempts and the prison at Cottbus, in that many inmates were charged with “deserting the republic” (Republikfucht) and even those charged with other crimes often wished to leave the GDR after serving their sentences. However, this memorial arguably violates the principle of the “authenticity of the place” promoted in the Federal Memorial Concept and interpreted by many contemporary historians engaged in memorial museum projects in terms of restricting the historical presentation to the traces of events that took place at the site. Nevertheless, what clearly counts in the case of Cottbus is the initiative of members of the Human Rights Centre to undertake projects, with the Memorial Museum providing a space which makes this possible. As the Human Rights Centre is not bound by the Brandenburg Foundation for Memorial Museums and the views of its committee of experts, and because the members of this victims’ organization own the site, it is able to undertake projects that would doubtless become problematic under the oversight of professional historians. Furthermore, while many other sites, including the Leistikowstraße building and the section of the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Straße, are subject to protection orders as historically signifcant structures, the Human Rights Centre has not sought such status for the former prison buildings. This means that, amongst other projects, the organization has been able to run a set of activities for socially disadvantaged single mothers in cooperation with the city’s social services, which have included the building of an illustrated climbing wall at the rear of main prison building, representing the struggle of GDR citizens to overcome the inner-Ger- man border. I would argue that what we fnd at this site is an alternative construction of authenticity in the context of a memorial museum, which relies less on academically sanctioned approaches to archaeological and documentary evidence that aim to present visitors with as much verifable information as possible. Rather, the Cottbus Memorial Museum stresses an authenticity of place defned by the self-expression of those who suffered at the site. This is not to say that the Human Rights Centre is not interested in a historically accurate understanding of the buildings and their function, but that the needs and wishes of the victims, defned in terms of membership of the association, are considered to be at least as important. It is also worth noting that many of the individual projects that contribute to the memorial museum are funded on a small scale by individual institutions, not all of them directly linked to state-led efforts 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 281 to come to terms with the GDR past. For instance, the installation of new seminar rooms in 2014, which necessitated the reconfguration of some of the original cells within the building, was funded via a joint project with the regional television programme 96 Stunden (96 Hours), in which volunteers take on a major building project for a charity within eight days and nights. This is part of an overall strategy that has clearly allowed the Human Rights Centre to develop the site in relative autonomy from the principles applied at other memorial museums within the Brandenburg Foundation and other state-funded structures. The Cottbus Memorial Museum also distinguishes itself from the Leistikowstraße exhibition and the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum in terms of its willingness to interpret the suffering of the victims in relation to contemporary issues, thus emphasizing the relevance of their experiences for German society. What is notable, however, is that the relevance attributed to that suffering is not framed in terms of the anti-communist or anti-totalitarian message that victims’ organizations have campaigned for elsewhere. In the case of Cottbus, as the emphasis on human rights in the title of the association that runs the site might suggest, the relationship of the history of the prison to contemporary human rights issues is emphasized. On entering the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with a series of questions and statements written in different type faces across the walls. These include: “What I do in my private life is nobody else’s business”; “I’ll decide if I want to become a soldier or not”; “Are you allowed to wear whatever you want?”; “Do you download music from the internet?”; and “Is surveillance undemocratic, if…” Although many of these questions are relevant to the SED regime, and indeed to the National Socialist dictatorship that is also discussed in the exhibition, questions about internet use and the possible justifcations for state surveillance clearly suggest connections to contemporary debates in Germany, as evidenced for example, by the emergence of the Pirate Party advocating free and unregulated access to data by via the internet and protests in the late 2000s over state attempts to monitor and control internet usage; protests that sometimes referred to such measures in comparison with the activities of the GDR’s security service as “Stasi 2.0.” The questions and statements, although often applicable to the GDR, are nevertheless formulated in a historically non-specifc way: the statement “The Party is always right!”, a slogan of the SED in the era of Stalinism, is an exception here. 282 D. CLARKE

At various points throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to refect on their own views of human rights issues emerging from the historical material using interactive display elements. These are stations with removable sheets of paper where visitors can record their own thoughts. For example, in relation to the theme of travel restrictions in the GDR, visitors are invited to place crosses on a map of the world indicating where they would like to travel. In another case, National Socialist violations of the right to privacy are the starting point for visitors to indicate their own beliefs about the permissibility of state surveillance. In the fnal room of the frst-foor exhibit, these sheets are then displayed to give visitors a sense of how others have responded before them. This room also contains displays of material both from Amnesty International, which campaigned for the release of prisoners from Cotttbus, and the International Society for Human Rights (IGFM). As already discussed in Chapter 3, the German section of the IGFM was particularly active in publicizing human rights abuses in the GDR. Indeed, a number of former Cottbus prisoners became involved with the organization after their release to the Federal Republic. The activities of the IGFM are given prominence with a text-board detailing its activities. However, the campaigns by Amnesty and the IGFM that are highlighted here are by no means restricted to issues from the Cold War. There are also posters referring to campaigns on human rights in Tibet, female genital mutilation, and the right of children in developing countries to education. By framing the fates of political inmates at Cottbus in terms of human rights, and indeed human rights activism, and by establishing links between their experiences and human rights questions with contemporary relevance in Germany and beyond, the exhibition makes a clear case for placing the history of the prison in a wider context. Rather than simply presenting the evidence relevant to understanding the site’s historical function, the exhibition guides the visitor in terms of the kinds of conclusion that should be drawn from prisoners’ experiences. By seeking to stimulate thinking about human rights, and by pointing to the kinds of human rights campaigns relevant in the post-Cold War world, the exhibition calls on visitors to see the suffering of political prisoners in the GDR as a lesson in the need to actively defend human rights in the present. If we understand the design and presentation of the Cottbus site as a form of communication in its own right, how then does this relate to the scientifc and protest communication that, in the other examples discussed above, have been in confict? The frst thing to note is that the 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 283

Human Rights Centre as an organization remains a victims’ organization, committed to producing protest communication as it has been understood in the rest of this study, namely as a demand for recognition on behalf of victims. Such a demand for recognition, in its very formulation, implies that victims have not yet been afforded their proper status in contemporary society. The design of the Memorial Museum’s exhibition seeks to address that defcit, not only by prioritizing the individual testimonies presented in the site, but by demonstrating the contemporary relevance of those testimonies to issues around human rights, freedom and democracy. It is important to note, however, that the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum chooses not to make a claim for such relevance only in relation to the danger of a potentially re-emergent communist threat. It fnds a way of constructing victimhood and its commemoration as essential to contemporary society, while implicitly acknowledging the potentially divisive nature of any insistence on anti-communist rhetoric. In forgoing the imposition of such a univocal message, the Human Rights Centre arguably acknowledges that this kind of communication has had a de-legitimizing effect on other victims’ organizations where they have sought to intervene in debates around memorial museums. While the design of the Cottbus exhibition nevertheless constructs a narrative focused on the importance of victims’ experience for contemporary society, thus stressing the need for the recognition of that suffering, its design incorporates important moments of refection for visitors that are designed to be open-ended. Visitors have to decide for themselves what conclusions they will draw about contemporary human rights issues from the experience of political prisoners in the GDR, even while their relevance is insisted upon. This approach appears to acknowledge the expectations created by heritage organizations and museum professionals operating within the scientifc system. While such organizations’ decen- tering of the victim perspective is rejected, the exhibition’s emphasis on visitors reaching their own conclusions takes up an important aspect of the methodology favoured by many museum professionals. While the Human Rights Centre therefore does not cease to function as a protest organization as I have defned such organizations in this study, it has nevertheless undergone some measure of “structural drift” (Luhmann 1998, p. 862) in systems theory terms, becoming (in a limited fashion) more like the heritage organizations of the scientifc system that other victims’ organizations have sought to challenge. While the 284 D. CLARKE strategy of the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum to exist outside of the Brandenburg Foundation has led to a relatively precarious situation, it has allowed the Human Rights Centre as a victims’ organization to establish its own preferred practices in terms of use and presentation of the site. However, it has not given the organization entirely free reign. The activists at the site have clearly been conscious of the need to present an exhibition that, while still speaking to the priorities of victims, does not radically contravene the norms of academically rigorous heritage sites. In this way, the Cottbus memorial museum has avoided the kind of controversy that can be seen in relation to the Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum. At no point has the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum been subject to sustained criticism from the academic community or museum professionals, which has doubtless made it easier for the federal government, the state government of Brandenburg and the city of Cottbus to arrive at a more permanent funding mechanism, although with continued fnancial input from the Human Rights Centre itself (Wähling 2015). As none of these potential funders seeks to require of the association that it changes its approach, it would appear that this victims’ organization has found a way of communicating its protest within the memorial museum space in such a way that it serves the need for recognition expressed by its members, while at the same time accommodating approaches compatible with the mainstream of museological practice advocated by those heritage organizations dominated by professional historians and museum-makers.

Conclusion The memorial museum is a contemporary institution of historical memory that seeks to address a range of social functions, not the least of which is to commemorate the experience of victims. In Germany today, the political system places faith in the memorial museum’s ability to educate citizens into appropriately democratic attitudes, yet for the most part hands the running of such institutions over to heritage organizations within the system of science that have their own professional norms and insist upon their academic authority. Where victim organizations have communicated protest against what they perceive as the lack of appropriate recognition of the meaning of their suffering in the memorial museum context, they have challenged that authority. However, while victims’ protests leave such conficts open 5 MEMORIAL MUSEUMS FOR THE VICTIMS OF STATE … 285 to politicization by parties at specifc junctures, that politicization serves the needs of those parties and does not ultimately guarantee that victims’ challenges to the authority of heritage professionals will be successful. Furthermore, the political system’s ability to challenge the academic authority of heritage organizations reaches its limits where that interference may itself become politicizable. In some cases, victims’ organizations are able to take control of these institutions. In such cases, they may opt for a victim-centred approach that remains within the system of protest, as in the contested Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum. Here victimhood is constructed as part of an ongoing anti-communist struggle, while the multiperspectivity and historicization encouraged by mainstream museology is rejected. In contrast, the Cottbus memorial museum shows that victim-dominated heritage organizations can develop a strategy in which enough account is taken of professional norms of museology that funders will be able to commit to supporting them in the knowledge that the presentation of the site is not likely, in its turn, to become the subject of political controversy. In this case, the Human Rights Centre has successfully combined the demand of victims for recognition, constructing the experience of victimhood as an important reference-point for German society’s ongoing engagement with issues of human rights. Victim experiences are given a central importance, while also leaving space for visitor refection that avoids reducing the lessons of those experiences to a straightforwardly anti-communist message. The Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum provides one example of a victim-led memorial museum project that has been able to manage this balancing act, but the process of memorializing oppression in the GDR is not yet complete, and it remains to be seen how well victims’ organizations who seek to instigate or further develop memorial museum projects will deal with this ongoing challenge. What is clear, however, is that any victim engagement with memorial museums also implies negotiation between competing constructions of victimhood and its relevance to contemporary society. Only by fnding ways of understanding and presenting victim experience in ways that resonate with contemporary concerns in the wider society can victims achieve the kind of recognition they desire.

Archival Source BT-Drs. Drucksache des Deutschen Bundestages. = 286 D. CLARKE

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Conclusion: The Future of Victimhood

Victimhood is central to processes of transitional justice and the contemporary politics of memory, not just in Germany, but also in the context of a developing global movement to offer reparation and recognition to those who have suffered human rights abuses under non-democratic regimes. The category of victimhood, as I noted in the introduction to this study, is also important for all kinds of other social movements that seek to redress historical wrongs, even within democratic societies. This study has sought to argue that victimhood is constructed in different ways by different social systems, and by organizations within those systems. In other words, the defnition and the social and political signif- icance of what it means to be a victim are the subject of communications from multiple sources, determined by the symbolic media of communication (Luhmann 1992, pp. 194–198) of the various systems concerned and their attendant codes, the latter being specifc to the historical context. I have demonstrated that the meaning attributed to victimhood in the case of crimes of state socialism in Germany has been the outcome of the interaction between the political system, the system of protest and, in some cases more than others, the system of science and the system of mass media, as described in Luhmann’s theory of social systems. Or, at least, I have demonstrated how Luhmann’s theory of functionally differentiated social systems and the means by which they produce their communications can help us to understand how the signifcance attributed to victimhood emerges in a particular context.

This approach does not, however, amount to an explanation of how German society has reached a consensus about the signifcance of the suffering of specifc groups of individuals under the Soviet occupation and, later, under Socialist Unity Party (SED) rule in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). As I have demonstrated in Chapter 4, in my discussion of the evolution of different forms of compensation for those who were persecuted in the GDR, a common language appears to have emerged, which tends to frame victims in general and former political prisoners in particular as “mothers and fathers of democracy,” to use Arnold Vaatz’s words (BT-Pl. 15/88, p. 7788). Politicians of all stripes now tend to present those who suffered repression in the GDR, along with the civil rights activists of the 1980s, as having resisted SED rule and contributed to the ultimate re-unifcation of Germany. Victims’ organizations have both contributed to and taken up this discourse. Nevertheless, from a constructivist point of view, informed by Luhmann’s work, this apparently shared meaning masks systemic differences. Where the political system produces communications about victims, it still does so in the medium of power, and victims’ organizations still produce their communications for the most part in the medium of protest. This coincidence of apparently shared framings of victimhood belies more fundamental systemic differences. These differences can help us to explain how, even in situations where politicians and victim activists appear to be speaking the same language, they still do so within different social systems and to different ends. This can contribute to feelings of frustration and disappointment on the part of victims, who can be left with the sense that politicians, although they are willing to pay lip-service to the victims’ cause, seem less willing to follow through on meeting their demands for recognition through specifc measures. The relationship between victims’ organizations and the political system is a compelling one, however, despite victims’ apparently inevitable disappointment. As I argued in Chapter 2, while the state is increasingly regarded as a source of redress for past injustice, the political system will remain a key addressee of victims’ communications. As Chapter 3 has demonstrated, this state of affairs encourages victims’ organizations to enter into different forms of structural coupling (Luhmann 1996, pp. 122–125) with the political system. Victims’ organizations are caught in a balancing act, in which they are, on the one hand, bound to produce communications to which the political system can respond and, on the 6 CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF VICTIMHOOD 299 other, to offer communications in the moralizing medium of protest that serve the function of mobilizing their members. For victim’s organizations, structural coupling (Luhmann 1996, pp. 122–125) with or even penetration by the political system (Luhmann 1987, p. 290) may appear to promise a direct line to those with the power to implement the measures victims demand, but runs the risk of appearing to fail to challenge the shortcomings of the political system and therefore of losing all claim to a protest function. At the same time, failing to maintain some form of structural coupling with the political system risks the appearance of irrelevance to those who might introduce concrete measures to the beneft of victims. As we can see from the examples of the Association of the Victims of Stalinism and the Working Group of Former Political Prisoners in the Soviet Zone of Occupation/ the GDR founded within the SPD, victims’ organizations can nevertheless seek to present themselves as offering certain services to the political system, while at the same time attempting to maintain mobilizing communication addressed to their members. The apparent consensus about the meaning and signifcance of those who were persecuted under the Soviet occupation and in the GDR has ultimately had the consequence of leading to an increasing de-politicization of the issue of how their fate should be addressed. This is not to say that individual politicians may not from time to time make reference to victims’ suffering in order to criticize their rivals, but rather that this political talk (Luhmann 2011, p. 124) does not necessarily imply a desire to re-open the question of those measures that might still be applied to address the fate of victims. As the issue of forced labour in the GDR’s prisons and the fate of young people in its children’s homes shows, this means that victims’ organizations must seek ways to re-politicize their situation, presenting it as un-resolved and emphasizing moral demands to the political system for further action. In these latter two cases, media scandals have offered a starting point for such protest communication. As the case of those fghting for compensation in the children’s homes and Jugendwerkhöfe of the GDR demonstrates, however, such a strategy may also involve the re-interpretation of victim experience, abandoning the dominant construction already adopted by the political system where this makes it diffcult for as-yet- unrecognized groups to make their claim to victim status. Although the political system is an important addressee of such communication, I have also demonstrated that, in another signifcant area of transitional justice and memory politics, namely the creation of memorial 300 D. CLARKE museums, the involvement of the system of science provides a further source of controversy. As Chapter 5 shows, the political system in Germany today tends to hold such cultural institutions at arms’ length, endorsing their independence at the institutional level. This does not mean that the actions of heritage organizations may not become politicized, however, as the cases of the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum and the Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum clearly show. Nevertheless, this institutional structure, which has historical roots in Germany’s political culture, is ultimately diffcult for politicians to challenge without such challenge itself becoming politicized. At the same time, museum professionals and historians engaged in the creation of memorial museums insist upon the priority of academic rigour as they conceive it, leaving only a circumscribed role for victims and, from the point of view victims’ organizations, failing to provide the recognition that they would regard as the primary purpose of memorial museums. The case of the Cottbus Prison Memorial Museum demonstrates, however, that heritage organizations can be run with a measure of success by victims’ organizations. This does not necessarily lead, as Carola Rudnik (2011) fears, to a presentation of the site in question that aban- dons the established academic and museological norms prevalent in those heritage organizations located within the system of science. The Cottbus Human Rights Centre has clearly recognized that its future fnancial security depends on its ability to demonstrate that it can operate according to such norms, at the same time as it seeks to place the recognition of victims and their suffering at the heart of its presentation of the site. Here we see a certain amount of “structural drift” (Luhmann 1998, p. 862), in which an organization located primarily within the system of protest has imported certain codes from another system (here, the scientifc system) in order to maintain its protest communication. As we continue to see memorial museums emerge at sites of state socialist repression, often with the involvement of victims’ associations (such as the Hoheneck Memorial Museum currently being developed in this former women’s prison), this may prove to be a viable model for reconciling these competing systemic priorities. It is also noteworthy that my analysis of the development of memorial museums has uncovered a range of constructions of the social and political role of victims by victims’ organizations in different circumstances. The notion of the victim of state socialism in the Soviet Zone and in the GDR as a heroic resister to state socialism and a harbinger of German unity has 6 CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF VICTIMHOOD 301 certainly come to dominate in the national-level political debate since the early 2000s, and victims’ organizations have often adopted this discourse. Their mobilization of it in debates about memorial museum sites has been uneven, however. While it was a strong feature of victim responses to the debate over the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum in the Bernauer Straße, it was less pronounced in victims’ protest communications in the case of the Leistikowstraße controversy, and was signifcantly modifed by the Human Rights Centre Cottbus in its emphasis on victims’ stories and their relevance to contemporary debates about human rights. This diversity shows that victims’ groups are far from a being a mon- olithic bloc of anti-communist fanatics, as some have implied. Rather, their organizations are capable of constructing new versions of what it means to be a victim of state socialism under different circumstances. What links these constructions, however, is an emphasis on recognition according to Axel Honneth’s (1992) model. In other words, victims’ organizations are looking for ways for their members’ experiences to matter to contemporary society; not just as one element in the historical mosaic of Germany’s post-war history, but as an essential point of orientation for the future of their country and its values. The demand for particular kinds of compensation or for particular kinds of representation of the victim experience in memorial museums is always framed in such terms, even if individual cases demonstrate that the values victims wish to represent are subject to an ongoing process of reformulation. In the introduction to this study, I stressed that the analysis presented here should not be understood as a work of advocacy. To be sure, I have not proposed a better way of providing victims with the recognition that they seek or of reconciling the competing logics of the social systems that play a role in providing that recognition. Nevertheless, the application of a constructivist approach to the problem of victimhood and its construction in German society in the case of the victims of state socialism has pointed to certain key insights that could have an impact on contemporary debates over the treatment of victims of historical human rights abuses, both in Germany and more widely. Above all, it seems inevitable that the political system will not meet all of victims’ requirements in terms of providing recognition, whether through compensation, memorialization or others means. The fate of victims is politicizable under certain circumstances, and victims’ organizations themselves will be drawn into a reframing of their members’ situation in such a way as to respond to that politicization by actors within 302 D. CLARKE the political system, without this necessarily guaranteeing that these organizations will achieve their goals. The tendency of victims’ organizations, when they fail to achieve those goals through engagement with the political system, will be to fall back into a moralizing protest communication. While such communication may maintain the mobilization of members, it arguably also fuels a sense of betrayal and disillusionment with the political system and with the social environment more widely. Victims’ organizations in this and other contexts might alleviate such feelings through a more realistic acknowledgement that, although the political system remains a primary addressee, there will always be limits to their ability to convert political support into the specifc measures for transitional justice and historical memory that they advocate. Equally, politicians have a responsibility to moderate their politicization of the issue of victimhood, given the expectations this raises among victims’ organizations. If one of the aims of transitional justice is to provide citizens with a sense of trust in democracy, the creation of the impression that politicians exploit the cause of victims for political advantage without following through on providing them with the recognition they demand is not helpful, as it leaves politics open to moralized protest that can focus on the duplicity of the system as a whole. While it is arguable that the temptation to favour talk over action is inherent in the democratic political system as described by Luhmann, politicians might moderate this effect by exercising greater caution in the politicization of the victims’ cause. In a similar fashion, conficts between victims’ organizations and heritage organizations in the development of memorial museums might be mitigated through a greater sensitivity on both sides to the systemic logic that determines the communications produced by both kinds of organization. Although museum professionals and historians have in some cases been vigorous in defending their theories and methodologies against the claims of victims, this essentially defensive position might be tempered with an acknowledgement that the demands of victims for particular forms of representation are not (or are not merely) the product of ideologically questionable positions, but rather result from a competing construction of victimhood that has its own validity within the system of protest. Conversely, a greater understanding among victims of the reasons for museum professionals’ discourse on professionalization and historicization might help them to moderate their moralizing communication on the actions of individual museum-makers. This does not mean that either 6 CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE OF VICTIMHOOD 303 victims’ organizations or heritage organizations can simply abandon the symbolic media that determine the nature of their own communication, but they might become more able to acknowledge the limitations inherent in communications produced by them in that medium. Given the widespread expectation that the demise of non-democratic regimes in the future will be followed by forms of transitional justice and policies for memory with a focus on the fate of victims, these insights are potentially signifcant for managing the tensions that may emerge between the various social systems involved. In other cases where the construction of the signifcance of victimhood is at stake in terms of its social and political value in the present, and where the measures to be taken are dependent on such constructions, politicians, museum professionals and historians, and organizations representing victims themselves might draw on the insights from this study to develop a more realistic understanding of what the systemic determinants of the likely outcomes will be. In a modernity characterized by the functional differentiation of social systems, no one system can impose its logic on any other, but each should still be capable of acknowledging the factors that determine the communications of others. For victims’ organizations in particular, this may unfortunately result in a recognition of the limits of what they can achieve.

Archival Source BT-Pl. Plenarprotokoll des Deutschen Bundestages. =

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A Association of Political Prisoners of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Soviet System (VPH), 104–106, German Democratic Republic, 111, 137 127 Association of the Victims of Stalinism Adenauer, Konrad, 81, 82, 85, 115, (VOS), 24, 79, 81–97, 99–106, 117, 148, 149 109, 111, 112, 117–119, 137, Administrative Rehabilitation Law, 138, 151–155, 158–161, 167– 162 169, 171, 174, 180, 182, 196, Agency of the Federal Commissioner 197, 199, 248, 274, 299 for the Stasi Records (BStU), 5, 6 Association of Victims of Political Ahlemeyer, Heinrich W., 64, 78 Repression and Resisters to the Amato, Joseph A., 1, 2 Soviet Occupation and SED Anderson, Benedict, 35, 36 Dictatorship in the GDR (VpV), Ansorg, Leonore, 16, 120 197, 198 anti-communism, 81, 126 autopoiesis, 44, 48, 71–73 anti-Semitism, 198, 266 Apartheid, 37 ARD, 200 B Assmann, Aleida, 34, 226 Baader, Andreas, 194 Association for a Memorial Museum Badiou, Alain, 34 in the Former KGB Prison in Barzel, Rainer, 129 Potsdam, 259 Beattie, Andrew, 20, 22, 270

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 305 to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 D. Clarke, Constructions of Victimhood, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Confict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04804-4 306 Index

Beer, Kornelia, 14 Brebeck, Wulff E., 228 Benz, Benjamin, 149 Brown, Wendy, 60, 61 Benz, Wolfgang, 266 Buchenwald, 221, 227, 264 Berlin, 5, 7, 25, 42, 80–82, 85–88, Buckley-Zistel, Susanne, 273 104, 105, 118, 120–122, 125, Bull, Anna, v 126, 134, 135, 169, 171, Bündnis 90, 166, 176 174, 177, 199, 227–229, 234, Bürgerbüro, 176, 177, 198, 199 235, 240–243, 245, 250, 251, 253–255, 258, 268, 273, 274 Berlin Senate, 126, 234–236, 239, C 242, 245, 249, 254 Calls for Help from Over There Berlin Wall, 9, 24, 42, 88, 107, 113, (HvD), 107, 109 234, 237, 239, 240, 243–245, Camphausen, Gabriele, 240 249, 250, 253–256, 268, 277, Card, Claudia, 13, 14 279, 280 Career Rehabilitation Law, 162 Berlin Wall Association, 240, 254, 256 Carter, Jimmy, 96 Berlin Wall Memorial Museum, 234, Catholic Church, 189 253, 255–257, 259, 267, 268, Center for Contemporary History, 204 271, 281, 300, 301 Central Council of Jews in Germany, Bernauer Straße, 234, 235, 238–244, 197 249–257, 280, 301 Checkpoint Charlie, 243–248, 250, Beutelsbach Consensus, 230 254, 255, 268 Beyer, Gerhard, 94 child abuse, 182, 190, 192, 207 Board of East German Associations children, 183, 184, 187–191, 194, (OKV), 203 230, 282 Bock, Petra, 181 children’s homes, 25, 182–185, 187, Böckh, Jürgen, 150 189–194, 206, 207, 299 Bohley, Bärbel, 7, 175–177, 179 Chilla, Detlef, 180 Boll, Friedholm, 113, 114, 116, 117, Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 119 10, 94, 114, 115, 117, 118, 125, Bonn, 10, 87, 88, 94, 109, 117, 121, 126, 129, 130, 133, 149, 156, 123, 125, 134, 138 157, 165, 166, 170–177, 179– Borbe, Ansgar, 16 182, 241–243, 245, 249, 255, Börggrafe, Henning, 206 258, 268–270, 272, 274, 276 Bouris, Erica, 3 Christianity, 1 Brandenburg, 26, 190, 258–260, Circle of Victims and Surviving 268–271, 275, 276, 281, 284 Relatives of Victims of the Berlin Brandenburg Foundation for Wall and the Inner-German Memorial Museums, 260, 268, Border, 238 271, 272, 280 civil rights movement, 5, 7, 164, 166, Brandt, Willy, 93, 121, 123, 127, 135 174–179, 201 Index 307 civil society, 7, 18, 57, 86, 100, 101, democracy, 3, 9, 17, 34, 35, 39–41, 112, 176, 177, 185, 193, 227, 60, 89, 122, 128, 132, 136, 148, 258 156, 158, 161, 166, 167, 171, Clay, Lucius D., 81 172, 174, 175, 178–181, 231, Cold War, 3, 11, 17, 21, 25, 33, 64, 233, 241, 251, 255, 283, 302 75, 76, 80, 82, 86, 92–95, 104, détente, 11, 17, 93, 95–98, 121, 122, 114, 135, 136, 167, 170, 171, 124, 130, 135, 247 196, 235, 241, 245, 252, 282 Detjen, Marion, 254 communication, 23–26, 44–49, 51, Deutsche Bahn, 204, 206 52, 55–57, 59–65, 71–74, 77, DIE LINKE, 174, 181, 182, 255, 78, 87, 103, 107, 111, 112, 114, 269–271, 274, 276 120, 123, 127, 129, 133, 136– Diepgen, Eberhard, 241, 242 138, 146, 147, 161, 189, 200, Dombrowski, Dieter, 206, 276 201, 206, 222, 224, 225, 230, Druliolle, Vincent, 13 231, 239, 241, 248, 255–258, Duwe, Georg, 82 268, 271, 282, 283, 297, 299, 300, 302, 303 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), E 113, 116, 120 Eastern Offce of the Social compensation, 4, 17, 21–23, 25, 33, Democratic Party of German, 39–42, 55, 63, 82, 83, 85, 86, 118, 119 91, 93, 94, 104, 105, 109, 118, Eastern Offces, 81, 114 133–135, 138, 145–151, 153, East German Evangelical Church, 175, 155–170, 172–174, 179–182, 268 186–188, 190, 193–208, 247, economic system, 44, 53, 56, 58, 60 298, 299, 301 Eich, Klaus-Peter, 238, 239 Compensation Pension Law, 173 Eichmann, Adolf, 2 complexity reduction, 59, 71, 73 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 80 concentration camp, 83, 168, 196, Elster, Jon, 12, 64 227, 260, 264 Enquete-Kommission, 10, 39, 40 constructionism, 49 environment, 45–51, 71–73, 75, 77, constructivism, 43, 49–51 78, 87, 147, 188, 189, 225, 230, Cooke, Paul, 6–8, 10 257, 258, 302 Cottbus Declaration, 268 Eppler, Ehrhard, 131 Criminal Rehabilitation Law, 162 Equalization of Burdens Law (LAG), Czechoslovakia, 81, 110, 196 149 Czerwick, Edwin, 72, 114, 115 Erfurt Declaration, 178 Esposito, Elena, 35

D Dahn, Daniela, 9, 178 F De Greiff, Pablo, 38, 40, 145 Faust, Siegmar, 106 308 Index

Fechter, Peter, 245 G Federal Centre for Political Education, Gauck, Reinhard, 108, 109 7 Gedenkstätte, 222, 240 Federal Compensation Law, 156, 168 Gedenkstättenrundbrief, 228, 229 Federal Foundation for the Study of German Communist Party, 5, 113 the Communist Dictatorship in German Democratic Republic, 4, 39, East Germany, 7, 22, 203 75, 146, 221, 298 Federal Law on Expellees and German Historical Museum (DHM), Refugees (BFVG), 152 235, 236 Federal Memorial Concept, 22, 221, German Red Cross, 101 226, 228, 270, 273, 280 German Trades Unions Association, Federal Ministry for All-German 118 Affairs, 81, 151 Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau, Federal Ministry for Inner-German 183, 185, 186, 191 Relations, 101 Giersch, Jutta, 97, 101, 106 Federal Ministry for Refugees and Gießen, 100 Expellees, 154 Glees, Anthony, 18 Federal Ministry of the Interior, 100 Gleicke, Iris, 203, 205 Federal Republic of Germany, 57, 80, Göhl, Eberhard, 96, 106 100, 155 Goldfarb, Rafail, 263 Fighting Group Against Inhumanity Green Party, 134, 164 (KgU), 80, 82, 107 Greifenstamm, Erdmann, 84 Finkelmeier, Konrad, 264 Gueffroy, Kerstin, 184 First World War, 1, 23, 151 Fischer, Manfred, 235, 239, 241, 254 Fisch, Mascha M., 97, 98 H Flierl, Thomas, 243, 249, 250, 255 Hacker, Hans-Joachim, 166 forced labour, 25, 196–199, 201–208, Harrison, Hope M., 234, 241, 245 299 Haug, Verena, 226, 227 Forum of Memorial Museums, 228 Havel, Václav, 12 Franke, Egon, 107, 126 Heidemeyer, Helge, 152, 154, 158, Free University of Berlin, 276 159 Freiheitsglocke, Die, 81, 83, 84, 89, 96, Heil, Hubertus, 135 102, 161, 167, 169 Heindt, Heinrich, 264 Freud, Sigmund, 3 Hellmann, Kai-Uwe, 59, 61–64 Fricke, Karl Wilhelm, 93 Helsinki Accords, 96, 102 Fulbrook, Mary, 8 Helwig-Wilson Hans-Joachim, 126, Funke, Rainer, 164 135, 136 Furth, Patrick, 203 Index 309 heritage organizations, 223, 225, Initiative Group Closed Juvenile 231–233, 266, 267, 273, 274, Detention Centre Torgau, 185 283–285, 300, 302, 303 International Labour Organization hero, 96, 247, 255 (ILO), 202, 204, 205 heroicization, 171, 175, 247 International Society for Human heroism, 171 Rights (IGFM), 106–112, 137, Herzog, Roman, 179 197, 282 Heym, Stefan, 178 International Society for Social Work, 101 Hildebrandt, Alexandra, 244, 254 Investigative Committee of Free Hildebrandt, Rainer, 80, 107, 244 Lawyers (UfJ), 41, 80–82 historian, 18, 197, 199, 201, 202, Ireland, 189, 192 227, 228, 251, 259, 266, 267, 273, 276, 277 Historians’ Debate, 17 J Hohenschönhausen Memorial Jacoby, Tasmin Amanda, 13, 15, 23 Museum, 199, 273–275, 284, Jahn, Roland, 201 285 Jander, Martin, 19, 266 Holocaust, 2, 3, 17, 18, 33, 34, 54, Janka, Walter, 6 82, 83, 198, 227, 242, 246, 248 Jewish Claims Conference, 82, 197 Honecker, Erich, 131 Jews, 17, 159, 198 Honneth, Axel, 62, 63, 301 Jones, Sara, 265, 273, 274 Horway, Rita, 181 Jugendwerkhof, 183, 185, 186, 191 House at Checkpoint Charlie, 244, 251 Hughes, Michael, 149, 151 K human rights, 3, 5, 7, 15–18, 33–35, Kalweit, Wilhelm, 82 48, 93, 96, 97, 99, 102, 106– Kaulfuß, Joachim, 277 110, 124, 128, 132, 167, 175, KGB, 259, 271 244, 259, 276, 277, 280–285, King, Michael, 52 297, 300, 301 Kinkel, Klaus, 163 Human Rights Centre Cottbus, 275, Kneer, Georg, 47 301 Knigge, Volkhard, 227 Huster, Ernst-Ulrich, 150 Knöchel, Richard, 169 Köhler, Werner, 87–89, 104, 117, 160 Kohl, Helmut, 10, 108, 163, 176 I Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff, 237–242, IKEA, 195, 199, 200, 202, 203, 206, 244, 252, 253, 257 208 Kolbe, Uwe, 99 310 Index

König, Helmut, 37 190, 200, 224, 225, 230, 231, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 179 257, 272, 299, 302 Korspeter, Lisa, 156 Lutz, Thomas, 229 Krafft, Manfred, 277 Luxemburg, Rosa, 131, 255 Kreutzer, Hermann, 120–122, 125, 130 Kuhn, Gino, 279 M Kurt Schumacher Circle, 120, 121 Magdalene Sisters, The, 189 Makarenko, Anton, 183, 184 Marienfelde Refugee Centre Museum, L 253 Lane, David, 4, 5 martyr, 247, 256 Langenbacher, Eric, 34 McAdams, James A., 7, 24 Lange, Roland, 208 Meckel, Markus, 203 Lässig, Roland, 174 media, 6, 36, 45–48, 73, 77, 97, Law for the Cleansing of SED 99, 110, 125, 138, 147, 185, Injustice, 162 188–190, 194–197, 199–201, Law on Aid to Former Political 203, 206–209, 244, 249, 274, Prisoners (HHG), 91, 94, 104, 279, 297, 299, 303 105, 109, 118, 155–158, 160, memorial, 22, 25, 40, 57, 174, 162, 164, 167, 169, 172, 182 185, 191, 198, 206, 221–255, Law on Maintenance for War Victims 257–267, 270, 272, 273, 275, (BVG), 149, 154 279–281, 283, 285, 299–302 Law on Returnees, 152 Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Law on the Transfer of Pensions Europe, 246 (RÜG), 165, 168 memorial museum, 17, 22, 26, 40, League of the Victims of Stalinist 185, 191–193, 205, 221–223, Persecution (BSV), 167, 169– 225–230, 232–234, 236, 239– 171, 258 243, 249, 251, 252, 254–256, Lehmann, Heinz, 123, 127, 134 258–260, 262, 263, 265–273, Lehnecke, Julian, 118 275, 276, 278–281, 283–285, Leistikowstraße Memorial Museum, 300, 301 258, 260, 267, 269, 272, 300 Memorial Museums Newsletter, 228 Lengsfeld, Vera, 274 memory politics, 4, 22, 37, 43, 48, 55, Liberty Bell, 81 57, 234, 260, 271, 299 Liebknecht, Karl, 131 Merkel, Angela, 165, 175 Lindenberger, Thomas, 7, 8 Mihai, Mihaela, 41 Lötszch, Gesine, 274 Ministry for State Security (MfS), 5, Löwenthal, Gerhard, 97, 108 39, 176, 222 Luhmann, Niklas, 23, 43–51, 53–56, Ministry of Education of the German 58–61, 71–79, 103, 137, 188, Democratic Republic, 7 Index 311

Ministry of the Interior of the GDR, Odenwald School, 194 100 ordoliberalism, 149 Möbius, Peter, 235 Organization for Security and Moon, Claire, 146 Cooperation in Europe, 96 morality, 3, 4, 61–64 Ostalgie, 8 Morsch, Günter, 260 Ostpolitik, 93, 95–97, 99, 101–103, Moyn, Samuel, 17, 35, 96 106, 116, 119, 122, 124–127, Mullan, Peter, 189 129, 130 Museum for Germany History, 235 museum professional, 22, 25, 26, 50, 54, 222, 225–227, 229–234, P 241, 254–256, 259, 260, 267, Paris Treaty, 114 272–274, 283 Parliamentary Committee on All- German Affairs, 154 Parson, Talcott, 50 N Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), Nassehi, Armin, 47, 58 134, 135, 169, 174, 175, 178, nationalism, 36 180, 242, 243, 248, 254, 255, National Socialism, 10, 17, 19, 20, 258 83, 84, 104, 112, 116, 148, 150, peaceful revolution, 8, 130, 146, 179 156–164, 168–171, 173, 179, penetration, 77, 86, 92, 299 196–199, 201–203, 206, 221, pension, 135, 151, 160, 162, 165, 226–228, 242, 260, 264 166, 169, 171–174, 180–182, Neubert, Ehrhart, 18, 171, 175, 177 193, 195, 199, 205, 207 Neubert, Hildigund, 198, 199 Penzel, Gerhard, 262 Neumann, Bernd, 269, 276 perpetrator, 12, 40, 165 Neumann, Eva-Maria, 11 Pirate Party, 281 Neumann, Franz, 116 Platzeck, Matthias, 268 New Social Movements, 76 Poland, 81, 88, 196 Niethammer, Lutz, 83 political education, 92, 101, 229, 230 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2 political parties, 25, 55, 56, 73, 76, Nolan, James, 61 77, 81, 83, 137, 147, 159, 165, Nolte, Ernst, 197 176, 181, 208, 233, 259 Non-governmental organizations political prisoners, 5, 14, 16, 25, 41, (NGOs), 77 79, 88, 89, 91, 97–105, 107– Nooke, Günter, 166, 171, 174, 176 109, 111, 115–120, 122–132, Novick, Peter, 34 153, 155, 157, 159, 165, NSDAP, 80, 84, 117 167–169, 172, 173, 182, 186, 187, 193–200, 202–208, 275, 277–279, 282, 283, 298 O political system, 1, 12, 22–26, 36, 37, Oberländer, Theodor, 156 42–44, 46–48, 50–58, 60–65, 312 Index

73–79, 86–89, 92, 93, 96, 97, 234, 239, 249, 254, 257, 258, 102, 103, 105, 106, 111–114, 267, 268, 274, 278, 283–285, 116, 125–127, 129, 134–138, 297, 298, 300–303 146–148, 161, 179–181, 187– Reconciliation Parish, 235, 236, 240 191, 195, 196, 199, 206–209, Red Army, 259 223, 225, 231, 232, 234, 241, Reese, Eberhard (alias of Sigurd 242, 255–257, 268, 272, 284, Binski), 95–97, 167–169 285, 297–302 Regional Centres for Political politicians, 17, 21, 34–36, 43, 46, Education, 229 50, 54–57, 60, 64, 76, 86, 91, Reichel, Peter, 36 95, 133, 146, 148, 149, 163, Reich, Ines, 259, 266 173, 174, 180, 181, 198, 200, Report Mainz, 200, 201 206–208, 225, 232, 234, 239, Research Group on the SED State, 241, 242, 254, 269, 271, 272, 276 274, 298–300, 302, 303 resistance, 7, 8, 81, 85, 88–90, 92, politics of memory, 1, 19, 23, 33, 35, 94, 99, 100, 104, 108, 114, 120, 38, 43, 48, 50, 52, 59, 63, 178, 126, 132, 146, 152, 154, 155, 227, 269, 297 157, 170, 172, 174, 181, 187, Pollack, Detlef, 176 190, 195, 242, 244, 248, 251, Poppe, Ulrike, 22, 39 256, 274 Porth, Max, 264 Rieke, Dieter, 117, 121, 123, 126, Portuguese revolution, 37 128 Prague embassy crisis, 110 Rothenbächer, Wulf, 106 protest, 11, 24–26, 40, 56–64, 72, Rothert, Margot, 277 75–79, 86–88, 92, 93, 99, Russian Federation, 260, 261 102, 103, 105, 110–113, 115, 134–138, 146, 147, 161, 176, 193, 200–202, 206, 223, 225, S 232–234, 239, 248, 252, 257, Sabrow, Martin, 228, 265, 270 258, 266, 268, 271, 272, 274, Sachse, Christian, 19, 199–203, 205 275, 282–285, 297–302 Sachsenhausen, 83, 221, 260 Saunders, Anna, 246 Saxony-Anhalt, 199 R Schacht, Ulrich, 130 Radbruch formula, 6 Schirmer, André, 115 Ravensbrück, 264 Schmidt-Pohl, Jürgen, 197 Reagan, Ronald, 107 Scholl, Armin, 50, 51 recognition, 1, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, Schröder, Richard, 203 22, 23, 34, 40, 43, 57, 62, 63, Schumacher, Kurt, 116 85, 91, 125, 136, 146, 148, Schumann, Konrad, 235 151, 155, 157–161, 163, 164, Schuricht, Fritz, 160 169–172, 177, 179–182, 186, Schwartz, Michael, 81 190, 193, 195, 197, 208, 233, scientifc organizations, 225 Index 313 scientifc system, 44, 224, 225, 231– Stalinism, 57, 82, 83, 89, 152, 158, 233, 268, 273, 274, 283, 300 160, 161, 281 screen memory, 3 state socialism, 4, 7, 8, 10–12, 16–20, Second World War, 4, 83, 148, 25, 39–42, 48, 57, 62, 75, 79, 151, 159, 162, 196, 198, 226, 91, 92, 104, 113, 114, 119, 123, 236–238, 253 146–148, 152, 156, 158, 159, SED-Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz, 162, 162, 163, 170, 176, 179, 181, 164, 168, 171, 180, 186 182, 187, 190, 197, 198, 207, Seeheim Circle, 121 208, 227, 233, 234, 242–244, sexual abuse, 194, 195 247, 248, 254, 256, 258, 268, Sierp, Aline, 8, 37 270, 274, 297, 300, 301 Simsa, Ruth, 72, 74, 75, 78 Stephan, Hans, 122 Site of Memory and Encounter in the Stölzel, Christoph, 236 Former Closed Youth Detention Stolpe, Manfred, 268 Centre Torgau, 185 Stöver, Bernd, 80, 81, 88 Smith, Kathleen, 57 structural coupling, 48, 63, 71–76, 87, Social Democratic Party of Germany 103, 104, 111, 138, 147, 257, (SPD), 24, 94, 107, 112–138, 298, 299 154–158, 163–166, 171–176, structural drift, 72, 77, 283, 300 178, 180, 181, 203, 241–243, Strunz, Harald, 165, 170, 257 268–270, 272, 276, 299 Suffering, 1–4, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19–23, Socialist Unity Party (SED), 4–7, 25, 33–35, 38, 43, 57, 60–64, 9–11, 14, 16–24, 39–42, 57, 82, 84, 89–91, 95, 96, 99, 104, 63, 64, 75, 80, 81, 83, 85, 94, 108, 115, 116, 127, 131, 136, 97–99, 103–105, 108–110, 112– 145, 149, 152, 156, 159, 160, 114, 116, 119, 120, 127–133, 163, 169–171, 181, 182, 189, 135, 136, 138, 146, 153, 158, 191, 193, 207, 226–229, 233, 161–178, 180–183, 185–187, 234, 239, 244, 247–249, 251, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201, 202, 254–256, 260, 261, 263, 265, 205, 208, 238, 242, 248, 252, 267, 268, 271, 274, 281–284, 256, 260, 271, 277, 281, 298 298–300 social movements, 57–59, 62–64, 297 systems theory, 49, 50, 56, 60, 61, 64, Sophiengemeinde, 236, 237, 240, 251, 71, 147, 223, 272, 283 253 South Africa, 37, 106 Soviet Military Tribunals (SMTs), 83, T 113, 149 Tappert, Wilhelm, 162, 163 Soviet Special Camp, 260 Templin, Wolfgang, 177, 244 Soviet Union, 6, 17, 57, 88, 114, 116, Thedieck, Franz, 155 196, 199, 205, 259, 261, 262 Thiemann, Ellen, 11, 12 Spiegel, Der, 99, 120, 189 Thomas, Marcel, 222, 231 Sprenger, Johannes, 250 Thornhill, Chris, 52 Stacheldraht, Der, 8, 170, 171 Thuringia, 199 314 Index

Tillich, Ernst, 80 249, 250, 253, 254, 256–258, Tito, Josip Broz, 80 260, 266–268, 271–275, 281, Topography of Terror, 228, 229 283, 285, 298–303 Torgau, 183–186, 190–195 violence, 10, 16, 184, 194, 239, 274 totalitarianism, 10 Violi, Patrizia, 226 transitional justice, 1, 4, 9, 19–24, 33, Vogel, Hans-Jochen, 131 35, 37–39, 41–43, 48, 50, 52, Volkskammer, 5, 25 55, 59, 63, 76, 145, 148, 208, Vollhans, Clemens, 154, 208 223, 297, 299, 302, 303 von Ketschendorf, Peter, 84 Truman, Harry S., 80

W U Wagner, Rainer, 8, 199, 206 Unifcation Treaty, 5, 6, 163, 168 Waldheim Comrades Circle, 248 Union of the Victims’ Organizations Wanka, Johanna, 276 of Communist Dictatorship WDR, 196 (UOKG), 8, 171, 196, 199–203, Weber, Ralf, 186, 187 205–208, 247, 252, 254, 257 Weber, Walter, 158 United Nations, 33, 34 Wegener, Kai, 203 United States of America, 2, 17, 80, Wehner, Herbert, 93, 116, 118 93, 196 Weiland, Alfred, 105, 106 University of Potsdam, 204, 276 Weißfog, Gregor, 14 welfare state, 52, 53, 149, 158, 162, 164 V Welzer, Harald, 228 Vaatz, Arnold, 166, 171, 174, 298 Wensierski, Peter, 189 Vesting, Justus, 202 Wierschin, Edith, 261 victimhood, 1–4, 11–13, 17, 19–21, Wieviorka, Annette, 2 23–25, 37, 42–44, 48, 50–52, Wilke, Christiane, 13 56–58, 63, 65, 76, 78, 81, 83, Wilke, Manfred, 251 85, 87, 91, 112, 146, 157, Williams, Paul, 221 158, 160, 162, 174, 177–182, Winters, Peter Jochen, 260, 266 186, 187, 193, 194, 196, 207, Wölbern, Jan Philipp, 97, 107, 108, 208, 223, 224, 233, 234, 242, 204 245–247, 249, 251, 253, 258, Working Group August 13, 107, 244 260, 268, 283, 285, 297, 298, Working Group of Democratic Circles, 301–303 117 victims’ organizations, 4, 8, 19, 23, Working Group of Formerly 25, 42, 64, 65, 71, 75–77, 104, Persecuted Social Democrats, 112 109, 111, 135, 137, 147, 159, Working Group of Former Political 167, 169, 171–173, 180, 181, Prisoners (AEPH), 24, 112, 121, 193, 195–199, 206–209, 223, 132, 299 225, 233, 238–240, 243, 247, Index 315

Working Group of Former Political Y Prisoners in the Soviet Zone/ young people, 83, 165, 182–184, the GDR, 24, 112, 121, 132, 187–192, 194, 230, 299 299 Workuta, 262 Wowereit, Klaus, 243 Z Wunschik, Thomas, 201, 202 Zimmermann, Verena, 183, 184, 186 Wüstenberg, Jenny, 20, 58, 85, 193, Zwangsarbeit, 25, 196, 201–205, 207 260, 263