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Legacies of East German Communism THOUGHTS from GERMANY DURING the COVID-19 PANDEMIC

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Legacies of East German Communism THOUGHTS from GERMANY DURING the COVID-19 PANDEMIC Legacies of East German Communism THOUGHTS FROM GERMANY DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC ALISON LEWIS In 2020 I found myself in Berlin at the utterances, it was clear how much her own peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. I arrived just personal experience as an easterner framed as the first restrictions were announced and every decision. In one sentence on 18 March, I would be lying if I said I was not fearing she was explicit about her communist past: the worst. Would the Germans impose ‘For someone like me, for whom freedom of stricter isolation rules than, say, their French travel and movement has been a hard-fought or British neighbours, I asked myself. And right, restrictions can only be justified as an would they police them more rigorously? absolute necessity.’4 Would we even see the re-emergence of When I was not scouring shops for the authoritarianism—the ‘authoritarian stores of food that might see me through personality’ that Theodor Adorno and the a 14- or 28-day complete lockdown—if it Frankfurt School diagnosed while in US came to this—I took time out to observe exile and which undergirded National the city’s commemorations to mark the ▲ Title image: Montage using Socialism and the communist German 75th anniversary of the liberation of article figures and 1 Democratic Republic? Berlin by the Red Army in 1945. Far less archive files photo by On many occasions when confronted prominent, but noticeable nonetheless, were Anton P Daskalov, Shutterstock. with rows of empty shelves in supermarkets events to celebrate the 30th anniversary and the sight of queues outside them, I was of the dissolution of the GDR and its ▼ Fig 1. Masks in reminded of the fabled chronic shortages in infamous secret police service, the Stasi or Berlin, July 2020 the GDR. For many locals, the public health Staatssicherheitsdienst. Immersed in this rich IMAGE: CARSTEN JS, FLICKR, CC0 1.0 crisis awakened painful memories of being memory culture of two dictatorships, I began UNIVERSAL robbed of one’s civil liberties—the right to associate and freedom of movement. In a powerful address to the nation on 18 March 2020, Angela Merkel implicitly acknowledged this history. She spoke about how ‘dramatic’ the changes to everyday life were and the need for ‘common sense and proportionality’ in the Corona restrictions.2 On other occasions, she referred to the pandemic as a ‘democratic challenge’ and expressed how deeply she regretted having to restrict ‘our existential rights and needs’.3 In all these HUMANITIES AUSTRALIA 11 / 2020 47 ► Fig 2. Reiner Kunze at a reading in 2012 IMAGE : WIKIMEDIA, CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 3.0 UNPORTED to ponder some of the imponderables in my ambitious blueprints for complex covert fields of research. Would the Germans from operations that were designed to intervene the former East be better equipped to deal with proactively in people’s lives and shape them restrictions of civil liberties or would they have in specific ideological ways. In them the a lower tolerance for government crackdowns? security forces effectively ‘played God’ and And connected to this was the larger question arrogated to themselves powers to intimidate of whether they had done a better job at and harass. The measures were specifically dealing with their communist past than designed to sully reputations, ruin friendships their Nazi past? Were the Germans doubly and families, and even to destroy suspects’ guilty—namely, guilty of ignoring the crimes of health. What these show us is that the Stasi National Socialism as well as the injustices of was much more than just a ‘thought-police’; communism—as Ralph Giordano once accused it became in effect a massive bureaucratic them of being?5 Or were they so determined machine for curtailing undesirable political not to repeat the mistakes of ‘mastering’ the contingencies in the population. legacy of Nazism that they made a better fist of The first case study in my project was the confronting the wrongs of communism? East German dissident writer Reiner Kunze I was in Germany to take up a research (fig. 2). I planned to compare the Stasi’s fellowship at the intercultural research monstrous plans to destroy Kunze with institute, the Morphomata Center for Advanced his own account of his life. Was it possible Studies at the University of Cologne. I was that Kunze had been just as effective in risk studying one particularly chilling feature of the management as the Stasi had been? Had he Stasi files. The dossiers of Stasi victims, which been able to thwart some of these contingency are made up of endless biographical profiles plans, and if so how? And how could I find and informer reports, are punctuated at regular out? In the course of trying to answer these intervals by draconian departmental action questions, I realised that Kunze could also plans, often replete with innocuous sounding serve as a contained case study for my bigger labels such as Informationen or Maßnahmeplan question of how Germany has dealt with (action plan). These plans do far more than the burden of Cold War history. In many merely describe the victim or sketch out the ways he could count as representative of the contours of the life of a suspect. They contain 48 HUMANITIES AUSTRALIA 11 / 2020 persecution of cultural producers and the intelligentsia.6 Kunze was my litmus test of how successfully, or otherwise, unified Germany has performed in righting the wrongs of the East German past. Kunze was born in 1933 in the Erzgebirge, in the same year that Hitler came to power, the son of a coal-miner and a seamstress. The postwar years were kind to him, and he was encouraged to finish high school and went on to study journalism at the Karl-Marx-University in Leipzig. Deeply grateful for the opportunity to gain an education, Kunze initially fell into line with the ideological expectations of the time. He was rewarded for his loyalty with a teaching appointment at the university in 1955 where he earned a reputation among his he published in a volume Die wunderbaren Jahre ▲ Fig 3. (left) Cover contemporaries for being an idealist.7 His (The Wonderful Years) in 1976 in the West, again of Die wunderbaren Jahre by Reiner career was on a steep upwards trajectory and with reluctant permission from the Office of Kunze he was made a member of the journalists’ and Copyright (Büro für Urheberrechte) (fig. 3). The IMAGE: PROSA writers’ unions. He published his first volume regime now decided to call Kunze’s bluff and FISCHER ▲ of poetry around this time, mostly politically issued threats to arrest him. Kunze, who did Fig 4. (right) Cover of Deckname 8 orthodox poems and love poetry. not know these were largely a bluff, promptly ‘Lyrik’ In 1956, around the time of the Soviet applied to emigrate. He and his family left for IMAGE: SACHBUCH FISCHER suppression of the popular uprising in West Germany over Easter 1977. Hungary, Kunze found himself under scrutiny We now know the entire back story to these for his liberal views, and after he spoke out events from Kunze’s Stasi dossier. Kunze’s file, publicly against the indoctrination of students, code-named ‘Lyrik’ or poetry, is voluminous. the Socialist Unity Party (SED) commenced It spans twelve folders and is 3,491 pages long. disciplinary action against him for counter- His file is thick, bulky in a physical sense but revolutionary activities. The Stasi began also thick in Clifford Geertz’s sense of ‘thick low-grade security checks on him. 1968 was description’, those rich layers of sedimented another watershed in Kunze’s vita. After the meaning-making and interpretation that Warsaw Pact troops marched into Prague anthropologists aim to produce. In many ways and suppressed the reform movement, he left the file provides one such ‘thick description’ of the party. From this point on, Kunze became social and intellectual life under communism.9 persona non grata and was placed under Stasi The last three months before Kunze’s exile surveillance. His next volume of poetry was fill two volumes and take up 300 pages. not published in the East, and yet, he received Above all the files afford us insights into the permission to publish it in the West. The Stasi precise objectives of the Operative Procedure nonetheless saw the volume, Sensitive Paths (Operativer Vorgang), which was launched after (Sensible Wege) (1969), as a serious danger. In the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. 1973 Kunze was finally permitted to publish The purpose was to investigate activities in another collection of poems in the GDR, relation to violations to Article 106, “Agitation during a brief phase of liberalisation. The Stasi against the State” (Staatsgefährdende Hetze) would have liked to arrest him but could not and Article 220 “Defamation of the State” because this volume had passed the requisite (Staatsverleumdung) of the Criminal Code.10 censorship authorities. Kunze became a Kunze decided to publish key excerpts from magnet for critical citizens and he collected his file in 1990 in a small book with the title true stories about injustices in the land, which Codename ‘Poetry’ (Deckname ‘Lyrik’) (fig. 4).11 HUMANITIES AUSTRALIA 11 / 2020 49 critics, who feared declassifying the files would MASTERING THE COMMUNIST PAST AND TRUTH-TELLING lead to witch hunts and a rampant culture of denunciations. Germany’s radical approach In transitional justice studies, scholars speak was even decried by its Polish neighbours as of a number of central pillars in effecting masochistic.15 In truth, none of these fears transition from an authoritarian system of rule were justified.
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