Those vile good old days

At a campaign rally held last month across from the old offices of the now-defunct East German Communist Party, nostalgia was the order of the day. Speakers greeted one another as “comrade” and railed against capitalist excess, while kiosks sold images of Lenin (albeit wearing iPod headphones), Soviet army caps and bottles of Red Oktober beer. Two days later, the party holding the rally won an enormous victory, taking 54 seats in parliament in a clear sign of the left’s resurgence.

What surprised me as I walked through the rally was not so much that Germans in what was formerly East Berlin should hanker for the days of the Wall and life under totalitarian rule -- ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East German dictatorship, has been well documented in the last couple of years as the promises of German reunification have failed to materialize.

But as I looked at the caps of Red Army soldiers, I couldn’t help but think of the book I am reading about the liberation of Berlin in the spring of 1945. A bestseller when it was published in Germany two years ago, it is the diary of a 34-year-old woman, a journalist, who lived through the weeks that followed the fall of the Nazis, when the Soviet army fought its way into the city and conquered it, then proceeded to loot it, systematically rape its female population and wreak further chaos among people who had already lived through six years of war. It is estimated that Russian soldiers committed between 95,000 and 130,000 rapes in Berlin in 1945, and the diary describes, stoically and graphically, the repeated rapes the author suffered during those weeks. “My fingers are shaking as I write this,” she says.

How, I wondered as I browsed through the Soviet nostalgia kiosk, could anyone look back on such people with fondness? Yet apparently some do.

These two contradictory memories -- the bad Soviets and the good Soviets -- are only two of the myriad memories that coexist in modern Germany. Sixty years after Allied troops destroyed the Third Reich and liberated Europe -- and 15 years after Germany was finally reunified -- these events continue to cast what Germans sometimes call a “long shadow” over politics and culture. Even as the generation with firsthand memories of the war dies out -- if you were 10 when the Soviets entered Berlin at the end of the war, you’re 70 today -- Germans continue to agonize over what it all means and to wrangle over what lessons ought to be drawn.

They’ve been agonizing like this since the war ended. De-Nazifying, reeducating, sensitizing, apologizing, examining and reexamining. And yet the issues don’t go away. Just this year, Berlin’s memorial to Europe’s murdered Jews opened after 17 years of negotiation over whether and how to do so. Last month, a U.S. request for additional NATO troops, including Germans to help fight insurgents in Afghanistan, led Germans to reexamine, once again, their postwar commitment to pacifism. The upstart success of the newly created Left Party in last month’s elections was a reminder of deep postwar divisions that reunification was supposed to have fixed.

On the surface, the recent German elections were a straightforward, modern, it’s-the-economy-stupid battle over unemployment, social security reform and who would cut or raise taxes. Beneath the surface, they roiled memories -- the specter of communism, East versus West and the raw and troubling question of Turkish membership in the European Union.

“Europe is a Christian continent,” said an angry businessman at a dinner in Dusseldorf recently. “The Turks just do not fit in here.” It was difficult not to hear that as an echo of the past.

As the decades pass, different political memories come in and out of style. After the war, Germans generally didn’t discuss the Nazis’ crimes. When a new generation finally broached the taboo topic -- after, among other things, the publication of “The Diary of Anne Frank” and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem -- it became for many years unacceptable to talk about German suffering in the war. Recently, the discussion has shifted again: Debates here have been reopened over the rape of the women of Berlin (prompted by the young journalist’s diary), the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities and towns (prompted in part by historian Jorg Friedrich’s book “The Fire,” and W.G. Sebald’s “On the Natural History of Destruction”) and the general toll the war took on ordinary people. (After the war, 20% to 30% of the country’s dwellings had been destroyed and one-quarter of the nation’s children grew up without a father.)

Once, in the 1980s, before reunification, I crossed into East Berlin through the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse and visited the German historical museum, a sooty, decayed but once-grand building that presented a version of history I’d never seen. At that time, exhibits (mounted by the East German government) offered thanks to the valiant Soviet army for liberating the country. The walls were covered with photos of heroic Russian soldiers and stories of Communist resistance to fascism. It wasn’t untrue, particularly -- but it was just one version of history.

Today, the politics of memory continue to haunt Berlin. The history museum is still there, spiffed up and once again grand. But its current exhibit focuses on “War and Its Consequences,” and specifically on how history is, and ought to be, remembered. At the war memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers in the Tiergarten -- yes, the same Soviet soldiers who raped tens of thousands of women in the spring of 1945 -- a sign notes, almost apologetically: “Showing respect for those who were killed violently, as well as keeping alive the memory of the break with civilization represented by National Socialist rule, is important for the way Germany views itself historically.” (After all, the Russian soldiers didn’t just rape women. As many as 70,000 Red Army soldiers may have died in Berlin alone in the final battle to topple Hitler in April and May of 1945.)

The German obsession with history keeps raw memories and conflicting emotions near the surface at all times. Could the rapists really have been the good guys? Can the suffering of ordinary Germans now be acknowledged honestly, or does that somehow diminish the evil of the Holocaust and suggest that all suffering is relative. Was Hitler’s campaign to destroy the Jews so unique that it deserves remembrance above the persecution of the homosexuals, the communists, the Gypsies? Can Germany ever go back to war -- in Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan or Iraq?

In the United States, such questions are discussed, but generally without the urgency and immediacy that the Germans bring to their ongoing national debate, without the sense that how we remember our history will determine our future.

Thus, we have no big national memorial on the Mall to slavery or to the destruction of the Native Americans (although we do have one to the victims of the Holocaust). We have a Vietnam War memorial, but it doesn’t question the meaning of the war, our memory of the war or the morality of the war. When the Smithsonian mounted an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, war veterans successfully pressured the museum to expunge from the exhibit some of the most controversial questions about the decision to drop the bomb, and ultimately forced the cancellation of the exhibit.

True, none of these events were the Holocaust. But surely they raise questions worth discussing.