Tendentiousness and Topicality: Buchenwald and Antifascism as Sites of GDR Memory

Abstract

This article examines two chapters from Martin Sabrow's 2009 edited volumeErinnerungsorte der DDR, one on antifascism and one on Buchenwald. These two case studies exemplify the complexities of the contemporary German memorial landscape. In particular, they thematize the remembrance of the Nazi past in the German Democratic Republic and how this GDR past has, in turn, been tendentiously remembered since unification. By examining the layering of memories in these two chapters, we argue that the theoretical models which often underpin contemporary German memory work, Sabrow's volume included, serve to obscure the role of the state as carrier of official memory. On the basis of this study, we show that concepts dominant in today's Germany promote a unified national narrative. In particular, terms such as the "culture of memory" (Erinnerungskultur) and cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis) downplay conflicting, contentious and diverse memories relating to the GDR past. As such, the article provides a timely note of caution for memory studies and memory work, which increasingly applies these models to wider, non-German contexts.

Activating the socialist past for a nativist future: far-right intellectuals and the prefigurative power of multidirectional nostalgia in Dresden

“…In the GDR, memory of non-communist Nazi victims was supressed, anti-Semitism ignored, and Nazi perpetrators reintegrated into society (Herf, 1997;Olsen, 2015). The socialist state built its legitimacy on the myth of communist resistance against Nazism and a nationhood defined through class, local traditions and Heimat (Palmowski, 2009;Peitsch & Sayner, 2015). Intellectuals were central in linking socialist re-education to German national culture (Dornhoff, 2001).…”