Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse by John Rodden;

Author:John Rodden; [Rodden;, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195112443
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2002-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

II

For Heike, disillusion came with Prague 1968. But the rendezvous with disenchantment came, sooner or later, for nearly everyone, she says. And yet, there was no single shared moment, no common nationwide point of no return for renouncing the dream of das bessere Deutschland. And that was the hardest part, she says. Was the early postwar era of her father’s generation really so different? I want to ask. But Heike effectively answers me: Each generation had its own unlessons, she says. Each generation had to unlearn and relearn for itself. Like those earlier communist pilgrims of the 1930s, who nurtured the flickering candle of Hope in exile or in concentration camps before the socialist sun rose over the eastern German ruins in 1945—through the pyres of the purges, the show trials, the mass executions, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and all the rest—successive generations of DDR citizens had to pass their own trials by fire in order to confirm their blind, unconditional faith. The tests were hardest if you actually lived in a communist country and saw your friends and family disappear or fall “out of favor” with the Party. Political romantics abroad could wax theoretical about “real existing socialism,” but eastern Europeans had to live under it. And yet, even when everything else had been taken from you, Hope remained. For, as Dubček later titled his autobiography, published posthumously: “Hope Dies Last.”

But die it eventually did. For nearly everyone in the DDR, the moment of recognition eventually came, Heike repeats. As though it were a long-resisted and deathly unpleasant initiation ceremony for the recalcitrant idealist. Or a belated coming-of-age, a second and curative Jugendweihe. For Heike’s paternal grandmother the date was 1953, when Russian troops ruthlessly suppressed the Arbei- teraufstand in East Berlin. For Heike’s mother it was 1956, when the world turned upside down in the wake of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” when the “Father of All Nations” suddenly stood revealed not just as a bad, “subjectivist” Party man but a murderer. For Heike’s old Russian teacher it was 1957, when Ulbricht silenced Ernst Bloch and convicted Wolfgang Harich and his intellectual circle around the Aufbau Verlag, all of it eerily reminiscent of the postwar show trials elsewhere in Eastern Europe—indeed of the Soviet show trials of 1936–38. For Heike’s older sisters it was 1961, when a desperate Ulbricht dammed up the westward flow of DDR migrants and erected “den antifaschistischen Schutzwall.” For a younger cousin, then a law student at Humboldt University, it was 1976, when the expulsion of Wolf Biermann ended the intellectuals’ honeymoon with Erich Honecker. Even for Heike’s resilient father, always the idealistic hard-liner, the date with the reality of “real existing socialism” finally came: in the mid-1970s, as the DDR began to “sell out to the fascists,” when the policy of Abgrenzung pursued by Honecker and Willi Stoph convinced him that the DDR would never offer a truly socialist alternative to the Bundesrepublik.

And for each of them, the depth of the disillusion reflected the majesty of the myth and the duration of the dream.

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