When East Germany collapsed, millions of the Stasi’s victims choose to remain in ignorance about their oppressors. Is it sometimes better to forget the past than to investigate it?
n East Germany, during the communist period, people would sometimes join a queue on the basis that if others were waiting, there must be something worth having at the end of it. Siegfried Wittenburg, whose images accompany this article, photographed this waiting-for-I-know-not-what in his home town of Rostock. It was safer to take photos than to criticise the regime in words, but only just.
He had heard many stories such as Wittenburg’s, but he also heard tales of a different kind. When the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt said of the Stasi archive, in 2002, “My instinct would have been to burn everything unread,” he was voicing the majority opinion of the West German political elite at the time of reunification.
After advertising their project in the press, and persuading about 150 people who had not seen their files to come forward, they used a combination of in-depth interviews and questionnaires to examine the reasons. These varied, but the most common were that the information was no longer relevant; that people preferred not to know that colleagues, friends or relatives had informed on them; or that they feared being unable to trust again.
In 1652, after the English civil war, parliament passed an “act of oblivion” that provided amnesty to those on the losing side . Within three years, the supposedly pardoned royalists had been placed under surveillance and slapped with a discriminatory tax. Then in 1660, after the restoration of the monarchy, another act of oblivion was passed. This time the amnesty excluded regicides, including some of the architects of the original act.
Likewise, in Ireland, some feel that keeping traumatic memories alive is the only way to drive political change. In 2018, geographer Joseph Robinson of Maynooth University accompanied veterans of the Ulster Defence Regiment to places along the Irish border, where they had survived violence in the 1980s. He noticed that they talked about present-day residents as if they had been bystanders to the violence – seemingly ignoring the decades that had elapsed in between.
Historian Denis Peschanski, one of the co-directors of 13-Novembre project, says they are watching a historical narrative being constructed in real time: a negotiation between individual and collective accounts that, he predicts, will eventually stabilise at some consensus.
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