How should the old East be remembered in a united Germany? New divisions are emerging, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin.
The heavy pendulum of German history keeps swinging. Six decades after the collapse of Germany's first dictatorship, the country is turning its attention to the second, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) which, like most countries that flaunt the word in its official title, was democratic in name only.
As the public pains of unification become manageable and the private strains over secrets in Stasi files subside, the question now being posed is how can and how should East Germany be memorialised as it finally enters the history books? The most recent successes of German cinema show the two extremes currently on offer: the Goodbye, Lenin!reality of a poor-but-happy paradise of polyester clothes and plastic cars. The Lives of Othershas swung the pendulum back to the other extreme of an Orwellian moral maze.
Now that it has swung both ways, can Germans agree to stop it somewhere in the middle and reach a consensus on the period? At present, the omens are not good.
Two years ago, the Schröder government asked a committee of historians and prominent East Germans to come up with proposals on how the country should memorialise the GDR and the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED).
The experts warned in their report that swift action was needed to correct the "tilt in the memory landscape" towards the SED regime.
"While the division and repressive measures of the SED state are represented in numerous constructional and symbolic relics," the report said, "everyday life and resistance of the . . . population is, to a great extent, hidden." This observation was welcomed by some but generated a wave of indignation from prominent West German historians who accused the panel of trying to whitewash the repressive East German regime.
One leading historian even called the report "state-sponsored nostalgia", the term used for nostalgia for all things East German.
The historians' standoff meant that the report now lies in a drawer and, instead of following its recommendations, we now have a new exhibition at Berlin's German Historical Museum entitled Dictatorship and Everyday Life in the GDR.
The exhibition uses everyday objects, party relics and even Lenin's fur hat to try and show the ideological tensions between public and private life in East Germany.
PUT TOGETHER BYthree west German curators with an eastern historical consultant, the exhibition gets off on the wrong foot by confronting visitors with loaded questions. "How did the citizens of the GDR cope with their everyday life? How did they elude the impositions of the dictatorship and its ideology?" Easterners visiting the exhibition last week were incensed.
"We coped quite well simply by ignoring party ideology," said one.
"It was quite possible, you know. This exhibition suggests the ideology was all-pervasive, even though it wasn't. There's nothing here about life, love or holidays, all the normal things that happened in East Germany just like anywhere else." The exhibition's curators have accepted some of the criticisms of the show but say it is worthwhile if it promotes discussion of the GDR past.
"I did understand better after putting the exhibition together that there was a normality, that one could live well there," said Dr Regine Falkenberg, the exhibition's west German curator. "On the other hand it is our belief that there were limits on the freedom of life, limits which were continually being renegotiated with the regime." But a walk around the exhibition gives the impression that it is less about the vanished normality of daily life in East Germany and more about West German perceptions of East German life.
After all, the widespread West German consensus on the GDR - that it was a 40-year anomaly, a grey vale of tears - is rarely questioned.
Some would say this perception must have been accurate, otherwise the East Germans wouldn't have brought down their system. This of course forgets that the initial demand of the 1980s protest movement was for a more just country, not unification with its western neighbour.
In the German mass media, East Germany is rarely treated as a part of German history or German pop culture. Instead it is an appendix to be addressed separately and, if possible, while wearing protective clothing.
Meanwhile, German schools have serious problems with the future of the East German past. Education is regulated at a state level, meaning the school curriculums vary hugely around the country; some history teaching plans don't even mention East Germany.
Teachers who do teach the period say they receive little guidance: talk about the "SED dictatorship" and they risk being called ideologically biased; try and teach the period in a neutral way and they risk being called a GDR nostalgic.
A recent television programme found that, in a Berlin class of 30 teenagers, only two knew that the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. More than half of the students couldn't explain what the wall was or why it was built.
It took decades to break the so-called "consensus of silence" over the Nazi era, and then only using the moral pressure of that regime's horrific legacy. Considering that, it is probably too soon to expect real historical work on East Germany to begin.
The legitimate, personal histories of former GDR citizens deserve their place in the history books beside the workings of Germany's second, illegitimate dictatorship. Without this, the extreme positive and negative views of the era will continue to prevail and the historical pendulum will swing on.