In Berlin, of all places, there is a debate about no longer treating the GDR as compulsory material in high schools. Are the right films and literary classics perhaps even more credible than school lessons?
The current fairy tale film about the GDR, “The Hero from Friedrichstrasse Train Station”, takes place in 2019, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a contemporary witness, Harald Wischnewsky speaks to a school class about his life under the dictatorship. A lush beard and a revolutionary look, that’s what a civil rights activist looks like.
The teacher explains that Mr. Wischnewsky is a brave man because he defied the rulers in the GDR. A boy asks, “Were you poor?” Wischnewsky says: “We were perhaps poorer than some in the West, but there were no unemployed people. There were no homeless people. Housing and food were not expensive. Every child could go to summer camp, and during school breaks there was strawberry and chocolate milk for everyone.” Why did he fight against it? “But not against it!”, shouts the dissident: “Against the intellectual narrowness, against the ban on thinking, against the shitty stuff! You can’t even imagine that with your smartphones!”
As if Berlin’s education senator had become aware of the pitfalls of GDR historiography in the cinema, the capital’s high schools were freed from the obligation to teach the material through the framework curriculum. After a complaint from the state history teachers’ association, the senator announced that the GDR would continue to be covered compulsorily in secondary schools. The question remains as to how such a dictatorship can be conveyed. Apparently difficult. The fact that students think Erich Honecker is a Federal Chancellor and Wolf Biermann an East German President is not a joke, but tested (ignorance).
It’s not just the schools’ fault, but also the authorities. Last spring, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania presented history school graduates with three quotes on the case of Pastor Oskar Brüsewitz. By self-immolating himself in protest against communism in 1976, Brüsewitz strengthened the church’s opposition to the state. In the quotes, Manfred Stolpe, then Secretary for Church Affairs and later Prime Minister of Brandenburg, declared him mentally ill. However, the quotes did not come from Stolpe; they were on a dubious website.
That “We are the people!” Sounded different 37 years ago because it was meant differently, every child should learn at school.
The school-appropriate reappraisal of the history of the East German state, which will soon have disappeared as long as it existed, has lost its way between black and white. For or against, perpetrator or victim. History teachers in particular should be expected to teach secret service files and government documents in a critical manner. Today there are films and novels that cover gray areas in life under a dictatorship, most credibly those that were banned in their time and not defused by censorship. “Fly Ash” by Monika Maron about the dirt of the GDR and its press was published by Fischer im Westen in 1981. “Rummelplatz” by Werner Bräuning about uranium mining in the Erzgebirge and socialist reality was kept under lock and key at Aufbau-Verlag for four decades, until 2007.
Perhaps the most instructive story from the GDR is 60 years old. In “Trace of the Stones”, based on a novel by Erik Neutsch, the film director Frank Beyer shows his state as a construction site. Between the barracks and scaffolding, a chemical plant is being built that cannot be finished because there is a lack of material and the workers are wearing themselves out in disputes with the party. Right in the middle as hero and anti-hero is the leader of the carpenter brigade, Hannes Balla. Manfred Krug, the most popular actor and jazz singer in the GDR, embodies an anarchist that only such a country can produce. He likes people, hates authority and despises their rules.
Balla is a Brechtian figure in all his dialectics. “We are building the road that leads to a bright future,” an agitator cheers through his megaphone. Balla laughs and trudges through the mud to drink. “Trace of the Stones” is about the small freedoms and big contradictions of a dictatorship that will collapse because of its prescribed, inhumane morality. Klaus Gysi, the Minister of Culture, publicly accused the “machine” of having the “wrong positions”. It wasn’t until October 1989, when the GDR dissolved, that the black and white classic from 1966 was released in cinemas.
The media and libraries contain works in which the GDR is described and shown as it was, and works about a GDR that never existed, but could have existed. “The Lives of Others” and “Good Bye, Lenin!” were fairytale films. If you want to learn something from them, you have to know the story, the history behind the fiction, in order to distinguish the true from the truthful. History also protects against left and right populists. Before retrotopias of socialism with a human face and before a spiritual occupation of the East, where normal, proud Germans still live. That “We are the people!” Sounded different 37 years ago because it was meant differently than today at the Monday march, every child should learn at school.
In “The Hero from Friedrichstrasse Station” someone says: “History is the lie that everyone has agreed on.” But the story is also that teachers have to teach their students about it in order to understand the truth behind it. Or even recognize it.
