Berlin election campaign mocks victims' memorials

By Stephan Hebel

FRANKFURT (DPA): Anniversaries like this Aug. 13 both honour and mock the victims at the same time -- something Germans already know from dealing with their Nazi past. The victims are paid tribute to by politicians of every stripe, whose voices quake with pathos as they rail against forgetting, who condemn the crimes of the regime -- in this case the crimes committed by East Germany's Social Unity Party (SED) -- in measured words and swear that history admonishes "never again."

But mockery is another of those things that knows no party lines, and often enough the person who accuses others of mocking the victims turns out to be guilty of mocking them himself. Take the example of the 40th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, coinciding nicely as it did with a heated local election campaign in the capital.

Frank Steffel, leading mayoral candidate for the conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and campaign impresario, used the occasion to whip up fears about an eventual "red-red" coalition in Berlin between the Social Democrats (SPD) and the successor party to the SED, the left-wing Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). "The soldiers who yesterday guarded the Wall will be the senators of tomorrow," he said (the local parliament is called the Berlin Senate).

"I hate the PDS," one speaker, a victim of the SED's thugs, said Monday. But Steffel wasn't motivated by make his remark by sympathy for that victim. No, the CDU mayoral candidate's remark was prompted much more by a calculated plan to demonise the PDS so that it can't pose a challenge to his party's -- legitimate -- claim to power. Political tactics like that exploit history, victims included, and scorn them in the process.

But there are also those in the SPD who style their own -- legitimate -- interest in power as selfless service to Germany by hawking the idea of forming a majority government with the PDS as a contribution to domestic political unity.

The post-communist party -- and given the hard time some factions within it have in declaring their belief in democracy -- does its part towards achieving German-German pacification. It often binds to the system precisely those people whose inner resistance to democratic attitudes could have led to a total rejection of the parliamentary system.

But that has nothing to do with making decisions on forming a coalition government. The PDS could still make a contribution without taking part in government. There are good reasons to cooperate with the PDS in order to come up with ad hoc majorities to pass legislation, especially in Berlin.

The CDU was booted out of positions of power mainly because the system under Berlin's former CDU mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, seemed an ideal confirmation of the propaganda once espoused by the SED -- that Western politics serves as the agent of the interests of capital. But anyone who idealizes a red-red coalition (thereby indirectly idealising the PDS as well) is no less guilty of denying history -- and all its victims -- than are those who demonise the PDS.

Among this group are also those who trivialize the historic situation until there are no more guilty persons, but merely historical inevitabilities. These people view the Wall as a "contribution to world peace" -- very probably the most shameful mockery of all to the memory of those who were shot and killed or who drowned trying to leave East Germany.

These kinds of apologists for the Wall are the easiest to answer. "The victims who died at the Wall (Mauertote) were not just some abstract result of the Cold War. The victims of such power politics are always the so-called little people," Gregor Gysi, former chairman of the PDS and the party's mayoral candidate in Berlin, wrote in Neues Deutschland, (formerly the mouthpiece of the SED and still a decidedly leftist newspaper).

But what would the others say, those strategists within the CDU and -- to a lesser extent -- the SPD, for whom the historic crime of cutting off the country and issuing the order to shoot serves as a malleable instrument that can be used at will to suit the political aims of the moment? Political moralism does not consist of whitewashing politics beyond recognition with spurious professions of morality -- something these people really should know.

A political culture that is conscious of history would look altogether different: Above all, it would hear the voice of the victims. On a day like Aug. 13, politicians could aspire to be more than mere screens projecting the intrigues of power. They could even be protagonists, who speak for themselves rather than simply being led quavering into the field to advance an argument for this or that.

The task then would be to ask how politically formative their perspectives are meant to be. To be perfectly frank, such feelings would have to be weighed against goals no less legitimate than the needs of those affected.

Certain things would have to be discussed. First: Would the PDS joining the ruling coalition mean a danger of a return to authoritarianism glossed over by the Left? The CDU's Frank Steffel doesn't actually pose the question -- he continually answers it with a resounding "yes" because it fits in with his Cold-War paradigmatic way of looking at the world. But a lot speaks in favor of the answer being "no" -- including developments within the PDS itself -- so much so in fact that patiently arguing that point might convince even victims of the SED regime.

The second step would be to ask whether there may be morally- founded reasons to guarantee the post-communists a bit of power, even in light of the SED's crimes? The political culture might inflict the same harm on that constellation as befell Berlin's grand coalition government between SPD and CDU under Diepgen, which in the end was little more than a recipe for political stagnation and the radicalization of the opposition.

Third would be to inquire in a very old-fashioned manner as to the substance of the political agendas that might be implemented with one party versus another. Finally, it would have to be added that it is precisely this interest in advancing policies deemed worthy of implementation that forces a party to act where necessary against the sensibilities of the victims but without losing their awareness of such feelings.

We can expect none of that to happen in the current campaign, however. How could it, when an anniversary like Aug. 13 produces more dumb answers than smart questions?