Even so, I do mention this asymmetry because it points to a very relevant circumstance: the east German populace had neither before 1989 nor afterwards access to their own public sphere, in which conflicting groups could have staged debates on identity. Because in 1945 one dictatorship followed another (if of a quite different kind),¹ there was no real place in the decades thereafter for a spontaneous, self-started, painstaking clarification of a shattered political consciousness, similar to what happened in the west. That is a deficit, arising through no fault of their own, whose consequences I cannot estimate.

I am an equally poor judge of for which parts of the population explanations of the psychotherapist Annette Simon, daughter of novelist Christa Wolf, hold true when she speaks of how the party-ordered, anti-fascist identity had a strong influence. This was, she said,

because it offered comprehensive exculpation from German crimes… Everything that was further internalised post-1945 in terms of psychic dispositions, of susceptibility to submission, authoritarian thinking, scorn for the foreign and the weak, was never publicly processed apart from in art and literature. In institutions and families there was the same silence as originally in the west. So there was a cover-up of what happened pre-1945 concretely at this particular university or that particular hospital or in this or that family. The bulk of east Germans were forced into an ideology by the Russian victors and their helpmates in Pankow or Wandlitz. If one accepted this ideology that was accompanied at first by terror and later by dictatorship, this double knot made of socialism and anti-fascism, then one could apparently be freed of any guilt and abandon any sense of German-ness.²

This analysis concerns first of all the absence until 1989 of any public sphere which might have enabled an open controversy among east-German citizens about how they should understand themselves as the heirs of a burdened past. The situation is quite different when it comes to a further and understandable socio-psychological symptom for which Simon cites other research—the shame about adapting to the expectations and impositions of the communist system to which one had meekly given in. That concerns the non-existent public sphere post-1989. At that time, the public sphere in the federal republic was opened up for its new citizens but they were denied their very own public sphere. So there was no shielded space for the overdue clarification and coming to terms with one’s past and present, for a process which would not be prejudiced by prevailing opinion from ‘over there’—the one that always knows best: “This old, often unconscious and suppressed shame about the GDR era in which one more than absolutely necessary bowed to constraint, is now being brought to light in a range of ways. And, in the harsh light of public opinion and under the west’s spotlight, it amounts to a new humiliation and devaluation. As an example, one might refer to the handling of GDR anti-fascism which frequently was construed as anti-fascism without any participants.”³

In this case it is the reunification process itself which has not just liberalised the press and TV in the east but attached it to the infrastructure of the west-German public sphere. The citizens of the former GDR did not get to enjoy their own public sphere. One could say they were ‘dispossessed’ of their own media if there had been up till then any free public sphere. That was not just true of the snaffled-up media enterprises but also of the personnel without which one’s ‘own’ public sphere cannot function.

The west-German press, that is to say, took care of the effective liquidation of east-German writers and intellectuals, whose words had articulated and reflected everyday GDR experiences up to that point. In the old republic they were still honoured and even celebrated literarily but in the reunified state Stefan Heym, Wolf, Heiner Müller and all the others now no longer counted as the left-wingers they were but as the intellectual water-carriers (‘domestiques’) of the Stasi regime—which they had not been. Neither could the oppositional intellectuals from among the ranks of the civil-rights activists take their place.

Klaus Wolfram, who was removed from his academic post in 1977 and sent to a factory, later belonged to the New Forum leadership. In December 1989 he founded the critical newspaper The Other but it failed to get off the ground for longer periods and finally closed in 1992. In a November 2019 speech, with which he sharply divided his audience of eastern and western members of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he also bemoaned the immediate

destruction of the home-based public media … Two years after 1990 there was in east Germany not a single TV station, no radio station and hardly any newspaper with a developed reader-paper connectivity that did not have a west-German editor-in-chief at the top. The general debate, political consciousness, social memory, all the self-identification which an entire population had just won for itself, was transformed into discouragement and instruction.⁴